The following selections are examples of American jeremiads—sermons, speeches, visual texts, or essays that, in the words of the scholar Sacvan Bercovitch, “unify a people by creating tension between ideal social life and its real manifestation.” The traditional jeremiad presents a biblical or spiritual ideal for behavior, then describes the ways individuals and communities have fallen from those standards, and finally provides a vision for an ideal public life that will result from a return to these high standards. It is named after the biblical lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, who prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem because the Israelites had turned their back on the Lord and were worshipping false idols. Speaking through Jeremiah, God said, “I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?” (Jeremiah 2:21). The American version of the jeremiad began as a rhetorical strategy of Puritan preachers looking to set high standards and high hopes in the New World, but the form has continued to find a home in American discourse because of the lofty ideals outlined in the nation’s founding documents and a strongly optimistic belief in progress.

Sources

John Winthrop, from A Modell of Christian Charity (1630)

Jonathan Edwards, from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)

Frederick Douglass, from What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July? (1852)

Robert F. Kennedy, The Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)

Ronald Reagan, from Farewell Address (1989)

Stephen H. Webb, How Soccer Is Ruining America: A Jeremiad (2009)

American Lung Association, Sandwich. Snack. Arsenic. (2011)

Barack Obama, Tucson Memorial Speech (2011)