Americanism

David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion . New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95.

America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough.

For many, both within the U.S. and outside, America is a thoroughly religious ideal. It is, Gelernter says, the fourth of the great Western religions. It has its Creed, its sacred history, its saints, its founders and prophets, its mission. America is something to be believed.

Americanism or the American Religion has two components. One is what Gelernter provocatively calls “American Zionism,” the belief that Americans are a new chosen people and their land a new promised land. The other is the American “Creed” of liberty, equality, and democracy.

Both of these, Gelernter says, are rooted in the Bible. Americanism is a biblical religion. Puritans like John Winthrop gave Americanism its initial shape, and later prophets like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan gave Americanism a global mission without abandoning its biblical roots.

Though Gelernter says that Americanism is an essay in “folk philosophy” rather than an historical study, the historical portions of the book are the strongest. Rightly and thoroughly challenging secular accounts of America’s founding, he demonstrates that the Bible was and remains a constant presence in American political and cultural life. America is indeed a “biblical republic.”

Gelernter is far less convincing when he assures religious readers that Americanism is not “a blasphemous replacement for Christianity or Judaism.” What else can we say about a faith that does not require belief in God, “so long as you believe in man”? Wasn’t that the original blasphemy?