American Jeremiad

Bercovitch employs John Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity to describe the American Jeremiad - a sermon that looks to unite an already displaced and insecure people by creating a binary between the ideal social life and its expression in the real. The "jeremiad" is named after the biblical lamentations of Jeremiah ("I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?" (Chapter 2, verse 21). Bercovitch begins his examination of the jeremiad in its origin in religious practice but later extends it to include its power as a unifying social force and medium. It is crucial for casual reader as well as historians to understand the jeremiad because of its role in the production and critique of public life. In this seminal piece, Bercovitch juxtaposes the American jeremiad with its European forerunner. On the one hand, the European jeremiad gives a picture of a static society stuck on its mythic roots. On the other hand, the American jeremiad is different because of its focus on progress. The American jeremiad has three elements: First, it provides a biblical or spiritual standard to inform individual as well as public life. Second, the jeremiad instructs on the ways in which a people have fallen from that norm. Finally, the jeremiad instructs on the ideal public life - with its simultaneous personal remuneration - that vis-à-vis adhering to the religious standard. With this ideal, "It posits a movement from promise to experience - from the ideal of community to the shortcomings of community life - and thence forward, with prophetic assurance, toward the resolution that incorporates (as it transforms) both the promise and the condemnation" (Bercovitch, American Jeremiad 16). The true significance of the American jeremiad is its porosity vis-à-vis the private and the public - the two are fused into one. The jeremiad is efficacious when an audience sees (or in this case, hears) the tug between the public ideal and their individual labors -- and seeks to sanctify them for the common good. I argue that this form of idealizing is a form of social control.

Sacvan Bercovitch has written a thrilling book not only about early American history (e. g., the Puritain errand in the wilderness) but also about tendencies of American civil discourse. The analysis of history is rhetorical and there is little beyond the dating of the documents that suggests there is more to the writing of history than textual analysis. For some this emphasis will be a strength, for others a profound weakness of the work. Whatever one's opinion of the approach, the outcome is spectacularly suggestive. The work provides something like a study of the form that the expression of the American dream has taken since the beginning. Most of the discussion concerns the iron exhorations of early American religious leaders. The jeremiad exists in America and seems inseparable from communication of the American people's greatest desire. The jeremiad, since it is a form or perhaps even a genre is not only durable but mutable, applicable to seemingly all realms of American discourse.I heartily recommend this perceptive little book to those curious about American discourse and the shared form that religious, political and cultural concerns take.