Pioneers Against Postliberalism

In recent years, American conservatives seem obsessed with lamentation. Intellectual magazines and other outposts of conservative intellectualism have promoted several narratives of national decline which lift up a mythic American past to contrast with a supposedly dreary American present. But scratching beneath the surface, there is nothing particularly innovative about concerns for American deracination such as those expressed by Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. In fact, writers from that supposedly glorious past, such as Norwegian-American novelist O.E. Rølvaag, explored themes of American alienation decades before the current generation of conservative intellectuals was even born. Not only is their work more original and interesting, it also offers better solutions to the problems the American republic faces today. 

Deneen’s central worry is that Americans have been uprooted from their lives and reduced to a state of atomized individualism. He claims that the pioneering American spirit of hope is an “implicitly theorized” desire for “the better, greater, more perfect opportunity” that points only to “a happiness ever out of reach.” In other words, Deneen believes that there is something about what others have called “the American creed” that leads American citizens to hubristically deny limits on their hopes. Unlike citizens of more ancient regimes, Deneen views Americans as fundamentally insatiable and therefore fundamentally unhappy. 

In fact, Deneen says his own students are defined by lives of “gnawing and ceaseless worry.” Rather than returning home and improving the places they are from, Deneen contends these students view such a prospect with nothing less than horror — their supposedly desperate, unlimited desire is to “be extracted from the crowded favelas, never to be seen again.” In this way, all Americans “outwardly exhibit the appearance of citizenship,” actually only “have the souls of tyrants.’

The “implicit theory” which has allegedly inspired these desires stems from the influence of “teachers of evil” such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the American Founding. Their liberalism, he claims, begins with an assertion that mankind’s natural state is one “free and independent... of society, of culture, of laws and civilization.” Later, he attributes to James Madison the view that the “freedom to make yourself is the reason that government comes into existence.” Ultimately, Deneen’s relationship to the American republic is alienated in the extreme — he simply does not seem to believe he can reconcile being a subject of God’s kingdom with his American citizenship. 

The Norwegian-American author Ole Edvart Rølvaag also told stories about young people consumed by a “gnawing and ceaseless worry.” His 1927 novel Giants in the Earth, the first in a trilogy, is the story of a Norwegian couple, Per Hansa and Beret, that immigrated to the United States in search of economic opportunity and a liberation from the boredom and oppression of life in Europe. In many ways, although they lived a century-and-a-half ago, Rølvaag’s pioneers endured many of the spiritual hardships Deneen worries about — endured, and mostly survived. 

Of the two, Per Hansa is much more enthusiastic about their new life in America than Beret. Always scheming to get ahead, Per Hansa’s dearest dream is to live in the biggest house and own the biggest farm in their new village in the Dakota Territory. Rølvaag portrays his struggle with the prairie as an epic story, on the scale of the old Norse Poetic Edda. He wrestles with adversity because he wants a better life for his family than was available in the Norwegian fishing village in which he was raised. Beret, on the other hand, is deeply uncomfortable with her new American life. She fears that “Americanization” is turning her children into barbarians, and her husband into a crook or worse. She sees most of his schemes as leading to moral ruin, and slowly life on the prairie drives her mad. Over the course of the novel, their American experience drives Per Hansa and Beret apart and nearly wrecks their marriage.

Although the prairie communities Rølvaag knew were universally Christian, very rarely could they sustain a church and pastor exclusively their own. Internerint pastors would travel from settlement to settlement, meaning that the pious Lutherans of the plains could go months or even years without access to the sacraments.

So, when a pastor visits Per Hansa and Beret’s settlement, it becomes the turning point of the novel. The pastor rebukes the couple for growing distant, forgetting their purpose in the new country, and becoming deeply alienated. “For the kingdom they were founding here would be a work of praise, a blessing to coming generations,” the pastors says in a sermon, “only insofar as they remained steadfast to the truths implanted in them as children by their fathers. There was no other foundation to build upon; indeed, what other refuge did men have?” The only hope for the couple living a good life — the only hope for their sanity, even — is to return to the church of their upbringings. The immigrants learned to serve God in a new national context; their faith was their salvation.

There was a great diversity among Lutheran immigrants to the United States, but historian Sydney Ahlstrom wrote that Norwegian Lutherans were closely aligned with the Missouri Synod, which in turn was marked by the “pietism and confessionalism” of its founder C.F.W. Walther. While Walther was deeply committed to the personal renewal that comes from faith in Christ against rationalistic religious liberalism, his confessionalism nonetheless “stood opposed to all tendencies to reduce faith to feeling” and believed Christian preaching had power insofar as it adhered to the “historic witness” of the church. For the Norwegian Lutherans, that confessionalism was the substance of the “truths implanted in them by their fathers.” Their new kingdom in the United States was not meant as a simple escape from the Old World — it was meant to fulfill the dream of a good society. 

The struggle central to Rølvaag’s work is the tension between virtue and prosperity, the ever-present tension between honoring history and embracing the newness of life in America. Rølvaag certainly does not offer easy answers, but he does demonstrate a fundamental confidence in the confessional truths he affirms that latter-day critics of American life, such as Deneen, often lack. 

Another great Scandinavian Lutheran writer, Søren Kierkegaard, once observed that the “predominant tendency” of paganism is a “merely human point of view” that only wants “to speak sorrowfully about the changefulness of human things.” Christianity, on the other hand, “wants to speak only about the changelessness of God.” To survive the “creative destruction” endemic to American capitalism — whether in its nascent prairie form or a more complex, technological manifestation — Americans must simply rediscover the truths their fathers taught them. Rølvaag did not hysterically advocate for a radical new “post-liberal” regime; he simply insisted on telling his people’s story, and adding to the funded wisdom of the ages.