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Accept No Substitutes

Ross: Or put another way: I expect my Presidents to be heretics, but I think it matters a great deal what kind of heretics they are. Arguably, no one can win the Presidency without confessing some form of the Americanist heresy, and so every President ends up adopting or professing views that are deeply at […]

Ross:

Or put another way: I expect my Presidents to be heretics, but I think it matters a great deal what kind of heretics they are.

Arguably, no one can win the Presidency without confessing some form of the Americanist heresy, and so every President ends up adopting or professing views that are deeply at odds with traditional Christianity.

This reminds me of something important that Richard Gamble said at the ISI conference at Yale (about which I really will be saying more soon). He argued against the continued national and political appropriation of Christian language of mission and redemption. This language, of course, is at the heart of American nationalism/Americanism, and the use of religious language and concepts to justify, whitewash and simplify the past both displaces the proper Christian understanding of these words and concepts and invests the nation-state with quasi-sacred status and makes nationalist historiography into the record of a secular salvation history. Prof. Gamble was very anxious about the dangers of civic religion and the description of America as a “city on a hill” and a “credal” nation (the latter, in my view, simply being the “proposition nation” idea using bastardized religious language) for some of the same reasons. Of course, it is impossible to be a normal country when a nationalist secular pseudo-religion defines the political culture. The exceptionalism justified by this appropriation of religious language (and even more absurdly defended in theologically nonsensical ideas that God wills everyone to be a liberal democrat) paves the way for a missionary role in the world that just so happens to coincide with the interests of certain factions in and around the state apparatus. What is most frustrating about all of this is that secular and heterodox Americans are among the most likely to believe and espouse these things, while at the same time the use of religious idiom in confessing Americanism will be cited as evidence of incipient theocracy, which is the last thing this substitute religion offers.

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