The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy

by Philip S. Gorski

Few played a more prominent role in crafting this vision of New England as a New Israel than the Mathers, Cotton (1663–1728) and his father and grandfather, Increase and Richard Mather. Today, Cotton is most often remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials of 1692. But he was also one of the first chroniclers of New England—and of its wars with the natives. For the secular reader, Mather’s chronicle seems a curious hodgepodge of military and church history. There are long descriptions of battles between the New England colonists and various native tribes, but also entire chapters on Baptist and Quaker dissenters. For Mather, though, war and dissent were inextricably linked by covenant and providence. In his view, the Puritans had made a covenant with God to defend the true religion. The presence of dissenters was a breach of this covenant. God punished the Puritans for that breach by sending the natives to wage war on them. In Mather’s words, “since this degeneracy has obtained so much among us, the wrath of heaven has raised up against us a succession of other adversaries and calamities.” If heretics were the cause of God’s wrath, then the natives were his chosen instrument. As with the biblical Israelites of the Old Testament, so with his new Chosen People in their new Promised Land of New England.8 Mather was not the first to view the Puritans’ wars with the native tribes through a providential lens. But he was arguably the first to view it through an apocalyptic...