IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

This was the tradition that Martin Luther King, in the 1950s, employing his unrivalled mastery of the Bible and its cadences, invoked to rouse white pastors and their congregations from their moral slumbers. The day before his murder, he gave a sermon in which he declared himself ready to die in the cause of redeeming his people from the chains of the slavery into which their ancestors had been brought. "Like anybody," he told his listeners, "I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land."

The allusion, of course, was to Moses: the great prophet who, guided by God, had led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, and then, before he died, climbed Mount Nebo to gaze across at Canaan, the promised land he was destined never to enter. "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

Today, although Martin Luther King's people may remain stranded in the wilderness, the Bible no longer structures the dread and the dreamings of Americans in the way that once it did. The book which for King had been a supreme inspiration has chiefly played a role in the current crisis as a prop held upside down by President Trump. Yet the tracks of Christian theology, as Nietzsche once complained, wind everywhere.

"The measure of a man's compassion for the lowly and the suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul." It was this -- the lesson taught by the redemption of the Children of Israel from slavery, and by the death of Christ on the cross -- that Nietzsche had always most despised about Christianity. Two millennia on, and the discovery made by Christ's earliest followers -- that to be a victim can be a source of power -- has brought thousands onto the streets of America and Britain alike.

Steeped in the language of intersectionality and postcolonial studies though the protests may be, the slogans derive ultimately from a much more venerable source. A dread of damnation, a yearning to be gathered into the ranks of the elect, a desperation to be cleansed of original sin, had long provided the surest and most fertile seedbed for the ideals of the American people. Repeatedly, over the course of their history, preachers had sought to awaken them to a sense of their guilt, and to offer them salvation. Now, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, there are summons to a similar awakening.

As minorities mass on the banks of the Jordan to attempt yet again to ford the river, white liberals -- often literally kneeling and raising their hands in prayer as they do so -- confess their sins and beg for absolution. Only through repentance, their conveners preach, is there any prospect of obtaining salvation. The activists, however, are not merely addressing those gathered before them. Their gaze, as the gaze of preachers in America has always been, right from the very first voyages of the Puritans across the Atlantic to New England, is fixed on the world beyond. Their summons is to sinners everywhere -- in London as in New York, in Amsterdam as in Los Angeles. Their ambition is to serve as a city on a hill.

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