Robert E. Brown reviews American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev:
As historians have long observed, the new political realities of the [founding] American experiment — individual equality and autonomy, secularism and religious pluralism, and representative democracy — created anxieties for all concerned.
In pre-monarchical Israel they found a state that existed as a federation of territories (the twelve tribes) ruled by democratic consensus (no central monarchy) centered upon a written constitution (the Law). The recasting of the American experiment in biblical terms helped to relieve anxieties over the inherent risks of an egalitarian society by showing that such an arrangement had divine sanction. Perhaps more importantly clothing the structures and values of republicanism in biblical dress was pivotal for disseminating and inculcating those ideals among the masses, whose exposure to classical Greek and modern political thought was not widespread. ...
Curiously, the flowering of political biblicism came to an abrupt end by mid-century. Shalev attributes this rapid decline to the rises of evangelicalism and individualism and to the controversy over slavery. Evangelicalism centered its conversionist spirituality on Jesus. Calvinism had made the Old Testament the pivot-point of early American religious and-political reflection. But a new focus on Jesus (and the New Testament) displaced the reigning Calvinist theology of covenant and its view of the people of God (Israel) as a spiritual template. At the expense of communalism, American polity created societal values that emphasized individualism, making the Israel metaphor less and less compelling. Finally, the controversy over slavery radically undermined the moral authority — and so the mythic power — of the Old Testament. Pro-slavery apologists repeatedly trumpeted that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery, and abolitionists responded by fashioning interpretive methods that privileged the moral vision of the New Testament at the expense of the Old. The mythology of an ideal Hebrew polity that could be held out for modern emulation was substantially eroded. The Civil War dealt a final, crushing blow to American self-identity as a renewed Israel. Like the old Israel, its unity was shattered by insurmountable dissension.
