by John Gray
For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken … we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God … We shall shame the ways of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us until we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.3
Among the colonists, the hope of a new world was combined with fear that the End-Time was near. John Cotton, minister of Boston’s First Church, used the section of the Book of Revelation describing the defeat of the Beast as his text for a sermon on the occasion of the execution of Charles I and prophesied the destruction of the Antichrist in 1655. Such beliefs were commonplace in mid-seventeenth-century England, not only in groups such as the Fifth Monarchy Men but among a wide range of religious leaders and sects. As the scholar of American prophetic traditions Paul Boyer has noted, Puritan leaders urged support for the colonizing venture in America on explicitly eschatological grounds, with John Davenport describing it as ‘a bulwark against the Kingdom of Antichrist’. Apocalyptic enthusiasm died down in England with the Restoration and the accession of Charles II in 1660, but by then it had found a new home in America. By the start of the eighteenth century Cotton Mather, minister at Boston’s First Church and author of a richly apocalyptic history of New England, was describing it as ‘the Spot of Earth, which the God of Heavens spied out’ as the capital of the millennial kingdom.4
Openly apocalyptic movements did not die out. As has been seen in Chapter 1, early nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the mass movement led by Joanna Southcott, while Methodism channelled a powerful millenarian current. Around the same time millenarian ideas were assuming more secular shapes. Radical thinkers such as William Godwin and Thomas Paine reformulated the post-millennialist belief that the world could be transfigured by human action as an Enlightenment faith in progress. Godwin – the anarchist writer mentioned in Chapter 1 who married the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft – viewed history as a series of stages in the development of human reason, ending in a world that no longer needed government. Godwin’s view of history is teleological and clearly indebted to Christianity, but it lacks the expectation of any sudden transformation; the abrupt arrival of a new world, which is the core of millenarian hope, is absent. In contrast Paine – who achieved fame as an ideologue of the American Revolution and was read with admiration by George Washington – showed clear signs of apocalyptic thinking. The declaration in the appendix to the 1776 edition of his book Common Sense, which affirmed that the American Revolution allowed the world to be made over again, is a classic statement of apocalyptic belief. Along with many of his friends in revolutionary France – where like Condorcet he was imprisoned by the Jacobins –Paine was a Deist who believed that the existence of a divine being could be demonstrated by the use of reason. Yet this ardent rationalist thought of the American Revolution as a millennial event.
It was chiefly the formative role of apocalyptic religion in America that prevented it from establishing a variant of European civilization in the New World. There have always been some in America who have seen it as renewing Europe’s achievements at a higher level. In his biography of Benjamin West, John Galt portrayed the great late eighteenth-century American painter as having revived a European artistic heritage. West’s work exceeded anything that had been achieved in Europe, but the decline of the arts in Europe was only ‘the gorgeous omen of the glory which they would attain in their passage over America’.5 There is no sense here of America making a new start. Instead, rather in the way that classical historians viewed history in cyclical terms, European civilization is seen as finding another lease on life on American shores. Had this vision triumphed, America might have produced – like the countries south of the border – a new version of the Old World. Instead it came to see itself as different from Europe, a new civilization founded on universal principles.
Among the ideas that informed the American founders was the political theory of John Locke – a theory of government as a social contract designed to protect natural rights. Unlike nearly all the states that have existed, the United States was founded on the basis of an ideology, and if it is new it is in virtue of this fact. Locke’s political theory served Americans well in the war of independence. It has been less useful when applied in foreign policy, where it promotes the belief that freedom is a condition that comes about simply through the removal of tyranny. Despite its universal claims, Locke’s thought is a distillation of beliefs and values that make sense only in particular historical conditions. His political philosophy depends at every point on Protestant theology.6 Human rights are grounded in our duties to God: we may not take our own lives, for example, because God created us and we remain his property. Locke’s conception of the state of nature expresses Christian beliefs about the divine creation and ownership of the world. His ideal of limited government was an abstraction derived from the conflicts of seventeenth-century England. Freedom is not, as Locke imagined, a primordial human condition: where it exists it is the result of generations of institution building. Yet in America an idea of natural freedom became the basis of a civil religion that claimed universal authority.
By no means all of America’s founders subscribed to this religion. The authors of the Federalist Papers, which appeared in 1787–8 when the ratification of the US Constitution was under discussion, viewed government in a more sceptical light. Thinkers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton did not see the regime that was coming into being as an instrument whereby humanity would scale undreamt-of heights. With wise guidance America might surpass other forms of government, but it could not overcome the flaws inherent in all constitutions. The Federalists belong in an American anti-utopian tradition that has persisted through many vicissitudes, but it is a tradition that has never displaced the sense of universal mission with which the American colony was founded.
In claiming a foundation in a universal ideology, the United States belongs with states such as post-revolutionary France and the former Soviet Union, but unlike them it has been remarkably stable. American institutions have changed less over the past centuries than those of practically any other country. In an analysis of American nationalism, the British scholar Anatol Lieven has observed:
Given the general stereotype of the United States as a new, young and ever-changing country, it is important to note that the antiquity of American institutions is one reason why Americans are so loyal to them … Even the British political system has changed far more fundamentally than the American over the past two hundred years … Far from being a ‘new’ or ‘young’ state, America therefore has some claim to be almost the oldest state in the world.7
It is partly the antiquity of America’s institutions that explains the abiding American belief in the country’s exceptional role in the world. In nearly all other countries the ruling regime has changed again and again. Even Britain has been the site of a succession of political experiments and settlements. In lacking this experience of political transience, America belongs with only a small handful of countries such as Switzerland and Iceland. In a way few other peoples are able to do, Americans can identify themselves as a nation with the institutions by which they are governed. Despite the hiatus of the Civil War and the extension of federal government during the Roosevelt era, the US remained recognizably the same regime for over two hundred years.
The shift that occurred under the Bush administration was made possible by America’s exceptional religiosity, which more than any other factor accounts for its difference from most of the rest of the world. As Alexis de Tocqueville (who coined the term8) recognized, American exceptionalism is a religious phenomenon. From the time the first colonists from England landed to the time when the country gained its independence America saw itself through the lens of religion. Both the post-millennial thinking that looked forward to a world transformed in part by human action and mo
re chiliastic pre-millennial beliefs that anticipated cataclysmic conflicts shaped the way Americans interpreted their history and viewed the future. Each gave America a unique role in history, and the result was the Americanization of an apocalyptic myth.
The belief in Manifest Destiny that was formulated in the mid-nineteenth century was part of this process. The idea of a messianic saviour, which was at the core of early Christianity, became the idea of a Redeemer Nation – the belief in America as the land of a ‘chosen people’ to which Melville gave expression. Only a faith in America’s redemptive role in history can account for the language used by Woodrow Wilson, when in his 1919 address attacking opponents of American membership of the League of Nations he declared:
I wish that they could feel the moral obligation that rests upon us not to go back on those boys, but to see the thing through, to see it through to the end and make good their redemption of the world. For nothing less depends on this decision, nothing less than the liberation and salvation of the world.9
Wilson may be a more complex figure than is sometimes recognized. In domestic contexts he was thoroughly reactionary on issues of racial segregation, and as far as the Americas were concerned the military interventions he favoured – in Mexico, for example – were exercises in classical imperialism rather than missions to export American government. Outside the Americas he recognized that democracy is not always practicable, and as an admirer of Edmund Burke he accepted that its growth could not be forced. Wilson still embodies a core conviction of American liberal internationalism – the belief that national self-determination should be extended throughout the world – that has had a recurring influence on US policy. The Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East were a replay of the programme that Wilson promoted in central and eastern Europe after the First World War. Neither had any understanding of the forces they were unleashing – ethnic nationalism then, radical Islam today. The belief has persisted that the American nation-state – which was achieved only after vast bloodshed – is a recipe for peace and freedom throughout the world.
Wilson embodies one version of a view of America’s role in history that has been renewed down to the present. This view has been summarized by two American writers:
… there has been throughout American history, with only the briefest exceptions, a single style of diplomacy, once the United States has turned its attention from the problem of the defence of the Republic and its territorial expansion to distant problems, to the problems of the larger world. That style has been a compound of the American experience of isolation and a moral fervour that is explicitly theological in origin.10
Beliefs of this kind have informed America’s foreign relations as much in times of isolation as in periods when it was engaged in large-scale intervention abroad. It is wrong to see these two modes as opposites, for in America even isolationism has an evangelical quality. Isolation and global intervention are phases in an American engagement with the world that has always been in some degree faith-based. This faith has altered its shape, at times becoming militant and proselytizing, at others being expressed in an inward-looking nationalism that fears being entangled in the corrupt machinations of the Old World. For much of American history it has been the latter that prevailed. For many Americans the sense of national mission has not translated easily or automatically into active support for overseas military intervention – they had to be persuaded to enter the two world wars, for example – but the belief in a special mission that inspired the Puritan colonists has persisted. As the scholar of American religion Conrad Cherry has commented:
The belief that America has been elected by God for a special destiny in the world has been the focus of American sacred ceremonies, the inaugural addresses of our presidents, the sacred scriptures of the civil religion. It has been so pervasive a motif in the national life that the word ‘belief’ does not really capture the dynamic role that it has played for the American people.11
In according itself an exceptional role in history, America is in no way unusual. Many countries have given themselves a world-redeeming role. There are obvious parallels with the idea of global mission that inspired revolutionary France, and America’s revolutionary war was linked in the minds of many of the country’s founders with the overthrow of the ancien régime. If the American sense of secular mission is not exceptional, neither is the conviction of being a nation chosen by God. The Dutch Afrikaners in South Africa, Protestant communities in Ulster in Northern Ireland and some Zionists have had similar beliefs.12 So have many Russians. A belief in a God-given national mission was central in the reactionary mes-sianism espoused in the nineteenth century by Slavophils, which I considered in Chapter 2. Where America differs from other nations is in the persistent vitality of messianic belief and the extent to which it continues to shape the public culture.
There have been long periods when the apocalyptic tradition was quiescent. During the interwar era it failed to stir even against the backdrop of a catastrophic Depression. It was not revived when in one of its noblest acts America entered the Second World War – a decision that was eventually taken in stoical recognition of a grim job that had to be done rather than any expectation of a much better world. Nor – despite the paranoia rampant at the time – were such beliefs strong during the early part of the Cold War. Here again the American mood was one of resisting a manifest danger rather than remaking the world. Apocalyptic thinking returned in the later part of the Cold War, but it was not a powerful force. Though he described the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ and reaffirmed Winthrop’s view of America as a ‘city on a hill’ in his farewell address, Ronald Reagan was not much influenced during his time in office by the Christian Right. Even when the Berlin Wall fell, George Bush Snr responded by speaking of the difficulties that lay ahead. It was only when his son became president that religion began to move into the centre of American politics, and only after 9/11 that it informed policies on a broad front.
George W. Bush’s references to some countries as forming an ‘axis of evil’ may not be as overtly apocalyptic as his under-secretary of defence, Lieutenant-General William Boykin, who declared, ‘… the enemy is a spiritual enemy, he’s called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan.’13 Boykin’s speech provoked controversy, but he continued to work on intelligence matters in the Pentagon – despite the fact that he had been centrally involved in extending ‘stress and distress’ interrogation methods from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib. There can be little doubt that he represents a view of the world Bush shares. There are many examples of apocalyptic imagery in Bush’s speeches. In his October 2001 speech in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks Bush made numerous biblical references, using phrases from the Revelation of St John and Isaiah. Later speeches on abortion and gay marriage also contained biblical allusions.14 In 2003, some months after the US invasion of Iraq, Bush told the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, ‘God told me to strike al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.’15
The formative influence of fundamentalist thinking on Bush is not confined to foreign policy. A number of the Christian leaders with whom Bush associates belong to the movement known as Christian Reconstructionism, or Dominion Theology. A post-millennial fundamentalist movement holding that a Christian form of government can be achieved in the present age in which every aspect of life will be subject to divine law, the movement has defined its aim as ‘world dominion under Christ’s lordship, a “world takeover” if you will … We are the shapers of world history.’16 The Dominion movement also believes that following the divine command humankind must ‘subdue’ the Earth – a task that includes exploiting the world’s natural resources and controlling the weather. Bush’s opposition to environmentalism has been explained by the fact that much environmental legislation is unpopular in America. But the hostility to environmentalism of American voters is often exaggerated, and a larger reason may be that environmental p
olicies conflict with Bush’s religious beliefs. There is no good reason to be concerned with global warming if you believe Armageddon is around the corner.
There were powerful political reasons for Bush to align himself with the forces of fundamentalism. As a number of insider accounts have revealed, there has been an element of cynical manipulation in the Bush administration’s relations with the Christian Right.17 Evangelical votes were crucial in the struggle for control of Congress, and there can be no doubt that for the administration the Christian Right was, until the mid-term elections of 2006, an instrument of political control. But it would be wrong to think Bush has viewed the fundamentalists simply as an ally. There is a true affinity of world-view. By his own account Bush is himself a born-again Christian whose conversion saved him from alcoholism and who begins each day with prayer and bible study, and like other fundamentalists he has suggested that theories of ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection.18 There is no reason to question the sincerity of Bush’s religious convictions, which belong in the American tradition of post-millennialism, or to doubt that they have shaped his view of America and its place in the world. In a talk to conservative journalists in September 2006 Bush told them that he senses that what he called a ‘Third Awakening’ of religious devotion is underway in America. The ‘First Great Awakening’ is the term commonly used to describe the intense religiosity that gripped the colonies around 1730–60, while the ‘Second Great Awakening’ is usually said to have occurred in the period between 1800 and 1830. He went on to say that like ‘a lot of people in America’ he viewed the ‘war on terror’ as a ‘confrontation between good and evil’.19
