This Side of Heaven

KCRW ran a fascinating interview on Sunday between Kurt Anderson and Sarah Vowell, a historian who has just written a sardonic little account of Puritain origins in Massachusettes Bay colony, which points out how many of their ideas are still floating around in the words of contemporary American politicians and politicians-elect (KCRW hasn’t posted their archive of the interview yet, but here’s NPR’s interview with Vowell, and a great little excerpt from her book: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95469284). A particular section of the excerpt caught my attention. It is a colorful comment on how the “New Isreal” myth of America typified by Reverend John Cotton’s sermon, “God’s Promise to his Plantation”, has directed much of America’s foreign policy for over two centuries:

“By the time Cotton says amen, he has fought Mexico for Texas, bought Alaska from the Russians, and dropped napalm on Vietnam. Then he lays a wreath on Custer’s grave and revs past Wounded Knee. Then he claps when the Marquis de Lafayette tells Congress that “someday America will save the world.” Then he smiles when Abraham Lincoln calls the United States “the last best hope of earth.” Then he frees Cuba, which would be news to Cuba. Then he signs the lease on Guantánamo Bay.”

Sarah Vowell is raising a powerful point here. Isn’t it ironic that a nation which prides itself so much on the separation of church and state, still operates so obviously out of this heavily theocratic mindset? Do we still believe that America is God’s nation on earth? Do we as Americans have a special calling, as George W. Bush would say, “from beyond the stars” to spread freedom and democracy and peace and justice and liberty? If so, where is this calling from, what is its nature, and how are we to go about enacting it? Is our idea of freedom, peace, justice, and the rest, even similar to that of the world’s? To God’s? I think its time to make some tough decisions, and some practical measures regarding this ever prevalent “New Isreal” myth.

As Robert Jewett explains in his book Mission and Menace, it was the millennial mindset of New Engalnd Puritans, which placed America at the apex of God’s true intentions for his earth, and “gave to all succeeding American events a continuing cosmic importance” (Jewett, 30). Though Jewett shows how the Puritain’s theocratic project in New England was quickly dissolved in favor of religious tolerance, implicit is the idea that many of their theocratic arguments and tactics have survived (in perhaps a more secular form) in the American civil religion “to this day” (Jewett, 43). Thus when Barrack Obama, echoing Lincoln, makes the secular patriotic claim that America is the “last best hope on earth”, he is perhaps relating more to “American Fundamentalists and Islamic and Israeli Theocrats” (Jewett, 43), than he could know, or would probably be comfortable with.

A dose of widespread, popular, even-handed historical acknowledgement is what is needed here, resonant somewhere between Howard Zinn and my third grade Social Studies teacher. We need to change the stories that our story-tellers are telling, from our grade school book reports, to our pundit’s campaign speeches. An authentic, humble, rational view of ourselves, might just help us actually be that city on the hill we are always claiming to be. It might show that we are open to critique, open to our own fallacy, and willing to make some real concrete decisions about who we are as a people, and what our actual place in the world might be.

When we propel the “New Israel” myth we are silencing the voices of the genocided people groups whose land we work, play, and build on every day. We ignore the slaves on whose backs our entire civilization has been built. We uncritically allow public policy which infringes on our personal freedom, and foreign policy which infringes on public accountability. Most importantly, perhaps, like a church which decrees it’s own spiritual infallibility, we inhibit our own ability to acknowledge error, and propagate positive change.

In Sarah Vowell’s KCRW interview, she says that Thomas Jefferson is a perfect embodiment of our national identity. He is a secular King David, a man who can pen what is perhaps one of the most beautiful statements of equality in history, and yet rape one of his own slaves. It’s time to get off of our pedestal. It’s not about being down on America. It’s not about being pessimistic about either our roots or our future. Rather it’s about being honest. It’s about seeing this place we live, not as a city on a hill, but as a city. Tony Campolo is famously quoted as saying, “we live in the best Babylon in the world, but its still Babylon.” Great. Its good to love America. Lets just be careful on which side of the eschaton we place it.