Islamists and neo-conservatives concur in
calling "Americanism" a religion, the "worst-ever
theology" in the view of the former, but according to
the latter, "the beliefs that make Americans positive
that their nation is superior to all others - morally
superior, closer to God". The quotations come
respectively from Abid Ullah Jan at the Tanzeem-e-Islami
website, and from Professor David Gelernter in the
January 2005 Commentary magazine.
America stems
from a religious movement and displays a marked
religious character, but its actual religious life is
splintered among scores of major denominations.
Gelernter wants to lump it all into a generic American
religion. He is just as wrong as the Islamists. Both
confound American religion with the Bush
administration's strategic agenda. American Christianity
at once is more personal and strategically more powerful
than either the Islamists or the neo-conservatives
imagine.
The neo-conservatives are ideologues,
not God-fearers, and they habitually confuse their
political agenda with the kind of religious conviction
that transforms the world. In an August 10, 2004, essay
I attacked the idea that Islam was a political ideology
rather than a religion. More than a billion people
embrace Islam with a passion because it is indeed a
religion, promising continuity to fragile societies
beset by global pressures. Islam's genius, I contended,
is to promise to remake the world in the image of
traditional society through jihad (Islam: Religion or political
ideology?). What America offers Muslims by
way of social progress - shopping malls, broadband
Internet, and voter registration drives - represents a
deadly threat to traditional society.
Religion
proposes not to create a more perfect union, nor to
safeguard individual rights, but to vanquish death.
America never has had a dominant religion. On the
contrary: America has had to rediscover Christianity
every few generations, in the form of new "Great
Awakenings" (see What makes the US a Christian
nation, Nov 30, 2004). The first Great
Awakening made the Revolution, and the second made the
Civil War. Today's evangelical Great Awakening well may
spill out of its American confines and change the course
of the world.
Gelernter is a distinguished
computer scientist, sadly a victim of the Unabomber, who
now has become an amateur theologian. Religion absorbs
the aging neo-conservatives, and Gelernter shows an
authentic interest in matters spiritual. One cannot
dismiss him as another acolyte of Leo Strauss promoting
religion as a useful public myth. But a tin ear for
matters of the soul afflicts Gelernter along with other
neo-conservatives. In 2003 I drew attention to a volume
on the Hebrew prophets by Norman Podhoretz, Commentary's
editor-at-large (Neo-cons in a religious bind,
Jun 5, 2003). Podhoretz, a literary pundit and promoter
of single-issue causes, imagines that the prophets were
pundits like him promoting a single-issue cause ("the
war against idolatry"). Now Gelernter avers,
"Americanism is in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a
millenarian religion; a biblical religion." This is
utter and complete rubbish.
Gelernter retreads
the often-told story of the Puritan Fathers' desire to
become (as he puts it) "God's new chosen people, living
in God's new promised land ... God's new Israel". He
concludes:
To sum up Americanism's creed as freedom,
equality, and democracy for all is to state only half
the case. The other half deals with a promised land, a
chosen people, and a universal, divinely ordained
mission. This part of Americanism is the American
version of biblical Zionism; in short, American
Zionism.
America has deep roots in the
Hebrew Bible (Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the
world, Oct 28, 2003), but Gelernter has
misread them. Islamists misread matters the same way,
for what that is worth. Abid Ullah Jan complains:
Radicalism, fanaticism and fundamentalism
are the terms exclusively used for religions such as
Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But the worst form of
fanaticism that we witness today is of the American
domination theology, which is even worse than a cult
... Americans who note that America is a bastion of
democracy and country of peace and tolerance are
right, but only in a narrow bookish sense which hides
the facts that America's foundations lie in the
genocide of natives and 100 years of lynchings. Other
than that, the history of US invading and terrorizing
other states, carving state territories from other's
land and imposing its hegemony dates as back to the
day when America came into existence.
That
the Puritan founders of America spoke of a New Israel
founding a new Promised Land is well known; readers who
wish to learn more about biblical religion in the
American Colonial period would do well to consult the
work of Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian at
Georgetown University, or Paul Johnson's History of
the American People.
The trouble, as
Gelernter is aware, is that Puritanism melted away into
Unitarianism at the turn of the 19th century, leaving
hardly a residue of its old Zionist attitude. "Where did
all the powerful religions' passion go?" asks Gelernter.
"Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed
itself into Americanism." Americanism, we are led to
believe, came from Puritanism, but when Puritanism was
no more, it turned into Americanism - a mode of
reasoning that would be circular were it not so
elliptical.
Gelernter simply ignores the central
fact of American religious history, namely that each
Christian revival occurred among different people than
the previous one. "Different people than the original
Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were swept up
in the First Great Awakening, and yet another group of
Americans, largely Westerners, joined the Second Great
Awakening during the 19th century. Yet another group of
Americans joined ... [the]Third Great Awakening of 1890.
If the rapid growth of born-again denominations
constitutes yet another 'Great Awakening', as some
historians suppose, the United States is repeating a
pattern of behavior that is all the more remarkable for
its discontinuity," I observed in the cited November 30
essay.
The trouble is that Gelernter is a
secular Jew with a midlife curiosity about matters of
the soul, but no inner sense of what religion means. The
motivation of religious Americans is too trivial to
register on his ideological Richter scale. That
motivation is redemption from sin. It may seem trivial
to point out the obvious, but Christianity, as opposed
to Gelernter's fleshless and bloodless American
religion, has to do with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ
on the Cross to redeem mankind from original sin. The
Great Awakenings of American religion do not begin with
a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, but
with a return in fear and trembling to the Cross.
Religion first of all is personal - deeply and searingly
personal - and political only as an afterthought.
Sin, Gelernter would know if he bothered to read
St Paul, means death. During the Great Extinction of the
Peoples ensuing the fall of Rome, Christianity called
out of the nations individuals who wished to belong to a
New Israel, a people of God beyond ethnicity with the
expectation of eternal life beyond the grave. The
Gentiles understood original sin, I have argued in the
past, to mean the sin of having been born Gentile, that
is, into a people doomed to extinction.
Christ
sacrificed himself, Christians believe, because man is
too depraved to redeem himself. Christianity demands
that each individual turn his back on ethnicity and
tribe, and accept Jesus in a discrete act of faith. For
the endangered nations of late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages, Christianity promised a new life, as it
does today to hundreds of millions in the southern
hemisphere whose existence is no less precarious than
that of earlier converts.
Few Christians are
quite satisfied with the promised Kingdom of God beyond
the grave, and therefore demand something in the present
life. Europe's Christians never quite shed their pagan
(that is to say national) roots, worshipping their own
ethnicity in images of Jesus, the Virgin and the saints.
That flaw, in my view, ultimately destroyed European
Christianity (Why Europe chooses extinction,
Oct 8, 2003).
The Puritans who settled America,
as Gelernter observes, looked backward "to the pure
Christianity of the New Testament - and then even
farther back. Puritans spoke of themselves as God's new
chosen people, living in God's new promised land." The
Puritans tolerated none of the old pagan devices to pad
the Kingdom of God with corporeal consolations. But they
did not abjure the world this side of the grave.
Rejecting the old pagan devices, the Puritans instead
adopted a Hebrew one, that is, a temporal order in
emulation of Israel.
New Israel, namely those
called to the Cross from among the nations, has no
kingdom of this Earth. Old Israel, by contrast, is quite
at home in this world. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the
sage of postwar Conservative Judaism, observed that
Judaism is not a concept, but rather a life, that is,
the continuation of the life of Abraham. The Jewish
people are redeemed by virtue of Abraham's covenant with
God, in recognition of the Patriarch's righteousness as
well as his absolute faith. To the Christian these are
promises of things to come; to the Jews this is mere
family history.
To stretch the point, one might
say that that the United States is founded on a
Judaizing heresy. Christianity struggles to find a place
for human initiative. If man is so depraved that he
cannot save himself, what role can he play in his own
salvation? To establish an earthly regime in pursuit of
grace is more a Jewish than a Christian project. In
Christian terms, God's grace, through Jesus' sacrifice
on the Cross, is a free gift to man, who otherwise has
no way to save himself. If depraved humans can do
nothing for their own salvation, it is nonsense to
attribute to man free will, as Martin Luther lectured
the Catholics. God will decide who will be saved (the
"predestined" Elect) and who will burn in hellfire.
The Reformation rejected Free Will, but the
founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony undertook one
of the boldest acts of will in human history, namely to
seek redemption by becoming a new People in a new Land.
Argues Gelernter:
When I say that Americanism equals
American Zionism, I am in one sense merely adding up
statements by eminent authorities. John Winthrop
[governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony] in 1630:
"Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us."
Thomas Jefferson in is Second Inaugural address: "I
shall need ... the favor of that Being in whose hands
we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from
their native land and planted them in a country
flowing with all the necessities and comforts of
life." ... Abraham Lincoln declared his wish to be a
"humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of
this, His almost chosen people".
Lincoln's
ironic characterization of Americans as God's "almost
chosen people" is to the point; for America to draw
inspiration from the Hebrew Bible is salutary, but for
Americans to regard themselves as God's chosen is
idolatrous. Megalomania of this ilk infected Europe,
beginning with Richelieu's France in the 17th century,
and then Nicholas II's Russia and later Adolf Hitler's
Germany in the 20th (The sacred heart of darkness,
Feb 11, 2003), with apocalyptic consequences.
(Jefferson, of course, was a Deist who expurgated the
New Testament of reference to the divinity of Jesus.)
Again, Christ's kingdom is not of this world.
Luther spoke of "two kingdoms", namely the political
life of the corrupt world in contrast to the Kingdom of
Heaven. To conflate them in the form of a "New
Jerusalem" broke not only with Christian tradition, but
beggared Christian doctrine, for it presumed that man
might redeem himself. If that is true, why did Jesus
need to sacrifice himself? That, I believe, is what led
to the extinction of Puritanism. Christians do not join
the New Israel through their mere presence in a polity,
but by personal faith in God's Kingdom.
Christianity, that is, belief in the redemption
of mankind through Christ's sacrifice, all but
disappeared from Massachusetts in the decade after the
American Revolution. All but one of Boston's churches
and Harvard College officially had turned Unitarian by
1800. John Winthrop's descendants found themselves
redeemed from earthly tyranny, and promptly became the
Brahmins of Boston, a byword for the arrogance of
inherited wealth. Without the benefit of the Puritans'
accumulated wisdom and with no help from the faculty of
Harvard, Americans of the frontier revived Christianity,
making Methodism and Baptism the dominant US
denomination by the fourth decade of the 19th century.
Not the American Puritan religion, but the transplanted
denominations of the English working class prevailed.
From this milieu (the "second Great Awakening")
came Abraham Lincoln, the self-educated frontiersman who
would join no Church, yet spoke in near-prophetic tones
of the mingling of divine will in the affairs of men.
The religious crusade that was the civil war achieved
its goal, redeeming the United States from slavery, at
which point Christianity dissipated, just as it had
after the Revolution.
America provides uniquely
fertile ground for Christianity, because immigrants to
America leave behind the pagan elements that corrupted
European Christianity. But that is mere potential, not
religion. Man does not live by the American Dream alone.
American evangelicals, whose appearance on the political
scene has caused so much consternation on the left,
spent decades cultivating personal piety, defending
hearth and home against the septic tide of popular
culture, long before circumstances pressed them into the
world arena.
The trouble is that Christianity
cannot resolve the conundrum of free will and original
sin. A handful of Christians, eg the Mennonites, will
form small communities apart from the world and wait for
divine grace to find them. That leads to irrelevance.
Most Christians will go out into the world and reform it
so that it is more amenable to grace, reverting, as it
were, to the Hebrew roots of Christianity. Puritan
emulation of the Hebrews, once it achieved its earthly
goals, led to Brahmin arrogance. America's tragedy, one
hears, is to win the war and lose the peace. In the
18th, 19th, and again in the 20th century, the United
States achieved its dream, but lost its soul.
Today's evangelicals have risen up against
soulless secular culture, not against worldly evil.
President George W Bush and his neo-conservative
counselors believe that the US will engineer democratic
regimes throughout the world; in this, I believe, they
will fail. Despite their failure, American religion yet
may play the decisive role on the world stage. As I
observed last year (Ask Spengler, Jun 2, 2004),
Professor Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State
University reports that US Christian denominations are
at the forefront of an "historical turning point" in
Christianity, "one that is as epochal for the Christian
world as the original Reformation". In the October 2002
edition of The Atlantic Monthly, he wrote, "In the
global South (the areas that we often think of primarily
as the Third World) huge and growing Christian
populations - currently 480 million in Latin America,
360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared
with 260 million in North America ... It is Pentecostals
who stand in the vanguard of the Southern
Counter-Reformation. Though Pentecostalism emerged as a
movement only at the start of the twentieth century,
chiefly in North America, Pentecostals today are at
least 400 million strong, and heavily concentrated in
the global South. By 2040 or so there could be as many
as a billion, at which point Pentecostal Christians
alone will far outnumber the world's Buddhists and will
enjoy rough numerical parity with the world's Hindus."
As Asia Times Online reader Douglas Bilodeau of
Indiana observed, "If Mecca is ever razed by an invading
army, it will not be Israeli or American or European,
but will march up from Africa south of the Sahara."
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