Dangers of Americanism

By Daniel Larison • September 10, 2010, 11:05 AM

I think the demagoguing of Park51 is a direct result of the GOP’s turn toward Christianism.

Long-time readers know that I disagree completely with Andrew’s notion of “Christianism” and especially with the idea that Chistian “fundamentalism” is at the root of the problems of the modern right. To the extent that “theocons” even exist, they have not been all that influential within the GOP, and most of the worst mistakes and errors Republicans and mainstream conservatives have made are the products of allowing secular ideological commitments to trump the obligations of the religions they claim to follow. If there is a religion, or pseudo-religion, that has warped American conservatism, it is Gelernter’s religion of Americanism or the nationalism that John Lukacs said had replaced or substituted for the religion of many American conservatives.

Indeed, as some serious religious conservatives have objected in the wake of the Beck rally, the problem is not that of “nationalist Christianity,” but simply a national civil religion that overwhelms and eradicates whatever might be distinctively or recognizably Christian. The impulse to treat the site of a terrorist atrocity as sacred space is not something derived from Christianity, but comes from the desire to make the place into a national symbol and to reinforce a feeling of national victimhood. The GOP hasn’t turned towards Christianism. The rise of Beck as a major figure on the right would be inexplicable if this were happening. Hostility to Park51 has entirely different sources. These are ultimately just as hostile to tradionalist Christianity, because any real religion stands as a rebuke and a threat to the cult of self-pity and self-congratulation that has been on display this summer.

18 Responses to Dangers of Americanism

Charlie says:

September 10, 2010 at 11:48 am

Sullivan should know that one need not be a “Christianist” to indulge in demagoguery, war-mongering and nationalist posturing when it comes to Islam and US foreign policy. He did those things for years and was never a “Christianist” in the way he defines that term.

Clearly Sullivan, even in the autumn of 2001, would never have countenanced a Koran-burning. But I can certainly imagine him, in the period between September 11 2001 and his turn against the Iraq war in early 2004, objecting in strong terms to the construction of an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero. He’s a sentimentalist at heart, and appeals to the “sacred” nature of Ground Zero and its environs are right up his alley.

I can also quite easily imagine an earlier iteration of Andrew Sullivan making, with great zeal, the kinds of “Person A knows Person B, and Person B does business with Person C, and Person C called a Hezbollah sub-commander a freedom fighter” guilt-by-association arguments that Park51′s critics are using now. His politics may have changed radically, but his temperament has not–that weakness for conspiratorial thinking and wild leaps of logic and rhetoric are why the newly anti-war and anti-GOP Sullivan of 2008 became so obsessed with the possibility that Palin had fabricated her recent pregnancy.

His zeal to blame “Christianists” for the ill-feeling and anger directed against Park51 seems like an evasion of the intellectual and moral responsibility borne by Sullivan and those who thought like him in 2001-2004. I include myself in that.

In 2001 Sullivan wrote an essay called “This Is a Religious War.” I think it’s useful to revisit the last four paragraphs:

http://tinyurl.com/5buj4o

It’s important to take note of the mindset on display in the last passages of that essay. Sullivan’s impulse to expand the conflict to “epic” proportions, to compare bin Ladinism to Nazism and Communism, to argue that our security demanded that we take sides in intra-Islamic debates about how that religion should be interpreted and practiced–these are all symptoms of the mindset that would lead him and others to lobby so fiercely for the war in Iraq.

Many religious people agreed with him, but the mindset itself has no particular “religious” character. It seems much more like a more modern version of secular colonialism and imperialism–we in the West, having expanded our influence into parts of the world we don’t understand, cannot retreat and must therefore categorize the natives, civilize them, and accommodate them to our worldview and our institutions.

I remember, after Sullivan had supposedly turned against the war and was advocating the withdrawal of American troops, reading a post where he argued that we should leave Iraq so the inevitable bloody civil war within Islam could be fought. This, he argued, was necessary for the development of Muslim civilization. That argument made an impression on me because it demonstrated that Sullivan’s bloody-mindedness, his conviction that it’s acceptable to sit in Adams-Morgan or Provincetown and opine about the salutary effects of chaos and violence in distant parts of the world, were constants that would survive any possible “change” in his superficial political opinions.

Having advocated that the United States fight a religious war, and having advocated changing the world through the judicious application of violence, Sullivan can’t simply turn around and blame others for how things have spun out of control. Iraq is one example of how the advocacy of violence can have consequences not intended by the advocate. The rise of hostility towards Islam and Muslims is another example. Clearly Sullivan would never condone these things, that’s the whole point. He should try looking in the mirror the next time he wonders how things got so crazy in this country.
rhampton7 says:

September 10, 2010 at 12:19 pm

“The impulse to treat the site of a terrorist atrocity as sacred space is not something derived from Christianity, but comes from the desire to make the place into a national symbol and to reinforce a feeling of national victimhood.”

Well said
dlcarltn says:

September 10, 2010 at 1:38 pm

Good Presbyterian that I am, I’d love to agree with you, but Sully has a point. Yes, this is basically nation-worship–but also underlying it is the widespread notion that the nation and Christianity are one and the same. Whatever the founding elites thought, that identification was present from the beginning, and was assiduously promoted by the Protestant clergy and then by the evangelicals for their own purposes. It’s altered a bit [Judaism is included now, as a junior partner of convenience], and theologically it’s weakened considerably, as Beck’s role illustrates. But the dominant strain of Christianity in this country–evangelicalism–has always privileged experience over theology–hence its vulnerability to therapeutic language and (in Beck’s case) simple weepiness. That these Christians are vulnerable to con artists doesn’t refute their faith–it illustrates it. And if the Christian role isn’t all that evident in the New York mosque controversy [It is New York, after all], you’d better believe it’s dominant in, say, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It’s not all that’s going on; ever since the end of the Cold War many Americans have been hungry for a global enemy to replace the communists, and the underground literature detailing a vast Islamic conspiracy (which has basically been flying under the radar of the elites) seems to fit that bill. But the desire to turn the struggle against Al-Qaeda into a holy war against Islam feeds on a perception of religious difference and, indeed, competition that has no clear place in a purely secular understanding of American nationhood. It requires a confusion of nation and Christian faith–and the fact that the confusion deeply corrupts both doesn’t change that.
ronbeas says:

September 10, 2010 at 2:04 pm

The Communism of the old Soviet Union was functionally a “religion.” The same is true of Democracy and The United States. If you read the notes and correspondence of those who authored the US Constitution you find they considered it to be a flawed and temporary document. Today it is a considered sacred document and much like the Bible itself is interpreted in a way to reinforce preconceived ideology.
Jim Dooley says:

September 10, 2010 at 2:55 pm

Christianist??? What the devil is a Christianist other than somebody Sullivan doesn’t like. And this from a guy who used to carry an Orwell quote on his banner. The man is an hysteric, who, so far as I am aware, has never really gotten anything right on the first time out. His obsession with the maternity of the Palin kid was embarrasing to watch, so I stopped watching.
conradg says:

September 10, 2010 at 10:56 pm

Trying to separate this anti-muslim American exceptionalism from the peculiarly American form of Christianity is a failed gambit. Yes, in the abstract we can say that worshiping the American state is not Christianity and feel theologically correct about it, but in actual practice the American Christian experience goes hand in hand with American exceptionalism, American militarism, American expansionism, and American global hegemonism.

No, it’s of course not the same as Daniel’s form of Orthodox Christianity, but that’s never been the dominant form of Christianity in America anyway. American Christianity has always had this element of “manifest destiny” in it that sees God as guiding and annointing us as a modern chosen people. And today we do indeed have a great many examples of the most prominent boosters of American exceptionalism melding this with Christian exceptionalism, because they two have always gone hand in hand. And suggesting that Beck is not a Christian melding God with the American State is simply absurd. Yes, he’s a mormon, but in his eyes certainly that is a form of Christianity, and it is perfectly compatible with the rest of those who feel that America is a Christian nation with a special destiny and role given to it by God.

To pretend that all this is just in the fevered imagination of Andrew Sullivan is to hide one’s head in the sand and refuse to look at the relationship between Christianity and American exceptionalism from its very beginnings.
Randal says:

September 11, 2010 at 2:13 am

American Christianity in general conflated with the attitudes of the most extreme and loudest-mouthed, and then demonised? How awful! Millions of muslims will feel your pain, I’m sure……

Anyway, both extremist pseudo-Christianity and outspoken US nationalism are excellent recruiting sergeants for anti-Americanism, and the world desperately needs a lot more, and more virulent, anti-Americanism if we are ever to stop the US continuing to do the murderous damage around the world it’s been doing for generations.

The truth is anti-American, and the problem is not US Republicans or US Democrats, but US power.
kent says:

September 11, 2010 at 7:09 am

@ Jim Dooley: A ‘Christianist’, for Sully, is someone who takes Christianity to be politically relevant and not confined to the religious sphere. That’s what he says he means and I take him at his word. (So Martin Luther King was a Christianist, and Gandhi was a Hinduist.) All of the politically relevant Christianists of today are on the right, so the term has become a sledgehammer with which to bash (many on) the right.
Ben says:

September 11, 2010 at 7:10 am

I don’t like the word Christianist either. It’s needlessly provocative.

I’m not old enough to remember George Romney, but I’ve read that his Mormonism wasn’t even an issue when he ran for President. I wonder if that would be true in today’s GOP if Mitt runs again? It was sort of an issue in 2008, but it didn’t seem to be his main hurdle to the nomination.
Charlie says:

September 11, 2010 at 10:50 am

To pretend that all this is just in the fevered imagination of Andrew Sullivan is to hide one’s head in the sand and refuse to look at the relationship between Christianity and American exceptionalism from its very beginnings.

You may be correct that American religiosity has significantly influenced American government and American foreign policy. Personally I don’t have the knowledge either of American religious history or American political history to have an opinion about that.

Having looked at the recent history of US foreign policy and the Middle East, though, I think blaming US foreign policy on American religiosity gets it backwards. All of the American policies that have inflamed anti-American sentiment in the Middle East (US support for corrupt and brutal regimes, sanctions on and then the invasion of Iraq, etc.) have had secular and not religious motivations (i.e., American domination of an economically and strategically valuable region). Even support for Israel, which DOES have a very religious component for many Americans, is a policy that is popular among mainstream American elites pretty much regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof.

So are things like this Koran burning or the Park51 protests evidence of a religiosity that drives bellicose American policies? Or is it just evidence that, if you have a bellicose foreign policy, and you constantly tell the public that intra-Islamic disputes over the nature of that religion should be a central concern of US foreign policy and the American public, and that Americans killed by Islamists are dying because we haven’t yet convinced enough Muslims to adopt a correct interpretation of their own religion, you’ll inevitably (and, possibly, intentionally) inflame whatever nationalism or religious chauvinism happens to exist among some Americans?
conradg says:

September 11, 2010 at 3:35 pm

Chicken and egg arguments can drive one nuts. I’m not sure which comes first, but they definitely go together. So you can’t sanely disentagle them. It’s certainly true that some will manipulate religiousity in the pursuit of certain political goals, but that only ties the two together, it doesn’t allow one to separate them. One can argue that the neocons merely manipulated GWB and much of the country into invading Iraq using religious arguments they didn’t actually believe in, but it doesn’t change the fact that religious arguments were a big part of the equation. GWB still believed that God had put him into the White House at this time to fulfill this aspect of our country’s manifest destiny, and so did millions of those who voted for him.

This belief in our country’s God-given manifest destiny is not the defining characteristic of all Christians in our country, it may not even define a majority of them, but it defines a very vocal and highly motivated number who end up driving a number of very powerful policies that have shaped our nation very strongly. To pretend this highly political form of “Americanism” exists apart from this kind of Christian sense of manifest destiny is absurd. They are wedded together and have been for a very long time, even if not everyone who believes in American exceptionalism subscribes to the Judeo-Christian form of it.

It goes back at least as far as the Mayflower and the early Christian eccentrics who first founded our original colonies. They believed God had given us this land, and had a plan for us, and over the centuries they kept “discovering” this plan in all kinds of self-serving policies that God had blessed us with. Invading Iraq was just the latest part of this plan. GWB new how to speak in code to those who thought this way, and was happy to have others join in who subscribed to a less overtly religious form of American exceptionalism. But even the more secular American exceptionalist trace their roots to religious exceptionalists somewhere back in history, and took up the notions of an Amercian “crusade” (such as Eisenhower in WWII) in terms that can only be described as religious. And not just any old religion, mind you, but Christian religion.

What Sullivan points to is a real phenomena. His only problem is that he tends to think of it as a new phenomena, rather than something that comes in waves and cycles. So he thinks the GOP is being overtaken by religious fundamentalists without recognizing that it was always that way, to some degree or other, it’s just changing its facade based on popular trends. But go back to the nineteenth century and look at the Christian exceptionalist force behind American expansionism in the West, and then abroad, and you can see that it’s always been this way, it’s an integral part of the whole American Christian-exceptionalist tradition from the start. It’s never been the whole story of either America or Christianity in America, but it’s a very powerful part of it.
Charlie says:

September 11, 2010 at 4:52 pm

Hmmm. I’m not sure I actually disagree with much of that. I do think many Americans are motivated, for good and ill, by strong religious belief. That probably has something to do with the zeal with which Americans take up various international “crusades.” And it’s definitely plausible that it has something to do with the American tendency–which is so baffling and infuriating to a lot of non-Americans–to wonder aloud why anyone could possibly hate us when everything we do is so self-evidently selfless and benevolent. But I think pointing to American religiosity may explain so much that it ends up explaining very little.

To take one example–the United States was first opposed to the Soviet Union, then an ally of the Soviet Union, and then once again an opponent of the Soviet Union. It was an opponent of Maoist China and then an ally of Maoist China. So our supposed crusade against “godless communism” could be manipulated, put on hold, or discarded when strategic considerations became paramount.

When religion is directly involved there doesn’t seem to be any particular tendency that can be described as a “Christian” approach to US foreign policy. Out of concern for its counter-Soviet alliance with Turkey (and then for other strategic reasons) the US refrained from recognizing the Ottoman genocide of Armenian Christians. It has supported Islamist guerrillas against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Christian guerrillas against the PLO in Lebanon, Shiite militias against Sunni guerrillas in Iraq, various Muslim groups against Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, etc. It was a moral imperative that we rescue the Muslim monarchy of Kuwait from the secular totalitarian Muslims of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. But there was no moral imperative to rescue Christian victims of the Rwandan genocide. We supported secular authoritarians in their various brutal campaigns against Central American movements inspired by Christian liberation theology.

These policy outcomes seem united by something other than religiosity. It’s easy, in the current circumstance, to believe that zealous opposition to Islam or Islamism must be motivated by America’s Christian character. But I think that’s an illusion–we’ve always been enthusiastically opposed to the enemy of the hour, regardless of how religion plays into things. Maybe there’s something about American Christianity which makes a lot of Americans gullible and willing to swallow their government’s patently absurd propaganda, but I think that’s a slightly different point than saying that Christianity in some way drives policy.

By the way, while I believe that George W. Bush is sincere in his sentimental religiosity, it’s instructive that his beliefs first made him an advocate of “humility” in foreign policy and, later, an advocate of a worldwide American crusade to free the world and banish evil. That’s actually a good example of what I’m talking about–Christianity is just the after-the-fact rationalization for feelings and policies that must have been arrived at from some other angle.
Randal says:

September 12, 2010 at 5:38 am

“These policy outcomes seem united by something other than religiosity.”

Clearly, Christian religiosity is one important facet of many Americans’ world-views, which can be, and often is, played upon for propaganda purposes by factions which seek to use US foreign policy for particular ends. In some cases it can be made useful, and is played upon strongly, and in others not.

Is it reasonable to count Christianity, in this sense, as the conservative equivalent of “humanism” for leftists, which is played upon by interest groups for similar purposes when it suits them (eg the recent Time propaganda piece about Afghanistan)?

Since it is easier to manipulate US foreign policy in directions that allow this easy and effective propaganda to be deployed, wouldn’t it be likely there is a “Christian bias” in US foreign policy, even if there isn’t a consciously Christan driver to it?
Jim Dooley says:

September 12, 2010 at 10:08 am

“…wouldn’t it be likely there is a “Christian bias” in US foreign policy, even if there isn’t a consciously Christan driver to it?

There probably is a common understanding among US foreign policy makers that their undertakings be marketable outside the beltway as consistent with what passes for Christianity out here which, by serious historical standards, is thin gruel.
By far the greatest force in US foreign policy making is bureaucratic inertia. US foreign policy is very much the product of interlocking bureaucracies where the first rule is to do no harm- to one’s own career. For example, with regard to the war of aggression in Iraq, when the Pope spoke, nobody listened. Even to have learned what the pope had to say about the war in Iraq, the typical State, Pentagon, CIA employee would have had to have found it on page 6 of the Post or the Times. He certainly would not have learned about it at work or at church, and if he had learned about it at church, he most assuredly would have left it there.
This US Christian Nation v. The Islamic World nonsense is merely a whirlwind in the void which appeared when the justifying purpose for our excellent adventures evaporated and no malefactors were held accountable. And it keeps the bureaucracies happy and busy tilting at windmills; and our entertainment outlets covering it; and our morons loving it.
Anderson says:

September 12, 2010 at 2:13 pm

Sully formulated “Christianism” by analogy with “Islamism,” itself a back-formation from “Islam” meant to distinguish Osama-style misuse and abuse of Islamic teachings from Islam itself.

When you remember that, and that therefore “Christianism” is not meant to be confused with “Christianity,” Sullivan’s observations are more cogent.

Daniel’s post is fine, except for missing the point. If Daniel were a Muslim writing to criticize the term “Islamism” by complaining there’s nothing Islamic about 9/11, Madrid, etc., that would equally miss the point.
conradg says:

September 12, 2010 at 6:22 pm

I too have to agree with a lot of what you said. I don’t think US foreign policy is driven by overt religiousity (most of the time), and I don’t think we go much out of our way to promote or protect Christian groups around the world.

What I’m addressing, however, is what Daniel calls the “religion of American exceptionalism”, which he tries to differentiate from Christianity because it’s an obvious form of heresy, but which I say cannot be differentiated from some of the major strains of American Christianity regardless of whether it is heretical or not, because the two have evolved in symbiosis to the point of being virtually a single political force. Not that there isn’t a secular form of American exceptionalism, or even a Jewish (neocon) form of the same, but the origins and abiding principles of it derive from and work in tandem with a particularly dominant strain of American Christianity, which sees the US’s interests as one and the same with God’s interests in making a great and Godly world here on earth. Because it is America that God has blessed for this mission, it’s okay if sometimes we break the rules and even ignore other Christians around the world – they may be Christians, but they aren’t the ones chosen to do this great work, and thus their interests can be sacrificed for the great good. But to sacrifice America’s interests for the greater good would be a complete contradiction, since America’s interests are God’s interests.

The point being that the entire history of American exceptionalism is rooted in a form of Christian theology which might be seen as heretical to some, like Daniel, but which is strongly held by a large number of American Christians, who have so strongly promoted it that most American politicians are required to believe in it in some form or another, even if not explicitly religious. It doesn’t necessarily translate into an explicitly Christian foreign policy, instead it makes America itself the political expression of the Christian “Divine Plan”. So, America pursuing its own interests, and pushing its own values to the world in a missionary fashion, even using its military for that purpose, is the fulfillment of a peculiar form of Christian exceptionalism. In fact, the missionary focus of American expansionism, imperialism, and “nation-building” is something not merely borrowed from Christianity, but is an expression of the merger of the two in the American project.

So there’s a significant contingent of Americans, maybe 25% or so, who basically see America’s role in the world in this way. But there’s an even larger contingent who are strongly influenced by this sentiment because it’s such a powerful part of our history, who generally agree that American exceptionalism is a simple historical fact and force that we are required to fulfill, and even if they don’t subscribe to the whole Christian religious theology at its core, tag along as enthusiastic supporters of the basic political movement, because they see it as benefiting them, and even the world as a whole. That’s where the mainstream basically accepts this notion and considers it a heresy to deny it. It’s imbued into the culture in a way that is more than mere nationalism, but is a religious faith in our own basic goodness and innocence that can’t help but deeply resemble and reflect Christianity, even if in a somewhat perverted form.
Norwegian Shooter says:

September 13, 2010 at 9:56 am

Excellent discussion, without adding my own two cents, I’ll “side” with conradg, but most everything here is good stuff. I will say that Charlie’s examples go off onto the wrong track. (Welcome, Charlie – and your first comment was great, thanks for the link)

I would like to know who are these “serious religious conservatives [that] have objected in the wake of the Beck rally”. The rest of Daniel’s last paragraph does miss the point. He needs to realize that his brand of Christianity is in opposition to most Christians in both theology and practice. The point that American exceptionalism and American Christianity are inseparable is the right one.

For instance, embracing the role as victim and celebrating victimhood is one common thread to the Tea Party (taxed enough already) and to conservative Christians (secular liberal media bias). Christian theology also centralizes the role of victim and punishment for sin. Returning to a golden age is another. (Take back our country, restoring honor, concept of heaven, banning abortion, etc.)

“These are ultimately just as hostile to traditionalist Christianity, because any real religion stands as a rebuke and a threat to the cult of self-pity and self-congratulation that has been on display this summer.”

Correct, but traditionalist Christians are a small, and powerless, minority, even in the GOP. Adultery isn’t even a taboo for Republicans anymore. “Real religion” (besides being an oxymoron), is only individually definable. It has no general meaning. And the rebuke over self-pity is merely about the cause of the self-pity being secular. Self-pity or self-congratulation about moral issues is distinctly evangelical Christian that is now mainstream.
J says:

September 14, 2010 at 1:34 pm

I agree, Andy is off more than a little bit here. But the counterhypothesis doesn’t seem quite right either.

We’re in a running generationally defined process of gradually accepting fringe but significant religious groups into the mainstream. For fundamentalist Protestant sects that began in the 1890s, around 1920 for Catholicism (and, I suspect, Eastern Orthodoxy), the mid-1940s for Judaism. Islam and other demographically minor theisms, e.g. traditional Hinduism, seem to get first mainstream legitimation shortly after 1968. Non-theisms like certain strands of Buddhism started to gain legitimacy as participants in public life starting in the early/mid Nineties.

Around 40-45 years after this mainstream acceptance begins in earnest there seems to be a period of reactionary misbehavior against these groups by members of the perceived mainstream. (Often by members of groups let in the generation before the group they attack.) There’s the attack on JFK’s Catholicism in the campaign of 1960 from fringy Protestants and the unstated reason Southern Baptist populated Dallas was a hotbed of hostility to Kennedy (but not Johnson) at the time of the assassination. There’s the diffuse outbreak of Holocaust revisionism (e.g. Willis Carto), anti-Semitic vandalism, the ZOG mythology and liberals-are-all-Jews canard, plus things like Pat Roberts’s book in the 1980s. And 42 years after 1968 there’s a similarly reactionary and contemptible and fundamentally scurrilous outbreak of malicious anti-Islamism, along with an Obama-is-a-Muslim canard.

So this phenomenon is not unique. It’s an ugly hazing that occurs shortly before a group gets majority support as acceptably mainstream. I suppose it has the same social purpose as frat hazings of new members, too: to reduce the moral authority of the newcomers and lower their expectations and relative status as a price of admission.