Obama and american exceptionalism

I caught the second half of Obama’s speech last night after I arrived back in West Virginia for a long weekend visit. There was certainly much to be impressed with, but theologian James K. A. Smith is right to point out the degree to which Obama’s “new politics” includes the same old americanism and american exceptionalism that should make Christians in america cringe (but, of course, doesn’t). He zeroed in on many of the speech’s passages that troubled me:

More significantly, despite all the talk of newness and change, the rhetoric and religion of Americanism still sounds the same from where I sit. In language that could have just as easily appeared in Bush’s second inaugural or the National Security Strategy of the Bush administration, Obama promised to “restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace and who yearn for a better future.” And immediately following this, he ramps it up a notch, associating America with the proverbial “ultimate sacrifice,” spilling blood for the flag:

I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

[…]
To put the question starkly: Can any Christian really say that they put their “country” first? Both Republican-speak and Democrat-speak remain committed to the god of Americanism.

Of course Obama doesn’t think he is the Messiah, and neither do his supporters. Anyone with an ounce of media literacy can tell the way in which the McCain camp dreamed up and promulgates that lie. The deeper problem is that Obama, like McCain, does believe that america has a messianic role. But this is the criticism we will never hear from the McCain camp, Catholic or otherwise, because making that criticism will expose their own hypocrisy and their own idolatrous tendencies.