Following up from Michael’s excellent Memorial Day reflection on the intermingling of true and false religion (Catholicism and nationalism) in America today, I think it is important to delve more deeply into this issue. More than any other country today, Americans tend to fuse Christianity with an invented civic religion, and, sooner or later, it all comes back to the idea of American exceptionalism, the notion that America is somehow ordained by God and is held to a different standard. And, more often than not, the underlying theology is derivative Calvinism.
We can trace this directly to the Calvinist religious dissenters who formed the early New England colonies. These early settlers viewed America as favored by God, much as ancient Israel had been in Old Testament times. God formed a covenant with the Puritans, again following the Old Testament example. They viewed themselves as the “elect”, those chosen by God to be saved through no action of their own. And America was their country. Puritan settler John Winthrop gave perhaps the clearest example of this theology in his famous city-on-a-hill speech in 1630 (that was later appropriated by Ronald Reagan):
“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken … we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God … We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”
Recently, William Pfaff penned an excellent essay on this very topic in the New York Review of Books. He showed that this mentality guided the policies of “manifest destiny” and frontier expansion in the early days of the American experiment. Then Woodrow Wilson stepped onto the stage. Wilson, the son of a Calvinist minister, believed that the United States had been chosen by God to show “the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” Pfaff notes that Wilson’s far-reaching approach to “self-determination” complicated Europe’s pre-existing problems, leading to ethnic and territorial grievances that would ultimately be exploited by the fascists. During the Cold War, Eisenhower’s secretary of state was John Foster Dulles, a firm Calvinist (and Presbyterian elder). The notion of the United States as a providential nation really became ingrained under Dulles, after Wilson’s false start. And Bush fit right in, dividing the world into the good and the bad, embracing American exceptionalism on steroids, and trying to remodel the world under the tutelage of the United States.
Lest there is any doubt of how the current regime has appropriated the worst of American exceptionalist theology, Pfaff spells it out:
“The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.”
Here’s the funny thing: the Wilson-Dulles-Bush ideology is eerily similar to Marxism. Then again, Marxist determinism resembles this derivative Calvinism, and may even be regarded as its secularized form. History is moving inexorably in one direction, and the role of America is to nudge it along. In Bush’s version, the impediment is radical Islam intent on restoring an oppressive caliphate. Just wipe the mess out of the way, and the preordained plan will play out. The overlap with Marxism should set off alarm bells, and point to the falsity of this manufactured secular religion.
History does not move in a linear deterministic fashion. By ignoring the consequences of their actions, the Dulles-Bush strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. America’s amorphous and meaningless “war on terror” has not made the world safer. It has had the opposite effect. The enemies of America do not “hate us for our freedom” (one of the truly stupidest slogans of all time), but rather the tendency to use overwhelming military superiority to muscle in on their part of the world. Context matters. Context such as the failure of the US to show more than token concern for the suffering of the Palestinian people. Context such as the view of western Christian occupiers in the middle east, especially after the breakdown of the Ottoman empire. Context such as the seemingly unlimited addiction to cheap oil. And the same blinkered one-dimensional mentality overshadowed the Vietnam war…
What evils could have been avoided, absent the doctrine of American exceptionalism? It’s easy to analyze in hindsight. Still, was it so hard to realize that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would end up an unmitigated disaster? Would the 1979 revolution have taken place in Iran had not the US connived in the imposition of Reza Pahlavi a quarter of a century earlier? If the US had not bombed Cambodia, would the Khmer Rouge have ever come to power? And there are many other questions. They all need to be addressed soberly.
American exceptionalism has been a disaster. But few seem to learn the lesson. No alarm bells went off when Ronald Reagan deliberately used the language of Winthrop. On the contrary, today, everybody wants to be Ronald Reagan.
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