Archive: What in the World is America?

Is our example of freedom an inspiration to the world? Or is it an impediment?

By Richard John Neuhaus

Unlike most other historic powers, America is not a nation by demographic and geographic accident, nor is it demarcated by the force of arms. America is a people on purpose and by purpose. America is self-consciously an invention in need of regular renewal by re-invention. It is an idea restlessly in search of and always falling short of secure embodiment. And the central idea animating the search is that of freedom.

This may seem to be a romantic view of the American experience, but I believe America is, to most people, an idea. Between those who believe freedom is a truth to be advanced and those who believe it is a myth to be debunked, there is no dispute that freedom is the issue.

A century ago it was routinely asserted that America was the chief source of the hope for universal freedom and felicity. Today among some Americans it is as routinely asserted that America and its influence in the world are the chief obstacles to universal liberation and equality.

Americans need an excuse for their country’s being so very big and so very blessed. American leaders have regularly articulated America’s sense of singular, even providential, moral purpose. Today, statements made by our Founding Fathers are both parodied as pretentious and reverently recalled in an effort to “turn America around” to its constituting vision.

Lincoln called America “the last best hope of man on earth.” In this century Woodrow Wilson has been scorned as well as cheered for a similar intuition regarding the American mission. But almost every presidential administration has engaged itself in national missiology.

Some evidences of this are Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” Carter’s regard for human rights and Reagan’s trumpet call for a “crusade for democracy.”

Until recently the Protestant mainline—those churches belonging to the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches—had unquestioned leadership in relating religion to culture, society and politics. That leadership has eroded as more and more of those who speak for the mainline have succumbed to the “great reversal” of world history. That is, though America was once considered the bearer of a universal promise, it is now condemned as the carrier of the disease of imperialist capitalist oppression. It is both fair and accurate to say that among the bureaucrats most responsible for “church and society” issues this assumption about America’s vicious influence in world history is pervasive.

A recent Roper survey done for This World magazine proposed: “On balance, and considering the alternatives, American influence is a force for good in the world today.” Among the teachers of theology and religion who responded, barely half agreed with the proposition; the rest were unsure or in disagreement.

The mainline Protestant elite have wearied of providing a religiously-grounded, moral legitimation for the American idea of democracy and its defense and advance in the world. (Moral legitimation does not mean uncritical affirmation. Rather, it refers to that sense of purpose by which the experiment can be criticized within the context of essential affirmation.) There is a large sector of the American religious community, however, that is not at all shy about moving into the vacuum.

This group is called the Religious New Right and is best known as the Moral Majority. Since its appearance many in the “liberal mainline” and the secular media have declared that it is a momentary aberration in American life—a blip on the screen, as it were. Those who believe that the moral majoritarians will soon go away are, I believe, whistling in the dark. Emerging from the worlds of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, the moral majoritarians represent millions of Americans who are coming in from a 50-year exile.

For decades it was assumed, with some justice, that these folks were politically and socially quietist, resigned to the reign of “unbelievers” in this world while focusing their attention on the world to come. Today a substantial part of this community has gone political, making a strong bid to become the new elite in the moral legitimation of American life.

The Religious New Right is now strident and confrontational. It is curious that the idea of “Christian America” is almost the exclusive property of what is viewed as the radical right. Yet as recently as 1931 the Supreme Court of the United States (in U.S. vs. Macintosh) observed that America was a Christian nation.

From a sociological view it is evident that the majority of Americans are Christians, and they consciously attribute their values to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Until the 1960s the assertion that America was a Christian nation would also have been considered indisputable in most mainline and liberal Protestant churches.

The idea that America is a “secular society” is of relatively recent vintage. The militant religionists of the New Right charge that the idea is propagated by a small cabal of secular humanists who have, with the collusion of the courts, interpreted the doctrine of “separation of church and state” as the removal of religion from public policy. However extreme the charges from the Religious New Right, I believe they have alerted us to troublesome changes in our culture.

Today, unless democratic rights are undergirded by religious values, they provide a feeble opposition to the excesses of majority rule. In historical terms the democratic ideal is naked to assaults from other belief systems, notably of Marxist-Leninist rule. It may be that among those who have experienced Marxist-Leninist rule firsthand, few find it a plausible belief system. Lacking that experience, however, many American intellectuals and religious leaders are enamored with what Peter Berger terms an alternative “plausibility structure,” an alternative way of “putting the world together.” This explains in part the excitement and sense of fresh discovery with which sundry versions of “Christian Marxism” are being embraced.

The task today is to re-establish the links between Judeo-Christian religion and the democratic experiment It is not enough that there is a general religious revival. Unless the ideal of democratic freedom is conceptually revitalized, the energies of religious revival could also be moved into antidemocratic directions.

The connections between religion and democracy in the European context are different in many respects. Note, for instance, the dramatic difference in the vitalities of institutionalized religion in Europe today. I make no apology for dwelling on the American situation, however. It is what I know best.

In addition, America and its influence in the world are, for better or worse, the chief bearers of the democratic ideal today and for the foreseeable future. This is not a statement of hubris but an acknowledgement of the fact that, in the absence of American example and influence, it is hard to see how the democratic proposition could be a significant agent of world-historical change.

This returns us then to the idea of an American moral purpose, even a kind of destiny. The notion of “manifest destiny” is widely pilloried today, yet destiny is but another word for purpose.

The American destiny may not be manifest today. Lincoln spoke of America as an “almost chosen” people, and he agonized over the ways in which providential purpose may have been entangled with the conflicts of his day. With the same modesty, but also the same urgency and courage, we must reconsider the meaning of America in a global context.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, a theologian at the University of Munich, is doing this with great care. In Human Nature, Election, and History he dares to propose that we reconsider the meaning of election as a category for understanding contemporary politics among nations. If America is elected by God, he suggests, it is not because of any inherent moral superiority. Rather, it is because America has a singular opportunity, and therefore a singular responsibility, to advance human freedom.

This is an audacious line of inquiry that runs counter to prevailing biases in American and Western thinking. But for a people incorrigibly religious, for a nation with the soul of a church, it is a line of inquiry that must not be evaded. The alternatives are an increased corrosion of confidence and a more severe de-legitimation of the democratic experiment, so that the field of world-historical change will be left to ideational forces that are hostile to freedom. The corrosion may already be too far advanced. The “naked public square” may be so entrenched that it will successfully resist redirection by religiously-grounded values.

Yet I believe ours is a moment, perhaps even a biblical kairos, in which we are called upon to resume Lincoln’s explorations into providential purpose.

America may not be the last best hope of man on earth, but for men and women who are committed to democratic freedom, the world’s future would be bleak without America’s example and influence. Islands of democratic freedom could be sustained in an otherwise totalitarian and authoritarian world, but the hope that humanity’s future will be one of democratic freedom could not be sustained. For this reason much of our future depends on the moral and religious re-legitimation of the most democratic idea in America.

Malcolm Muggeridge has written:

“If I accept, as millions of other Western Europeans do, that America is destined to be the mainstay of freedom in this mid-twentieth-century world, it does not follow that American institutions are perfect, that Americans are invariably well behaved or that the American way of life is flawless. It only means that in one of the most terrible conflicts in human history I have chosen my side, as all will have to choose sooner or later, and propose to stick by the side I have chosen through thick and thin, hoping to have sufficient courage not to lose heart, sufficient sense not to allow myself to be confused or deflected from this purpose and sufficient faith in the civilization to which I belong and in the religion on which that civilization is based, to follow Bunyan’s advice and endure the hazards and humiliations of the way because of the worth of the destination.”

Is America really that critical to our world’s future? Yes, I believe it is. As an American, I wish it were not so.

Richard John Neuhaus is director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society. This article is excerpted from his essay in the book On Freedom, edited by John A. Howard. (1984 Copyright by Devin-Adair Publishing, Inc., Greenwich, CT 06830. Used by permission.)