As a Protestant, I can accept that for a Protestant salvation is an individual enterprise. The implications of this observation are enormous. One can hardly explain the American Revolution without reference to the extraordinary revival that coursed through the colonies prior to the revolution. Literally thousands of colonials would gather in open fields to hear itinerants such as Wakefield preach to the masses. It was a phenomenon that swept the country which was to be repeated in many ways during the Civil War, especially in the South.
But a caveat is in order, the reason the faithful gathered in the fields to hear a preacher on top of a wagon was because the established church, especially in New England, excluded these preachers from their facilities. So we see the origins of the Chautauqua tradition in America. In this exclusion in which these preachers were barred from existing churches and forced to operate in the open, we see echoes of the practices in 17th century New England in which banishment occurred, Catholics were driven from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, nonconformity was emphatically discouraged with stocks and other punishments, and in extreme cases lapses into paranoia and witch trials.
The caveat should also include knowledge that the Mayflower Compact was essentially a socialist document and the attempts to settle in the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early 17th century were originally utopian or socialist experiments. They failed for the reasons that socialism universally fails but nevertheless the impulse was unmistakably there.
Having stated and illustrated the caveat, I nevertheless contend that Protestant faith postulates an essentially individual salvation. I have often written in this forum that Christian salvation is essentially retail event, it is, at least for the Protestant, an expression of a relationship between two people (emphasis intentionally put on "people"), the penitent and Jesus.
The implications of this individualistic salvation are enormous. It is the bedrock for the Declaration of Independence. It is impossible to imagine Thomas Jefferson writing, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," without the idea that man is an individual, one who is created, recognized, and ultimately justified by God. It is impossible to consider the denial of the divine right of kings apart from the revolutionary idea of the sovereignty of the individual. So the legitimacy runs not from God to King to Subject but from God to man and then on loan to government. This syllogism is essential for the republican impulse that sparked the American Revolution.
This is of more than mere historical interest.
It is of immediate application to our present day elections and to the kind of government we will have, the kind of culture that government will permit, and the kind of religion, whether Catholic, Protestant or otherwise, which will be permitted to flourish or, rather, marginalized. Barack Obama makes no apologies for his belief that "salvation" (presumably meant by him in the secular sense but it is perhaps revealing that he resorts to the word) is strictly a group phenomenon. He says time and again that he came to recognize that his salvation can occur only in the context of salvation for the whole country.
The implication? Get with the program or you will frustrate "salvation." Consider what animates the left and not coincidentally makes the left so intolerant. The utopian impulse, or the impulse of the statist, to organize society in order to create an earthly heaven is an impulse which has been with us throughout history. We have noted that it infected the pilgrims and the result was not pretty. They nearly starved, they became intolerant, they became radicalized -a description which well describes every leftist movement history presents for study.
