American Israel

The first post-Christendom Christian nation

Excerpted from my Between Babel and Beast (Wipf & Stock, 2012). Still, I think, relevant.

“American” is a new kind of human being. First there was Francis, then a new brand of humanity known as “Franciscan”; first Luther, then “Lutherans.” America has no single founder, but it too has “forced itself upon man’s plasticity” and remade humanity in its own image.¹ Today everyone is, or aspires to be, American. Even our worst enemies wear our sneakers and eat our burgers and envy our freedoms.

The American was a long time coming. Conceived by Luther, gestated by Calvin, he was born of the Puritans parents who begat America. It took three labors to bring him finally to birth – the English Civil War from which American Puritans escaped, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War.² From these emerged a new character type, characterized by a boundlessly optimistic sense of possibility and inventiveness, an extraordinary willingness to try, fail, and try again that has been the astonishment and envy of the world. He is generous, always ready to help. He is sentimental; even American warriors have a soft side. The American is fiercely independent; don’t tread on him, because he won’t be pushed around. He is often willing to extend the same independence to others, to live and let live. The American has a dark side: He is utterly confident of the rightness of his every cause, infatuated with violence, insatiably hungry for novelty, not greedy for stuff so much as greedy for new stuff. He assumes that if the world were rightly ordered it would look like a global America, and is bewildered by people who resist this utopia. Like most people, the American’s virtues and vices are sometimes hard to distinguish.

American Christianity, like everything American, is new, a fresh Christian experience and form. It is Christianity unhaunted by a Catholic past, Christianity detached from Christendom, the “first experiment in Protestant social formation.”³ The virtues formed by America are the hardy Weberian virtues of hard work, thrift, restraint, inner-worldly asceticism, aggressively moralistic virtues expressed in Prohibition and anti-smut campaigns, but not only those. Every renewal of American Protestantism has blossomed in remarkable efforts to serve the poor, the stranger, the orphan and widow.⁴ Americans give more of their income to more charitable causes than any other people on earth, and we have a lot of surplus to give away. For nearly three centuries, most human beings of the American type profess to believe in Jesus and the tenets of Christian faith. What he really believes is not Christianity but another creed, which the versatile David Gelernter has identified as “Americanism,” the “fourth biblical world religion.”⁵

“America” is a new type of political community, and being an American entails commitment from the heart to this particular form of political community, an assurance that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution establish the best political order the world has ever seen, the last best hope of mankind. It is a polity devoted above all to liberty. America is the firstfruits of the polity of the end of time, but it is not the full harvest, and Americans and America will never feel content, or quite secure, until the inner American that dwells within every human being, and the splendid inner America that is the telos of every political order, struggles free of their chrysalis. America is the already of an American global order not yet formed, but Americans are here to help. The “Americanism” that Americans, including American Christians, believe is a religiously charged faith in American liberty as the hope of mankind. Our national self-consciousness is a “Messianic consciousness.”⁶

American Israel

“Americanism” was initially constructed from the misshapen fragments of the metapolitical outlook of Christendom. The Puritan Founders of New England were orthodox Christians in all their theological beliefs, but they laid the foundations for Americanism because of their tendency toward a nationalist, an-ecclesial reading of Scripture, their enthusiasm for nationalistic eschatology, their privatization and individualization of the Eucharist. As Americanism developed, these tendencies settled into habits, and the result was fourth great biblical religion.