Democracy in America begins from the central insight that religion precedes politics. This is best seen in the prominent role that Tocqueville accords to America’s Puritan Founders. The Puritans, in his view, contribute much to the spirit of American political culture. On the one hand, they contribute a covenantal theology that focuses on the importance of intermediation among otherwise separate democratic individuals. Yet the Puritans are also responsible for notions of sinfulness and religious “stain” that have the potential to assume illiberal forms. As Joshua Mitchell argues in this chapter, one potentially illiberal danger of Puritanism is the scapegoating of particular groups through the dynamics of identity politics. In Mitchell’s view, we need to reckon with America’s Puritan legacy not only through the lens of John Calvin and the covenantal theory of mediation but also through the prism of Blaise Pascal whose insights into the problems of loneliness, separation, and redemption illuminate contemporary political dilemmas.

Chapter 4 discusses the political theology of the American Puritans and their influential legacy of the bi-dimensional covenant. Arriving on the shores of the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, the Puritans set about the ambitious project of creating perfect theologico-political communities. In particular, the Puritan settlements combined republican and liberal perspectives: On the one hand, the church covenant resembled in its horizontality the social contract theory, by creating a religious community with an accepted government from the free accord of its individual members. On the other hand, the vertical covenant of each church with God was modeled after the classical political contract between the people and its rulers. Thus, both the liberal apprehension of the people as a collection of equal individuals and the republican understanding of the people as of corporate whole were implemented in the colonies of New England. The chapter includes samples of the Puritan compacts, excerpts from the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, and selections from the writings of John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Nathaniel Ward, John Wise, and others.

This chapter situates Franz Rosenzweig’s unique and influential contributions to Jewish theology in his Christian historicist and philosophical context of modern European civilization. Doing so allows us to best understand his theological contributions with the interdependent two-fold Jewish exilic tradition of interpreting the Torah as an engaged, dialectical response from the dual perspectives of the living Scriptural authority of their respective communities of faith and the non-Jewish and increasingly secular contexts in which they found themselves. The chapter unfolds as an interpretation that is based on Rosenzweig’s introduction of a novel methodological speech-act philosophy that he calls New Thinking which takes shape in the midrashic form of a messianic aesthetics. Simon claims that this approach enables Rosenzweig to set out a normative guide of teaching-as-practice throughout the entirety of The Star of Redemption, in order to bring the structures of the inter-related processes of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption into functional and dynamic ethical relations.