FROM THE ARCHIVES: LIBERTY AND JUSTICE UNDER GOD

Post-9/11 America Is a Religion (George Monbiot, July 30, 2003, AlterNet)

As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book "Chosen People," published last year, the founding fathers of the U.S.A, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States should depict the Israelites, "led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address, that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token of providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the American identity was part of a process of "supersession". The Roman Catholic church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the beloved of God. The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago, as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind."

Gradually this notion of election has been conflated with another, still more dangerous idea. It is not just that the Americans are God's chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project. In his farewell presidential address, Ronald Reagan spoke of his country as a "shining city on a hill", a reference to the Sermon on the Mount. But what Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem, but the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan's account, was God's kingdom to be found in the United States of America, but the kingdom of hell could also now be located on earth: the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, against which His holy warriors were pitched.

Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America the divine has been extended and refined. In December 2001, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of that city, delivered his last mayoral speech in St Paul's Chapel, close to the site of the shattered twin towers. "All that matters," he claimed, "is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what it's all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was ... how much you believed in America. Because we're like a religion really. A secular religion." The chapel in which he spoke had been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact that George Washington had once prayed there. It was, he said, now "sacred ground to people who feel what America is all about". The United States of America no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood.

So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The U.S. has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life.

If Mr. Monbiot has just figured this out now, and doesn't realize that President Reagan's direct point of reference for the City on a Hill was to John Winthrop, and to the ideals that undergirded the American experiment even before it was a nation, one wonders if he's qualified to report on America. He is, of course, quite right that America proceeds from a set of ideas--as did Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and its communist successors--but the difference is that our ideas are right. And those ideas are fairly simple: Man is created by God and therefore every one of us starts out with equal moral and political standing. We honor the dignity in one another by affording the maximum possible freedom consistent with a decent society. That's it. That's all Americanism really boils down to. Yes, Americanism is religious and it is indeed universalist. And, as four hundred years of history has shown, it is the most powerful political ideology (a secular expression of the Judeo-Christian religion) Man has ever pledged himself to--crushing enemies who oppose it, leading other nations to try to replicate it, and attracting and assimilating millions of immigrants who believe in it. Obviously no one has to believe in Americanism, but it's self-evident that if you oppose it you are anti-American. [originally posted: 08/01/03] Posted by Orrin Judd at November 27, 2008 12:32 AM