David Gelernter - Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My editor Adam Bellow has guided this manuscript wisely and patiently every step of the way, and Im grateful. I tried out several of the ideas in this book during my stint as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and I thank Susan Brenneman and Nick Goldberg for helping me to refine them (but they dont necessarily endorse them!). I tried out even more of these ideas in the indispensable pages of the Weekly Standard; my thanks to Bill Kristol and the whole Standard staff, but especially to Claudia Anderson and Richard Starr. Ideas launched under the auspices of the Shalem Institute, Jerusalem (where Ive served as a senior fellow in Jewish thought), have been essential to this project. My new colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, where Im a national fellow, are exceptionally generous with ideas and time; Michael Novak and Leon Kass (among other AEI fellows) are national treasures of the first order, and their work and conversation has helped me understand America, religion, and the Bible; Im grateful also to Chris DeMuth, the AEIs director, for good guidance and generous support. Im aware also, every day, of the generosity of Yale University, where Im a professor of computer science. Yale promotes the development of public intellectuals and stands for freedom of thought and research in the proudest American traditionand for liberal education in the best sense.

My deepest thanks are due to Neal Kozodoymy teacher, my colleague, and my true friend. I tried out many of the main ideas of this book in Commentary-sponsored lectures and in Commentary essays, all of which Neal edited with his customary thoroughness, deep care, and deep thought. Of course all remaining errors are mine, but any good points are due largely to the people Ive named, to Neal above all. And my thanks to Roger Hertog too, who has repeatedly taken it upon himself, out of pure generosity, to give me guidance and help. Neal and Roger together add up to one of the rarest phenomena in the universe, a purely unselfish force for good.

Lastly, my thanks to my two boys, Joshua and Daniel, for becoming young men who can be funny and smart about any topic whatever, who get every joke and understand the deep spiritual things that are hardest to convey; and to my parents for everything; and to my wife for even more.

David Gelernter
Yale University and American Enterprise Institute

CHAPTER 1

I BELIEVE IN AMERICA

I believe in America. Many people have said so over the generations. They are not speaking of a nation. They are expressing belief in an idea, and not just any idea but a religious idea of enormous, transporting power.

In this book I will argue that America is no secular republic; its a biblical republic. Americanism is no civic religion; its a biblical religion. Americanism doesnt merely announce the nations ideals on its own authority; it speaks on behalf of the Bible and the Bibles God, as Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address. Its goal is for America to move forward with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, as Lincoln said in that same speech. That America is a biblical republic and Americanism a biblical religionboth facts are perfectly consistent with absolute religious freedom; both are supported by mountains of evidence. So how come nobody knows them? Is the evidence secret? Hardly. But we live in a secular age. No book will change that fact, but our secular prejudice cant change history either. If we look the facts in the face and dont flinch, we will see America the biblical republic and Americanism the biblical religion emerge clearly.

America is one of the most beautiful religious concepts mankind has ever known. It is sublimely humane, built on strong confidence in humanitys ability to make life better. America is an idea that results from focusing the Bible and Judeo-Christian faith like a spotlights beam on the problem of this life (not the next) in the modern world, in a modern nation. The ideas that emerge in a blaze of light center on liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind.

These ideas are often attributed to ancient Greece and to eighteenth-century philosophy. I will show how they grew in fact from the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity. They were present implicitly (unopened buds) in the Puritan America of the early 1600s. During the revolutionary era the climate was right for the buds to bloom. And they were beautiful. But they reached maturity only decades later, under the ministration of the greatest religious figure of modern centurieswho was also President of the United States.

The religious idea called America is religious insofar as it tells an absolute truth about the meaning of human life, a truth that we must take on faith. (We hold these truths to be self-evident, says the Declaration of Independence. No proofs are supplied.) I will try to show that the American Religion, which gives America its spiritual meaning, consists of an American Creed in the context of a doctrine I will call American Zionism. Virtually everyone agrees on the existence if not the details of the Creed, but the phenomenon I call American Zionism has been discussed by relatively few historians. I will try to show that the American Religion incorporates the biblical ideas of a chosen people in a promised land. Those concepts are the source of Americas (sometime) sense of divine mission; of her (not invariable yet often powerful) feeling of obligation to all mankind; of her democratic chivalryher nagging awareness of a duty to help the weak against the strong. This chivalry has nothing to do with knights and ladies; it is a deep sense of duty to the suffering, and comes straight from American Zionism.

I will try to show how the American Religion was shaped by American history and how it shaped that history in turnAmericas history and its religion in a centuries-long embrace.

And I will try to show that the American Religion is a global religion. Believers in America have lived all over the world. Some have believed with tormented desperation. Others have believed serenely, because the idea called America seemed profoundly humane and beautiful. Most did not believe in America as if it were God, but did believe as if America had chosen a divine mission and had the means to carry it out. For others the belief was more abstract: America only symbolized the facts that liberty, equality, and democracy could indeed become real on this earth and that human beings could make them real. And given the many who have believed, as well as the depth and fervor of their belief and the sublimity of the American idea (which I have yet to define precisely), this American Religion is a great religion.

No religion had ever before laid out these three political ideals as its creed: Liberty. Equality. Democracy. The great achievement of Americanism is to proclaim these three principles