America as a Religion

The Public Square

That America is guided by Providence is a belief deeply entrenched in the seventeenth-century beginnings, the constitutional period, Lincoln’s ponderings on our greatest war, and Woodrow Wilson’s convictions about the inseparable connections between freedom and American destiny. The belief has never been absent from American public life and discourse, although in the last half century many, and not least religious thinkers, have tried to discredit or marginalize it. In recent years, however, the idea of a providentially guided America has been making a comeback. One thinks, for instance, of Michael Novak’s On Two Wings, which makes a strong case for the Founders’ Hebraic understanding of history, as well as providing a marvelous florilegium of their statements about providential purpose (see review, FT May 2002). More recently, Steven Webb has provided an incisive and nuanced account of the history of the idea in American Providence: A Nation with a Mission (see review, FT February). Then there was and is the attention aroused by the controversy over “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, a phrase suggestive of both divine direction and judgment. Of greatest influence perhaps has been the harsh criticism of George W. Bush’s employment of the idea of Providence in relation to the course of freedom in the world, even though his statements have generally been carefully honed and are unexceptionable in the context of presidential history.

Another important contributor to the new discussion is David Gelernter of Yale. I have earlier raised questions about his near-identification of Puritanism with Judaism in American history (see Public Square, FT February). Now he has gone considerably farther with an essay in Commentary, “Americanism—and Its Enemies.” Gelernter writes, “By Americanism I mean the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart; the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God.” He goes farther still: “Americanism is in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion. Unlike England’s ‘official’ religion, embodied in the Anglican church, America’s has been incorporated into all the Judeo-Christian religions in the nation.” America is a religion that has been incorporated into other religions? The suggestion of syncretism is pronounced—or, as one reads on, the suspicion arises that Americanism has in some way displaced the other religions. One wonders if this is a new version of “supersessionism,” an idea excoriated in Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Gelernter writes: “I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism. This new religion was the end-stage of Puritanism: Puritanism realized among God’s self-proclaimed ‘new’ chosen people—or, in Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable phrase, God’s ‘almost chosen people.’” Lincoln’s is indeed a remarkable phrase, but the “almost” seems to get lost in Gelernter’s account. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reform Jews who rejected the Zionist idea of a Jewish state declared that “America is our Zion.” Gelernter appears to have moved beyond that. “We can go further. 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.” He says he is working on a “Thanksgiving Haggadah” that will recite the providential story of America including the “repeated reenactments of the Exodus that make up America’s history.” The Haggadah is, of course, the Passover retelling of God’s liberation of the children of Israel, similar to the Anamnesis in the Eucharist that recites the saving deeds of God in Christ.

“And so,” writes Gelernter, “we circle back to the beginnings of Protestantism, which begot Puritanism, which begot Americanism.” There is no room for Catholicism in this telling of the story. “Papism” and Anglicanism’s compromise with papism are the Pharaoh from which God delivered his Puritans who begot Americanism. That aspect of Gelernter’s American religion is troubling, to put it delicately, but many will be even more troubled by the hubris of Americans being “positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God,” that America is “a promised land, a chosen people, and [has] a universal, divinely ordained mission.” The promised land? The chosen people? More than all others? Presumably Gelernter, being a Jew, would not say so, although I am not sure.

Certainly, Christians must not say so. Christ and his body the Church is our first community, prior in time and prior in allegiance. Jews can speak to the Haggadah, but an American Anamnesis is, not to put too fine a point on it, idolatry. It is a welcome development of great importance that thinking about America and Providence is receiving renewed attention. The direction pointed by David Gelernter, however, ends up in conclusions that contributed to discrediting such thinking in the past. For a far more promising way of exploring these questions, I recommend Steven Webb’s American Providence.

Interests, Ideals, and World War IV

What to make of Andrew Bacevich’s long article in the Winter 2005 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “The Real World War IV”? The editor of the WQ, Steven Lagerfeld, seems a bit nervous about publishing it, concluding his introductory note with this: “It’s a provocative argument, from a writer whose thinking never fails to command our interest.” I have no problem with that. Bacevich, who teaches at Boston University, has published in these pages, but in the last couple of years has taken an isolationist turn and seems more at home publishing in Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative. He has been a vigorous, some would say strident, opponent of the Bush doctrine following September 11, and his WQ article aims to counter the arguments of Norman Podhoretz and others who have promoted the idea that we are engaged in World War IV and must win it.

A lot of thoughtful people are uneasy about U.S. policy in Iraq. In January, William F. Buckley reported on a dinner conversation in which conservatives were sharply divided over whether, if they knew then what they know now, they would have supported military action in Iraq. Buckley ended his column with the suggestion that people should be demanding an early withdrawal from Iraq, but only if President Bush “beckoned” them to do so. A few days later, however, a Buckley column favorably reviewed Podhoretz’s most recent and very hawkish manifesto. What does Bacevich’s article contribute to this unsettled state of the question among people who have in common that they understand themselves to be conservatives?

First, Bacevich underscores that U.S. policy in the Middle East was significantly set by FDR when in 1945 he promised military protection to the Saudis if they would guarantee an unlimited flow of oil under U.S. control. So there is something to the “blood for oil” slogan after all. He makes the interesting argument that our current circumstance began with, of all people, Jimmy Carter. In 1979, Carter made his “American malaise” speech (called that even though he never used the word “malaise”) in which he asked Americans to sacrifice in order to cut back on our reliance on Mideast oil. When it quickly became apparent that Americans were in no mood for such sacrifice, Carter took direct, and miserably failed, military action in Iran. This, says Bacevich, was a departure from decades of policy in which the U.S. tried to control the Mideast through military surrogates. In Bacevich’s telling, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton expanded fitfully but incrementally the policy of asserting direct U.S. control in the Mideast, a policy that reached what he describes as its disastrous fullness under Bush II after September 11.

Bacevich accuses this and prior administrations of disguising geopolitical designs under the language of promoting freedom and democracy in the world. There are other parts to his argument, all folding into his chief gravamen, The New American Militarism, the title of the book from which the WQ article is drawn. Of course Bacevich is right that current U.S. policy has a history, and that history is closely related to our dependence on oil. Although he very seriously downplays the importance of the establishment of the state of Israel in this drama. He is surely right in saying that American presidents, when appealing for support for military action, typically accent ideological and idealistic reasons rather than geopolitical factors. One may be permitted to suggest that that is rather obvious. Bacevich takes it as an indictment of U.S. foreign policy over recent decades. His realpolitik perspective leads him to belittle the degree to which a concern for freedom drove, for instance, U.S. support for Western Europe’s resistance to the Soviet Union during the Cold War (i.e., World War III). The Cold War was not about freedom, he comes close to saying, but about geopolitical rivalry between the superpowers. The editor of WQ is right in saying that Bacevich is provocative.

Finally, however, it is not clear what difference the argument makes. One may agree that deep geopolitical and economic interests have contributed to shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, and that many mistakes have been made since FDR struck his deal with King Ibn Saud, even as one believes that Bacevich has overlooked other important factors. Yet, after his all-stops-pulled polemic against America’s misbegotten “crusade,” Bacevich ends up writing, “God forbid that the United States should fail, allowing the likes of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to decide the future of the Islamic world.” Precisely.

It is useful to point out that U.S. policy is also self-serving (an older phrase for self-serving is “the national interest”), as well as serving the interests of many others. But that hardly precludes other motivations, such as a desire to promote freedom and democracy, which is also in our interest and the interest of the world. Might all these interests have been better served by different policies over the last sixty years? Quite possibly. That, however, is to engage in counterfactual historical revisionism that is but an interesting thought experiment. Andrew Bacevich is a conservative. Wishing for a history other than the one we have been given is not ordinarily the kind of thing that conservatives do.

“Crackpot realism” is a phrase not much used since the Vietnam era, but it comes to mind in reading Bacevich’s account of our present circumstance. One need not ignore economic and geopolitical factors to be more impressed by the explanatory narratives provided by scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington who accent the cultural and religious sources of the current conflict. For instance, the murderous vision of Sayyid Qutb of Egypt (born 1906, executed 1966), founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical Islamism that gave birth to such as al-Qaeda, cannot be reduced to geopolitical or economic rivalries. Noam Chomsky may believe it, but I doubt whether Andrew Bacevich really thinks that George W. Bush’s impassioned declarations about the universal quest for freedom are but a guise for maintaining American hegemony over the world’s oil resources. To the extent that Bacevich tells uncomfortable truths about the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, that brought us to our present circumstance in the Middle East, his argument is to be welcomed. Even as one recognizes the logic of his conclusion that, however we got to where we are, we must hope that U.S. policy, shaped by both interests and ideals, will not fail.

Stifling Intellectual Inquiry

“In fact, the breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science. Once it does, it won’t be long before the American scientific community—which already has trouble finding enough young Americans to fill its graduate schools—ceases to lead the world.” That is the editorial voice of the Washington Post which, on this subject as well as most others, is temperate compared with many others in the liberal establishment.

The alarm is prompted, of course, by the efforts of school districts to teach students that evolution is a theory. That evolution is a theory is a fact, unless somebody has changed the definition of theory without notifying the makers of dictionaries. The “search for knowledge” and “the pursuit of science,” one might suggest, will suffer grievously if we no longer respect the distinction between theory and fact. To argue that skepticism about the theory of evolution is inadmissible if it is motivated by religion is simply a form of antireligious bigotry. It is a fact that many devout Christians, many of whom are engaged in the relevant sciences, subscribe to the theory of evolution. It is also a fact that some scientists who reject religion also reject evolution, or think the theory highly dubious. That is the way it is with theories.

Theories are proposed principles or narratives that are both arrived at and tested by their explanatory force relative to what are taken to be known facts. To simply equate evolutionary theory with science is a form of dogmatism that has no place in the pursuit of truth. The problems with that approach are multiplied by the fact that there are such starkly conflicting versions of what is meant by evolution. The resistance to the theory is almost inevitable when it is propounded, as it often is, in an atheistic and materialistic form. Atheism and materialism are not science but ideologies that most people of all times and places, not just “red state” Americans, deem to be false. Proponents of “intelligent design” and other approaches, who are frequently well-certified scientists, contend that their theories possess greater explanatory power.

If someone claims the theory of evolution is false because it contradicts their understanding of what the Bible says, that is not a scientific argument in the ordinary meaning of science. It is an argument from the authority of the Bible, or at least from a certain interpretation of the Bible. One may make that argument in an eminently rational way, although in a way that will not be convincing to many people. Just as the theory of evolution is not convincing to many people. That is the way it is with arguments. The proponents of intelligent design, however, are not making their argument from the authority of the Bible but from what they are persuaded is the scientific evidence. Their opponents contend that their argument is discredited because most of them are Christian believers. Turnaround being fair play, one might answer that the more aggressive proponents of evolution are discredited because they are typically ideological atheists and materialists. These are religio-philosophical disputations of a low and ad hominem sort and have no place in what is, or should be, scientific methodology.

The great question of the origin and development of life in the cosmos is endlessly fascinating. Intellectual freedom and integrity require that all pertinent evidence and lines of reasoning be taken into account in forming speculations, hypotheses, and theories regarding that great question. It is a historical fact that evolutionary theory, variously construed, has achieved a status as “the truth” among most scientists in the century past. It has also had its very eloquent dissenters, such as David Berlinski whose work has received frequent attention in these pages (see Public Square, FT May 2004). For the past decade, we have had the scientific proponents of “intelligent design” sometimes frontally challenging and at other times offering significant modifications of the theory of evolution. The defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy raise the alarm at any suggestion of intelligent design or purpose, thereby implicitly endorsing a narrowly dogmatic version of evolutionary theory.

Some school boards have very modestly suggested that students should know that evolution is not the only theory about the origin and development of life. What they want students to know is an indisputable fact. There are other theories supported by very reputable scientists, including theories of evolution other than the established version to which students are now bullied into giving their assent. On any question, the rational and scientific course is to take into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals. We can know that the quasi-religious establishment of a narrow evolutionary theory as dogma is in deep trouble when its defenders demand that alternative ideas must not be discussed or even mentioned in the classroom. Students, school boards, and thoughtful citizens are in fully justified rebellion against this attempted stifling of intellectual inquiry.

While We’re At It

• Asked to summarize his conservative philosophy, former editor Jim Nuechterlein would respond, “Change is bad.” In fact, his philosophy is considerably more interesting than that, but you have to begin somewhere. As it happens, there are a number of changes in our shop and I am confident the result will be very good. Although we will very much miss Damon Linker. He joined us as associate editor in 2001 and succeeded Jim as editor in 2004. He is resigning to write a book about the people involved with FT and their effort to advance a vibrant religious presence in the public square. Damon has been a conscientious, loyal, and exceedingly competent colleague, and I will miss him. Returning to FT as editor is Joseph Bottum, who was our associate editor from 1995-97 before he left to preside brilliantly over the back of the book at the Weekly Standard. Joseph, Lorena, and their daughter Faith are settling back into New York, and I am eagerly looking forward to what I trust will be our long-term collaboration. A real loss is John Gray, who was associate editor only one year. He was, in addition to other virtues, a great deal of fun to have around. Family responsibilities compelled him to decide, most reluctantly, that he needed to return to California. Succeeding him is Matthew Boudway, who has been our managing editor and who, as associate editor, will also have primary responsibility for books. Replacing (if that is possible) Matthew as managing editor is Erik Ross who has been an exceedingly efficient editorial assistant. Taking over from Joseph Bottum as poetry editor is Anthony Lombardy, a widely published poet who has served as coeditor of the Tennessee Quarterly and divides his time between Belmont University and the family farm in Florida, where they grow fern and citrus fruit. Kristen Linton, daughter of Michael Linton who writes for us on music and culture, is currently serving as editorial assistant, and she will be succeeded in May by John Rose, the younger brother of Matthew Rose, who was with us for two years as editorial assistant. John and Matthew Rose, as well as former editorial assistant Vincent Druding (who is now studying for the priesthood), are all from Wabash College, Indiana. It seems that staff from Wabash is becoming something like a tradition. Jim Nuechterlein is wrong about change being bad. Although I suppose the above changes are marked more by continuity than by discontinuity. I count it a great blessing that, since launching FT in 1990, there has been remarkable cooperation and cordiality among the staff, and I have every reason to believe that will continue to be the case. If not. . . . Well, I don’t even want to think about it.

• Jewish and Christian “progressive faith leaders,” as they are called by the newsletter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, met for a two-day session in Washington to evaluate the wreckage of their cause. The “moral values” factor in last November’s election, they recognized, was a disaster. The meeting was sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and resulted, it says here, in a major shift of strategy. The faith leaders are going to stop calling themselves progressives. From now on they are prophets. “‘Progressive’ sounds like it’s an ideological position with values attached,” said the Rev. James Forbes of New York’s Riverside Church. Said Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, “We sound like secularists when we need to sound like the prophetic religious leaders we are.” In the biblical tradition, it will be remembered, prophets do not presume to appoint themselves but are called by God and speak on His behalf. The conclusion of the Washington strategy meeting, it would seem, is that progressives need to be more morally presumptuous.

• The end of the Pius wars? The book of that title by Joseph Bottum and David Dalin gives us reason to hope so (see While We’re At It, FT February), but that doesn’t mean some folk won’t keep trying. Here is a New York Times story giving credence to the claim that Pius XII sent a letter to Angelo Roncalli, papal nuncio in France and later Pope John XXIII, instructing him to raise obstacles to Jewish children being returned to their parents. These were children whom Catholics had rescued from the Holocaust. The letter is unsigned, not on papal stationery, and is written in French, although the Holy See’s communications with Roncalli are all in Italian. There is no mention of such a communication in Roncalli’s exhaustive journals and diaries. Plus, as the Times admits, nobody knows who “discovered” the document. And there are on record explicit and undisputed instructions by Pius XII that such children should be returned to their Jewish parents. In short, the document is almost certainly a fraud. That will not stop the inveterate enemies of Pius XII from citing it. Perhaps they will employ the locution of the Times with respect to Dan Rather’s notorious use of fake documents in attacking George W. Bush’s national guard service. As the Times memorably said, the documents were “fake but accurate.” In this case, accurate means useful in advancing your purposes.

• “Oh, not that old line again.” Such is the frequent response when the claim is made that the demolition of the marriage-based family really began with the widespread acceptance of artificial contraception and its separation of sex from procreation. Now, however, “that old line” is getting new and more respectful attention. Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands has been receiving well-deserved praise (see review, FT March). The author is W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, and he connects his argument to the question of contraception in an article in the ecumenical magazine Touchstone, “The Facts of Life and Marriage: Social Science and the Vindication of Christian Moral Teaching.” He notes the well-orchestrated opposition to Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on human sexuality, Humanae Vitae, and contends that current scholarship debunks the opponents and underscores the prescience of the Pope in foreseeing the consequences of contraception. From the Bible through the Didache and the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers, Christians were unanimous in affirming the integral relationship between love, sex, and openness to new life. The first break in the tradition came with the approval of contraception by the Church of England in 1930. All these years later, Wilcox is encouraged by a changing scholarly consensus on marriage and family, but also by a rethinking of contraception among Christians. “There is a new openness among Evangelical Protestant scholars and leaders to the truth and wisdom of the ancient Christian teaching against contraception. Among others, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary professor Harold O. J. Brown, and Evangelical theologian J. I. Packer have raised serious concerns about the moral permissibility and social consequences of contraception.” He quotes Mohler who wrote in these pages: “Thirty years of sad experience demonstrate that Humanae Vitae [correctly] sounded the alarm, warning of a contraceptive mentality that would set loose immeasurable evil as modern birth control methods allowed seemingly risk-free sex outside the integrity of the marital bond. At the same time, it allowed married couples to completely sever the sex act from procreation, and God’s design for the marital bond. . . . Standing against the spirit of the age, evangelicals and Roman Catholics must affirm that children are God’s good gift and blessings to the marital bond. Further, we must affirm that marriage falls short of God’s design when husband and wife are not open to the gift and stewardship of children.” The radical destabilizing of sexual morality in recent decades, Wilcox notes, has had devastating consequences for the poor, for whom all of life, including family life, is precarious. This, he says, is the moment for Christian scholars and leaders of all kinds to take the lead in proposing a better way. “We must make it crystal clear that the church’s commitment to the poor requires nothing less than a vigorous proclamation of the church’s true and beautiful teaching about sex and marriage. In other words, we must make it clear that the preferential option for the poor begins in the home.”

• Yes, I saw the Time magazine cover story on “The Twenty-Five Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” Along with Senator Rick Santorum, another Catholic, I’m not sure what we were doing in that impressive company. (The story did note that we are Catholics.) It is not even a flirtation with false modesty to say that the story greatly exaggerates my influence. When The Naked Public Square appeared, Clare Boothe Luce, the widow of Henry Luce, sent multiple copies to friends and told me that, “if only Harry were alive,” she would have arranged for me to be on the cover of Time the way she had arranged it for Father John Courtney Murray. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked that the cover of Time is “the most coveted stained glass window of the modern world.” That was a very long time ago. But it’s nice to have made it at last, even if I did have to share space with twenty-four others. Some while back U.S. News and World Report did a survey in which I was listed as one of “the thirty-two most influential intellectuals in America.” The number thirty-two gave the judgment a tone of careful deliberation. Not twenty-five, not fifty, but thirty-two. That survey is sometimes mentioned when I am introduced on public occasions. To which I usually respond, “How would they know?” Popular magazines are given to pieces on the “top” figures in this, that, or another connection. FT doesn’t do that sort of thing, which is maybe one reason it is not so very popular. Although we did publish that book, The Second One Thousand Years, in which we proposed representative figures for each of the centuries of the millennium past. That at least has the merit of historical perspective not generally available to newsweeklies.

• In that Time magazine cover story it was said, “Conservative churches mobilized as never before and helped reelect a president they see as one of their own. Now they expect him to deliver for them.” Charles Colson, no stranger to the game of politics, dissents. He asks whether President Bush “owes us,” and answers with a ringing No. Colson writes, “Almost every time the Church has achieved earthly power, it has managed to shoot itself in the foot.” And there are deeper considerations: “And remember, Christians are just as susceptible to the seduction of worldly power as anyone else. The editors of Time may think religious voters ought to be lining up for our share of the spoils, but Christians know we should instead be falling on our knees, asking God to keep us humble. We ought to remember that the job of the Church is to bring biblical truth to bear in society, to win people to Christ, and to promote righteousness and justice. We should remember, as well, that throughout history, Christians have made the greatest inroads in society when we traveled, not among the politically powerful, but among the poor and the powerless. Think of the Wesleyan revivals or of Wilberforce and his reformation of morals in England.” The question, says Colson, is not what Bush “owes us” but what we owe God. A jaundiced observer might say that Colson is being coy: in grabbing for power it is wise not to be perceived as grabbing for power. But those who might say that do not know Chuck Colson. I have been with him in meetings when religious leaders started talking about how they could punish uncooperative politicians at the ballot box. Colson immediately and firmly calls them to order, reminding them that the role of Christian leaders is to bear faithful and persuasive witness. His Prison Fellowship, a worldwide ministry to prisoners and their families, exemplifies the concern for “the poor and the powerless.” Moreover—and this is evident also in his several books—Colson has a powerful concern for the integrity of the Church. He well remembers that the corruption of the mainline/oldline liberal churches was intimately connected with their confusion of the gospel of Jesus Christ with their political agendas. The New York Times had a sympathetic story the other day on liberal-left figures such as Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Bob Edgar of the National Council of Churches who, it said, are trying to organize a political counterforce to “the religious right.” The reporter wrote that “liberals have historically been uneasy about mixing religion and politics.” Now that is coy. Unless, of course, the reporter was born yesterday, as Chuck Colson was not.

• Christianity Today, the mainline evangelical magazine, was generally pleased with the Time story on evangelical leaders, noting that “this is a group that’s broader than you think.” It is allowed that CT‘s list of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals “would surely be somewhat different.” Some might question the presence of the two Catholics but Time “offers solid argument for including both.” Evangelicals, on the other hand, might wonder about the inclusion of two or three “evangelicals” who are doubtfully evangelical. There are those who challenge, for instance, the evangelical credentials of Brian McLaren, leader of the “emerging church” movement. But, all in all, the Time portrayal “is the evangelical movement understood in its historical context.” “Let’s be thankful that evangelicalism and its diverse leadership are becoming better known and better understood by the larger culture.” The larger culture? Depending upon how one defines evangelical, evangelicals are one quarter to one third of the American population. After the