America's Prophet Read online

  As historian Steven Bullock explained in Revolutionary Brotherhood, a history of Freemasonry, the use of necromancy, secret codes, and ancient wisdom appealed to Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caught up in the twin allures of antiquity and the Enlightenment. Like Protestants, Freemasons viewed the Middle Ages as “ignorant” and expressed greater interest in the Hebrew Bible as a primary source of knowledge. Masonic teaching involved “reconciling Plato and Moses,” said one observer. Yet Masonry insisted that wisdom could be found in all religions. Its morality plays, elaborate stage productions complete with costumes and sets, wove quotations from the Pentateuch with Newton, Pythagoras, even Shakespeare. The status that came with mastering these rituals attracted men cut off from traditional peerage. Masonry became a gentlemen’s club, a civic-promotion institution, and a pan-religious body all in one. By the mid-1700s, Masonry had spread across western Europe.

  The lure of education and status particularly appealed to Americans far removed from English society. Lodges were set up in the 1730s in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. Benjamin Franklin published the Freemason’s code, The Book of Constitutions, in 1731. By the eve of the Revolution, the colonies brimmed with rebellion-minded members, including Samuel Adams, Ethan Allen, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. The movement transformed the social landscape of early America, says historian Gordon Wood. “Masonry was not only an enlightened institution, it was a republican one as well. It repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and created a new hierarchical order that rested on ‘real worth and personal merit.’”

  Masonry suffered a backlash in the nineteenth century, as Americans rebelled against its perceived influence, but it regained popularity in the twentieth century, reaching four million members following World War II. By the turn of the twenty-first century, that number had eroded by two-thirds, forcing the Masons to fling open their doors to attract members. Tom Savini explained that he often pleads to potential members, “Our air-conditioning is nice.”

  I was more interested in Masonry during the founding era, specifically how the Mosaic story, working through Masonic liturgy, might have influenced the creation of American society. I asked Savini why Masons had focused so intently on Solomon’s Temple.

  “The temple is just a symbol,” he said. “Interpreting it literally is going to drive you crazy. It represents a place where humans can live in concert with the divine. Our message is, ‘You should listen to what God is telling you. You should focus on the work in front of you, as a good craftsman. And you should judge how you’re doing by the stones you’re laying.”

  “So you’re a student of religion,” I said. “Is that a message from the Hebrew Bible?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t think Masonry is self-reflective enough to say that it’s definitely more Mosaic than Christian, but it is. It has no concern with the afterlife. The focus is on the here and now. It encourages action. And there’s a strong element of suffering, of laboring, of caring for your brother, and working to preserve the community.”

  I told him I’d learned that America has a meta-narrative, an overarching story that runs through the Pilgrims, the Great Awakening, the Revolution, and beyond. It’s the story of oppressed people from differing backgrounds, who tap into the idea that all humans have natural, God-given rights to dignity and freedom, then strive to create a better world, a New Israel, where they can fulfill those liberties and spread them to others. “Did the Masons help create the narrative of America?”

  “I think it fits into the narrative of America, but I don’t think it shaped that agenda,” he said. “To give it that much purpose is to assume too much about it. No man had a greater influence on America than Jefferson, yet he wasn’t a Mason.”

  “But what about Washington and all those Masons involved in the Revolution?”

  He lifted his arms and raised his eyebrows almost apologetically. “Sorry. It might be more interesting if we had some secret control over America at the time, but we didn’t. True, a lot of the generals around Washington were Masons. Masonic lodges might have been used to plot the Boston Tea Party. Nine signers of the Declaration were Masons. But so were many loyalists. Masonry was just one more social movement at that time. Just because some of our ideas correlate with the Revolution doesn’t mean there’s causality.

  “What I would say,” he continued, “is that at a time when British society was being overturned, Masonry provided a sense that an American society could replace it. Masonry contributed to the notion that you could take wisdom from ancient sources, and it stressed that honor, politeness, and order were important characteristics in society. Here’s where Washington being a Mason may have been important. He emphasized certain values—fortitude, justice, humility—that are very Masonic. Masons call Washington a ‘perfect ashlar,’ a great stone, chiseled to perfection, that’s ready for the house of God. For many Masons today, he’s still the standard by which they are judged.”

  A FEW DAYS later I drove to Princeton, New Jersey, to further explore the connection between the United States following the Revolution and Israel following the Exodus. Since 1620, colonists had been using the Moses story as a boon to their aspirations to break away from England. But by the 1780s Americans had different concerns. Freedom was not enough. They had no organized economy, no discernible borders, and no national identity. Cut loose from their past and wandering toward their future, Americans had even greater need for a historical precedent. And once again they turned to the Bible. The Israelites provided a history for a people orphaned and afraid. Moses offered leadership for a population adrift.

  The most immediate example Americans drew from the Exodus was the harsh reality the Israelites face in the desert after they flee Egypt. No sooner do the Israelites cross the Red Sea than they start to complain. The first ill words occur a mere three days into their journey. “And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’” Moses throws a piece of wood into some briny water and turns it sweet. Next the Israelites complain about the lack of food, and God rains down manna from the sky. But the manna, which tastes like “wafers in honey,” comes with a “test,” God says. The Israelites are instructed to gather one portion of the “fine and flaky substance” every day, and an extra on the sixth day for the Sabbath. Instead, the Israelites hoard the manna and the leftovers become infested with maggots. Israel flunks the test, and “Moses was angry with them.”

  These incidents in the wilderness have a clear theme: The Israelites are not yet truly free. They are still trapped in the slavishness of the past and unable to cope with being a liberated people. The pattern will only deepen in the years to come as the motif of murmuring becomes a dominant theme of the last four books of the Pentateuch. The Moses narrative contains at least a dozen different rebellion stories in which the people gripe about everything from water to food to their leadership to God. In many ways, these stories reflect the problems of the original Creation story in which God finds humanity corrupt and sends a flood to destroy them. In the Sinai, God again threatens to destroy his chosen people. Creating a righteous nation, the Bible suggests, is an indirect and awkward business.

  In the 1780s, American preachers were particularly fond of drawing parallels between the stiff-necked rebellions of the Israelites during their desert wanderings and the moral degeneracy of the colonists during and after the Revolution. As early as 1777, Nicholas Street preached a sermon called “The American States Acting Over the Part of the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.” He used as his base text Deuteronomy 8:2. “God led them those 40 years in the wilderness to humble and prove them,” Street said. And while Americans are indignant about the Israelites’ grumblings against Moses, we are “acting the same stupid part.” He continued, “Now we are in the wilderness, i.e. in a state of trouble and difficulty, Egyptians pursuing us, to overtake and reduce us. Are you not ready to murmur against Moses and Aaron?”

  Samuel Cooper, a pr
eacher who turned down the presidency of Harvard, proclaimed in 1780 that to mention all the passages that proved the Americans were like the Israelites “would be to recite a large part of its history.” Still, he mentioned a few. “Like that nation we rose from oppression, and emerged ‘from the House of Bondage.’ Like that nation we were led into a wilderness, as a refuge from tyranny, and a preparation for the enjoyment of our civil and religious rights…. And like that nation we have been ungrateful to the Supreme Ruler of the world.”

  In 1973 political scientist Donald Lutz undertook a comprehensive survey of American political rhetoric during the founding era. He set out with Charles Hyneman to read everything published in America between 1760 and 1805. The effort took ten years and covered 15,000 items, including 2,200 for which they recorded every reference cited. Their goal was to settle long-simmering disputes in the political-science community over the sources of the Revolution by objectively evaluating the influence of Enlightenment writers such as Montesquieu, Locke, Hume, and Hobbes, as well as ancient writers such as Plutarch and Cicero. The first sentence of their conclusion reads: “If we ask what book was more frequently cited by Americans during the founding era, the answer somewhat surprisingly is: the Book of Deuteronomy.” Thirty-four percent of all references were to the Bible, compared with 22 percent for the Enlightenment and 9 percent for the classics. The Bible was cited four times as often as Montesquieu, ten times as often as Locke, and thirty times as often as Hobbes.

  But why Deuteronomy specifically? The fifth of the Five Books of Moses, which scholars believe was added after the original four, is mostly a retelling of the earlier books. The name Deuteronomy, from the Greek deuteronomion, literally means “repeated law.” Deuteronomy is Moses’ closing argument. The focus of the book is a series of speeches Moses gives to the Israelites near the end of his life. In them, he reiterates the blessings that await the people when they conquer the Promised Land yet reminds them of the obligations that come with that bounty. Deuteronomy resonated so deeply in early America because while Moses celebrates the liberation of Exodus in its pages, he also tries to reassert control over a population intoxicated by its newfound freedoms. The Moses story, in other words, can play two ways: Yes, it urges antiauthoritarian actions by celebrating the confrontation with the pharaoh, but it also promotes a new authoritative order through the imposition of divine law.

  And once again the books of Moses proved predictive of events in the United States. By 1787, Americans concluded that the Articles of Confederation were too weak to preserve the Union and should be replaced with a stronger federal law. Given that sectarian differences still separated the states, delegates largely chose to leave God out of the Constitutional Convention. Lutz and Hyneman, in their study of political rhetoric, found that the number of biblical citations, which was 34 percent throughout the 1780s, dropped to less than 5 percent from 1787 to 1788. “The Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible had little to say.”

  America’s greatest contribution to world religion—and the idea that most ensured religion’s success in America—the First Amendment, which holds that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” was passed with little sustained discussion of theology. Asked about the dearth of conversation about God, James Madison is said to have responded, “We forgot.” Hardly. The ardent champion of religious liberty in Virginia purposely avoided the topic, yet he still managed to secure his point, that “religion flourishes in greater purity, without rather than with the aid of Government,” into law. “One is tempted to conclude,” writes Martin Marty, the dean of American religious historians, “that the ‘godless’ Constitution and the reticent constitutionalists helped make possibly a ‘godly’ people.”

  Yet if Moses lay dormant during the drafting process, he returned in earnest during the ratification. In June 1788, Samuel Langdon, the former president of Harvard, delivered a sermon before the Court of New Hampshire, which was considering ratification. “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States” maintains that the three-branch structure of government of God’s New Israel was identical to that of God’s Old Israel. When the Israelites first left Egypt, Langdon said, they were a feeble patriarchy. By Mount Sinai, they had organized a body of elders and a network of judges. “The great thing wanting was a permanent constitution, which might keep the people peaceable and obedient.” In response, God created a senate of elders and a body of tribal representatives and a justice system and named Moses “chief commander.” “The government therefore was a proper republic,” Langdon said. After his speech, New Hampshire became the ninth and deciding state to ratify the Constitution.

  Even the most colorful writer of the age, Ben Franklin, joined the Exodus chorus in 1788 with a diatribe, “A Comparison of the Conduct of the Ancient Jews and the Anti-Federalists in the United States of America.” Like Israel of Old, the Supreme Being has freed Americans from bondage and given the nation a constitution, Franklin wrote. Yet once again, “discontented, restless spirits” are rejecting God’s law, crying, “We have freed ourselves from the slavery imposed by the Egyptians, and shall we suffer ourselves to be made slaves by Moses?” Franklin concluded that the American Constitution, like the biblical one, would eventually pass. The man who proposed that Moses appear on the seal of the United States in the wake of the Declaration now brought back his champion to save the Constitution.

  The persistence of Mosaic rhetoric in the first decade of the United States testifies to the enduring elasticity of the Exodus as a trope in American identity. The fact that so many who invoked the story were members of the elite shows that reverence for Hebrew scripture ran through even the highest segments of society and was not merely for rallying illiterate masses. All ten colleges founded on American soil before the Revolution offered instruction in Hebrew. The seal of Yale depicts an open Bible with the inscription “Light and Truth” in Hebrew. The seals of Dartmouth and Columbia include Hebrew as well. The Harvard commencement included a Hebrew oration every year until 1817. Even in the face of the Enlightenment, the Hebrew Scripture stubbornly maintained its grip on the American mind. And Moses maintained his status as the Bible’s chief ambassador to the United States.

  MICHAEL WALZER STROLLED amiably into the main reading room of Fuld Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Famed for housing the office of Albert Einstein, Fuld Hall is a redbrick Georgian building with a cream-colored bell tower, making it the spitting image of Independence Hall. The genetically tweedy Professor Walzer, in his early seventies, had hair as gray as Einstein’s but much straighter and more kempt.

  In 1984, Professor Walzer, a left-leaning political theorist, published Exodus and Revolution, a pioneering reading of the Moses story that introduced an idea into the study of the Bible that electrified readers. Walzer’s simple yet radical notion is that Moses was not merely a convenient example of how to execute a revolution. Moses invented the idea of revolution, at least as it’s practiced in the Western world. “Since late medieval or early modern times,” Walzer wrote, “there has existed in the West a characteristic way of thinking about political change, a pattern that we commonly impose upon events.” That pattern, he said, is oppression, liberation, social contract, political struggle, new society. “This isn’t a story told everywhere; it isn’t a universal pattern; it belongs to the West, more particularly to Jews and Christians in the West; and its source, its original version, is the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.”

  A near-perfect example of that revolution occurred in America. In both cases, the moment of liberation—when the Israelites cross the Red Sea; when the Americans win the war—is not a moment of genuine freedom, Walzer argues. The newly freed slaves remain trapped in a web of servility; they are passive, weighed down by oppression, frightened. They have the misplaced notion that freedom means lack of respon
sibility. “The childish and irresponsible slave or subject is free in ways the republican citizen can never be.”

  The solution, Walzer puts forth, is to voluntarily commit oneself to a new form of bondage. To reenslave oneself. For the Israelites, this means accepting the law handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. For the Americans, this means ratifying a new federal compact. The former victims could become free “only insofar as they accepted the discipline of freedom; the obligation to live up to a common standard and to take responsibility for their own actions.” The covenant, in other words, is the linchpin of freedom. The two pillars of the Moses story—freedom and law—have been present in America since the Pilgrims were reconfirmed in America’s founding decade.

  I asked Dr. Walzer why the moment of emancipation is not the moment of freedom, especially because everybody believes it to be so.

  “But disappointment is built into the story,” he said. “The slavishness of the people. The yearning to go back to Egypt, the golden calf. It’s part of the extraordinary realism of the biblical writers. They understand that there’s going to be backsliding.

  “Lawlessness,” he continued, “is the most radical notion of freedom, but that’s not a version that’s compatible with any form of a common life. You might say the Israelites have no common life between leaving Egypt and Sinai. You have a group of freed slaves, with some collective memory, but without a sense of society until they assume the burden of the commandments.”

  I mentioned that the moment of covenant seems conservative, compared with the radical moment of liberation.