All civilizations, like all individuals, have flaws. The Christian civilization of Church and empire had flaws. America, which began as a refuge from the religious wars of Europe, has its flaws. Just as individuals can flourish despite their flaws, so can civilizations, if they look at their flaws squarely and work to mitigate them. Jews have flourished for 3,500 years, and heaven knows we have our flaws, as Moses and the prophets never ceased to remind us. The American republic can flourish despite its flaws.
Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, wrote of the Volksgeist, or national spirit, whose particularity “expresses every aspect of its consciousness and will—the whole cycle of its realization. Its religion, its polity, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp.” He thought that each nation’s Volksgeist contributed in its idiosyncratic way to the World Spirit, before passing its best-used-by date—a notion I find unconvincing. Contrary to Hegel, Jews do not want to be sublated into some World Spirit. Nor would the loss of our particularity be of benefit to other peoples. The British sing teary-eyed at the Proms of rebuilding Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, not of Alfred the Great or King Hal at Agincourt. Until recently, Italy’s de facto national hymn was Verdi’s chorus “Va Pensiero,” adapted from the exiles’ longing for Jerusalem in Psalm 137. Following St. Isidore of Seville’s mission to the Visigoths and St. Gregory of Tours’s mission to the Merovingians in the sixth century, the Catholic Church upheld the Davidic Kingdom as the model for Western polity after the collapse of Roman Empire. And, of course, the Pilgrim Fathers envisioned a Mission in the Wilderness and a new City on a Hill in America.
How do Jews view this emulation of Israel? The Orthodox rabbi Meir Soloveichik, in his 2020 Erasmus Lecture, “Lincoln’s Almost Chosen People,” celebrated “the miraculous nature of the Founding” and Lincoln’s “recognition that America bears a mission not for itself alone—a mission greater than independence, which makes Americans an ‘almost chosen people.’” But “almost chosen” is a lot like “almost pregnant.” Israel’s Exodus from Egypt was miraculous; America’s founding was merely heroic. Rabbi Soloveichik missed the irony in Lincoln’s bon mot. Americans have a unique Volksgeist with unique strengths, but also weaknesses. If we confront those weaknesses, we can prevent them from undermining our virtues. The difference between “chosen” and “almost chosen” is a good place to start.
What is America’s Volksgeist? Are we the heirs of the English tradition of individual liberty and representative government, as Russell Kirk argued? Are we a “propositional nation,” as John Courtney Murray dubbed the liberal understanding of America, a Lockean association of rational actors by mutual assent?
Are we rather “a nation with the soul of the Church,” aspiring to the Puritan vision of a new Mission in the Wilderness and a new City on a Hill? The answer is “Yes.” We are all of them, but not entirely any of them.
A proposition will not motivate a revolution. The Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor out of passion, not intellectual assent. The vision of a new City on a Hill and a new Mission in the Wilderness, a manifestation of religious faith, inspired the personal sacrifice of the Founders. No other group of property-owners, free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion, ever took up arms in this way. And four generations later, nearly half a million Northerners died to end slavery.
Reducing America to a proposition implies that any nation can adopt this proposition, irrespective of its cultural heritage. That conceit, the core idea of neoconservatism, informed America’s baleful attempt to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Culture must be taken into account. But what is culture? Russell Kirk, the great advocate of the cultural interpretation of America, referred to T. S. Eliot’s definition:
The term culture . . . includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.
In the American context, this sort of enumeration is a reduction to absurdity, like the old jingle, “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.” American culture, though, is easy to identify: Uniquely among the cultures of the world, it is monothematic. It is obsessed with the individual’s journey to redemption, but that is a journey that can never be completed. The antinomian Protestantism of its Puritan founders became a meme in our popular literature. From Huckleberry Finn to William Munny, every protagonist of our fiction and cinema is a first cousin of John Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim, with an existential difference: The American pilgrim can never reach the Heavenly City.
Hemingway rightly said that “all modern American literature comes” from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Twain gave us the most fecund image in American literature: the two runaways Huck and Jim, on a raft, floating down the great river that bisects our nation. The standard criticism misses the obvious. Lionel Trilling obtusely described Huck as a “servant of the river-god.” Harold Bloom wondered whether Huck was a “wholly secular being” or an “American Orphic.”
Twain tells us directly that Huck is a successor to Christian in John Bunyan’s allegory, as is well documented by Liam Purdon in a 2018 article in the Mark Twain Journal. When Huck is taken in by the Grangerford family, he finds two books: “One was a big family Bible, full of pictures. One was ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.” Unlike Bunyan’s Christian, the American pilgrim can never complete his journey; the City on a Hill glimmers in the distance like the point of perspective at infinity but is not accessible by the roads traveled in terrestrial politics. A great gulf is fixed between the British, who sing of rebuilding Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land, and the Americans, who know that the Heavenly City is unattainable by earthly pathways. All the European nations at some point in their history arrogated the Election of Israel to their own ethnicity. As a multi-ethnic nation, America resists this form of national megalomania; we are “almost Chosen” but never elected. Our hero is not a successor to the Davidic Kingdom but a poor wayfaring stranger on a lone journey to salvation.
America’s journey is the Christian pilgrimage without an earthly terminus. There is only one possible conclusion to Huck’s adventure. His journey must resume, as he announces in the book’s last line: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Huck’s successors are the cowboy who rids the town of evildoers and then rides off into the sunset, the gunslinger with a heart of gold, the private detective who avenges wrongdoing and then fades into the urban nightscape, the loner with authority problems: Natty Bumppo, the Continental Op, Shane, Dirty Harry—poor wayfaring strangers, every one.
The nations of the Old World have their national histories, and prior to those, their national legends. By contrast, we have adopted as our national story the history of Israel, in the same way that evangelical Christians identify the soul’s journey to salvation with the journey of the Children of Israel to the Promised Land. But this is the Israel of Christian imagination, not the concrete Israel that embeds the past in the present and evokes the World to Come in this world through all-embracing religious practice.
The mitzvot transport the past into the present. When we hear the Pentateuch read in synagogue in an annual cycle, we stand before Mount Sinai once again. When we re-enact the midnight hour of the Exodus at Passover, each of us is required to consider that we personally left Egypt. The two Temples were destroyed, but the Shabbat table of every Jewish family preserves the Temple altar, and the candles we light at Hanukkah preserve the light of the Temple’s menorah. We believe in the World to Come, but as our modern sage Chaim of Volozhin wrote, every Jew builds his own World to Come in this world. The tools and skills required for this construction are acquired by a lifetime of learning. Americans can adopt Jewish history as a metaphor, but they cannot reproduce the Jewish reconstruction of sacred time.
Confusing the Earthly City with the Heavenly City is our national susceptibility. This flaw in our character has spawned the Social Gospel, progressivism, and the woke parody of Puritanism. We want our spiritual journey to have a terrestrial terminus. That is both un-American and un-Christian. Contrast it with Franz Rosenzweig’s characterization of Christianity as a never-ending journey, an “eternal path.”
It is Christianity that has made the present into an epoch. The past is now simply the time before Christ’s birth. . . . Time has become a single path, but a path whose beginning and end lie beyond time and therefore an eternal path. By contrast, on those paths that lead from one time to another time, one only sees another section of the road. Because beginning and end are equally near on the eternal path, and equally displaced just as is time itself, because every point is a midpoint.
Ethnic idolatry is the characteristic flaw of Old World Christianity. From the founding of the Visigothic and Merovingian kingdoms in the sixth century to the Thirty Years’ War, the European monarchies styled themselves successors to the Davidic kingdom and God’s representatives on earth. The ethnocentric nations of Europe stood in contrast to the concept of Christians as a new nationality. As the Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac wrote:
To St. Paul the Church is the People of the New Covenant. Israel according to the Spirit takes the place of Israel according to the flesh; but it is not a collection of many individuals, it is still a nation albeit recruited now from the ends of the earth, “the tribe of Christians,” says Eusebius, for instance, “the race of those who honor God.”
“Precisely through Christianity the idea of Election has gone out amongst the individual nations, and along with it a concomitant claim upon eternity,” in Rosenzweig’s words. The Gentiles of the Old World longed for eternal life in their own skin. America is truer to the Christian concept of “a tribe of Christians” (Eusebius), a new people “recruited now from the end of the earth.” The ruin of European Christianity was to idolatrize ethnicity. American idolatry consists of substituting the Earthly City for the Heavenly City.
America has no memory of an existence before its Christian founding. We created a Christian memory by appropriating the history of Israel. The Mission in the Wilderness became the precedent for two new Covenants: the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of God-given rights; and the Constitution, with its specification of the practices of a nation that embodies those rights. These covenants are the wellspring of American culture, what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone.”
The Gentiles of the Old World recall the god-infested world of pre-history, the unchanging sameness of human existence before the advent of Christianity. The pre-history of European cultures has no inherent metric of time, and their chronicles have archetypes but not characters. Their time is the “once upon a time” of fairy tales.
The peoples of the Old World, by contrast, recall a time before Christianity, the god-infested world of paganism. This world has archetypes, but not characters. Old World cultures are fixed in the past; their time is “once upon a time,” the undifferentiated time of legend. The span of a day, a year, or a lifetime blends together. A traveler passes an enchanted castle and joins a feast, but the seven days of his sojourn turn out to be seven years.
Time itself changes in the modern world. America’s first writer of note, Washington Irving, repurposed the ancient tale to instantiate the novus ordo seclorum of the American republic. Rip falls asleep in the Old World of timeless legend, and awakens in the new time of revolutionary America. The undifferentiated “once upon a time” of the pre-Christian past dissolves in the new light of day. Irving’s brilliant conceit has a distinctly Jewish precedent. As Joseph Soloveitchik observed, “The first commandment [Israel] was given in Egypt which signaled the commencement of their liberation was to mark time (Exod. 12:1).” Only free people can envision and act to achieve their future.
In summary, there is a close analogy between Christian conversion and naturalization as an American. Assimilating immigrants is our national genius. Germans will say of a resident who acquires citizenship that “he has a German passport.” A German who takes the oath of citizenship in the United States, by contrast, is a real American, as good as any other. We could not do this if America had only propositional content and no spiritual purpose. It is a secular construct inspired by spiritual striving, but not yet—indeed never—the realization of that spiritual goal. It is a journey that can never end, but like Huck’s, only begin again.
Sanctification of ethnicity can only end in tragedy. Rosenzweig wrote that
the love of the peoples for their own ethnicity is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death . . . They foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.
That is why the tragic heroes of the Old World, from Oedipus and Antigone to Hamlet and Wallenstein, act out the tragic fates of their peoples. Rather than wait for the tragic denouement, the American lights out for the territory. That helps explain why Americans never mastered tragedy as a literary form. Eugene O’Neill, our most self-conscious tragedian, produced plays that aspire to tragedy but betray the structure of a situation comedy. The Iceman Cometh is Cheers with murder and suicide, and A Long Day’s Journey into Night is Leave It to Beaver with addiction and tuberculosis instead of a window broken by a baseball.
America has no ethnicity and therefore no fear of extinction. We look forward to the journey rather than backward to our roots. Our journey is the Christian journey to the Promised Land, which is bound up with the journey to America: the Pilgrims’ journey to New England, the flight of slaves to the free North, the westward migration of the landless. It is not the journey of God’s people to the Promised Land, but the Pilgrim’s Progress, the journey of the individual soul to redemption.
America’s inner life relives the history of Israel. That is an imaginative substitute for the absence of a pre-history to the Founding, but not a fully successful one. There is no Judaism of the imagination; Jewish practice is rooted in the minutiae of daily life. The Jewish past and future are the stuff not of faith and imagination, but of concrete actions. The American adoption of the history of Israel as its inner story has this great advantage, that it can be extended to the many nationalities who come to these shores and make them Americans by adoption, as happens in no other nation. We go terribly wrong when we confuse the motivations of the few individuals who chose to leave their nations behind in order to become Americans with the aspirations of the myriads who remained behind.
The alternative model of Christian polity, universal Catholic empire, ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, although the Holy Roman Empire did not formally dissolve until 1806 and a scrap of it remained in place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918. It could not reconcile the competing loyalties of particular nation and universal Church. Whether it might have been otherwise is a question for counterfactual speculation, long since moot. America sought not to order the nations under a single Church, but to take individuals out of the nations. Because America is the most Christian of all nations, it must separate Church and state. No denomination of Christianity dare assert itself as an official religion. What we can agree on is a secular creed. It doesn’t matter whether we adopt as our founding philosophy the social contract of John Locke or Hegel’s dialectic of family, civil society, and state. Religion must belong to the sphere of individual conscience. Our public religion is a general commitment to one nation under God, even if we conceive of God in different ways. We are a creedal nation—a nation defined by specific secular laws and procedures—precisely because we are a religious nation of a peculiar kind.
Every Volksgeist has its strengths and weaknesses. Deep tradition and high culture are the blessings of the old European nations. A Frenchman or German doesn’t wonder who he is; whatever form of government rules him and whatever circumstances befall him, he is German or French. We Americans, by contrast, are nothing and nobody without the republic and the Constitution that summoned us from a hundred nations and made many into one. With every blessing comes a curse: The European nations, without exception, at some point in their history decided that they were God’s instrument on earth, a new chosen people, a new Davidic kingdom, with the privilege of crushing their neighbors. The great Franco-Spanish conflict of the seventeenth-century religious wars and the world wars of the twentieth century all arose from this tragic flaw.
We Americans, a nation without ethnicity, are spared this flaw but susceptible to another: We confuse the Heavenly City with our worldly circumstances, and in our messianic delusion, attempt to remake the rest of the world in our image. Natural law and natural rights are not the soul of the American polity; they are merely the lowest common denominator, upon which the adherents of all faiths can agree. The “Lockean” side of the American polity is the plumbing, not the foundation. What makes us Americans is not the mechanisms of Madison’s Constitution, but Chesterton’s observation that we are a nation with the soul of a church—not a specific church, to be sure, but the church that beckons to us from the Heavenly City at the vanishing point of perspective. American pluralism was a boon to Catholics and Jews, as a Protestant state church on the British model would not have been. Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1829, and Jews not until 1858.
There’s a joke about the Maine farmer who tells a tourist seeking directions to Kennebunkport, “You can’t get there from here.” No path leads to the Heavenly City from our present circumstances, and in our impatience and petulance, we confuse the mechanics of civil society with the plan of the Heavenly City. That is our chronic weakness and susceptibility, the insoluble problem of our national makeup, the inherent debility of our Volksgeist. It is not a cause for shame or self-accusation. Just as the flaws of individual humans are manageable if we acknowledge them, our national weakness need not damage us, provided we understand it.
No discourse on a Jewish vantage point would be complete without a Jewish joke, so here is a very old one: An old-country rabbi adjudicates a commercial dispute. He listens to the plaintiff and declares, “You’re right!” The defendant remonstrates and presents his case, and the rabbi says, “You’re right!” The rabbi’s wife is listening and objects, “They can’t both be right.” Says the rabbi, “You’re right, too!”
Hegel in his Philosophy of Right envisioned a dialectical interplay between Being as embodied in family and tradition, Rationality as expressed in the free marketplace of civil society, and Reason as manifest in the state. Consider this riposte from Joseph Soloveitchik:
Judaic dialectic, unlike the Hegelian, is irreconcilable and hence interminable. Judaism accepted a dialectic, consisting only of thesis and antithesis. The third Hegelian stage, that of reconciliation, is missing. The conflict is final, almost absolute. Only God knows how to reconcile; we do not. Complete reconciliation is an eschatological vision.
What the Jewish perspective can offer Americans is this insight: Patrick Deneen is right, and so is Daniel Mahoney. The Madisonian liberals are right, and so are the religious integralists. We cannot resolve the eschatological gulf between the earthly and heavenly cities through any possible arrangement of the American polity. But we can act in imitatio Dei and build an earthly city informed by the heavenly vision, living as best we can with our perplexities.
