The United States has come to believe that it is a special nation, with a high calling and responsibility toward the rest of the world. Whilst this may sound noble, it has become grossly deformed to where it has led the United States into war after war after war around the globe. This series of articles traces how this belief in America being an exceptional country came into existence. Sadly, it arose because of a perversion and deformation of the Christian faith. In this post, we trace how an original godly Christian vision came to be perverted into a disgusting idolatry.
Patriotism, or love of one's homeland, is a dangerous emotion. It can so easily be perverted into evil actions. Nationalism, which asserts that one's nation is the ultimate human reality subordinating all other duties and concerns is an idolatry, pure and simple. Yet from their beginning, the British colonies and settlements in North America believed that they were part of something special. A new dawn was beginning for humanity. A new nation was arising which would accomplish new and wonderful things in the world.
The Pilgrim and Puritan fathers migrated to North America to be unshackled, so as to be free to believe and practice the Christian faith. Their settlements were faith based; their aspirations were to serve and glorify the risen Christ. Their settlements were to manifest a greater coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth. As Cotton Mather expressed it, the Colonies were a “city set on a hill”: the biblical allusion was deliberate. They would be a light to all the earth. To this point, the colonists' belief in manifest destiny was nothing more or less than an orthodox Christian belief that all Believers are servants of God and that the Church is called to go forth and bring the Gospel to every nation.
Over the course of the eighteenth century the faith of the Pilgrims and Puritans became secularized. In particular, it fell under the thrall of the Enlightenment. Critical here was the separation of reason from faith, and the assertion that reason was autonomous and independent of faith. It could be written with a capital R. The Enlightenment initially accepted there were at least two loci of authority in the universe: God and Nature. The natural order was just as much a manifestation of god, his nature, his truth, as could be found in any holy book, such as the Bible. You could read the book of Nature by applying reason to the natural order, or you read the Bible. What you learned would be the same—or so ran the Enlightenment's line.
Now this was a self-deceived position. The initial generations of Enlightenment scientists and philosophes were preconditioned and preprogrammed to accept some of the central tenets of the Christian faith which had dominated Europe for over a thousand years. They did believe there was a god. They did believe in structure and order in the universe. They did believe that Nature was governed by laws which were promulgated by a god. It was inevitable, therefore, that they found in their rational investigations of Nature what they already presupposed was there in the first place. Their scientific investigations found the very furniture in the room which their conditioning had suggested would be there.
In the second place, since they “proved” to themselves that Nature was as reliable a book of revelation as the Bible, the latter was no longer necessary. The Church and the Christian faith had been made redundant. The upshot was that autonomous human Reason was enthroned above faith; Nature eventually cannibalised Grace.
Given this development, did the idea of Manifest Destiny continue in the American colonies? It certainly did, but in a changed form. The great grandsons of the colonists came to believe that what was really special about the American colonies was not their adherence to the Christian faith, but their love of liberty. It was liberty, not the Christian faith, which was the genius of America. Liberty allowed believers to worship and believe as they pleased. It also allowed Reason to go “where no man had gone before,” exploring Nature, thus indirectly learning of god. Liberty came to be seen as the wellspring of Church and State, their primary means of grace.
Nathan O. Hatch documents this devolution in The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). America would lead the way to a greater coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth. The New England churches and pulpits and theological faculties were full of it. But the Kingdom (now) had morphed into a belief that American was to lead the world, not in bringing the Gospel to it (as their Puritan forbears had believed) but in liberating the rest of the world from oppression and political tyranny. The light of the city set on a hill was no longer the light of the Gospel, but the light of political liberty and freedom. Hatch writes:
During their opposition to French and British tyranny, New England ministers decided that the Pope of Rome no longer served as the primary embodiment of Antichrist and that Satan had redirected this evil power through another agency, that of oppressive and arbitrary civil governments.
With faultless logic ministers concluded from this innovative assumption that the main struggle between good and evil had shifted to the arena of politics and nations. Because Antichrist had altered his tactics and sought to crush the church through civil oppression, the forces of righteousness could not expect Christian truth to flourish under arbitrary government. . . . In this scheme the American Republic assumed 'the soul of a church' not by accident but as the direct result of those principles of republican eschatology which emerged in the years between America's two Great Awakenings.” (Hatch, p.17, emphasis, ours)
The American Republic now had the soul of a church. Here, then, is the subtle, diabolical catch: if Liberty is the primary means of grace for pure Christianity, the American Republic (the state) must be seen as the very rock upon which the Church is built and the vanguard of its ministry to the nations. Here is the source of the idolatry which has brought such curse and degradation to the United States. Unconsciously the New England ministers had dethroned Christ and committed themselves to a soft-statism—in the Name of Christ, no less!
The irony is that at this point they had almost gone full circle and were approaching again the doctrine of the divine right of civil power. The Tudors and the Stuarts would have generally approved. They would have been very comfortable with the notion that the State was the bedrock upon which the Church stood. Had they not claimed and asserted this all along, with their pernicious doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings?
By the end of the eighteenth century there was an overwhelming consensus amongst American churches and Christians that they were living at the beginning of the end times. The world was about to experience a global reformation that would see the discipling and christianising of all the nations of the earth. America was God's appointed leader and instrument in this movement. She would lead the world into the light. But, it would be the light of political liberty first, the Gospel second.
By thus aligning a scheme of providential history with republican thought, this widely shared perspective on the Revolution made the realization of political goals essential to the approach of the kingdom. The prospect of sharing the political ideals of the Revolution with all mankind became, in this climate of opinion, not only the clergy's fondest hope, but also a necessary prerequisite for spreading the Christian message. . . . The gospel was only compatible with political forms that stood on the sacred ground of liberty. (Hatch, p.150. Emphasis, ours)This was an increasingly explicit idolatry. The Gospel depended upon political liberty; not the reverse. It was not idolatrous to believe that where the Gospel went and was heard, civil liberty would eventually follow as part of its spiritual fruits. Millions of slaves in the Roman Empire had found that out. But the idolatry lay here: that political and civil liberty was the vanguard of the Gospel, and that the American Republic was the foundation of the first, and, therefore, implicitly of the Gospel itself. As one theologian (writing in 1794) put it:
It seems no unnatural conclusion from ancient prophecy, . . . that in order to usher in . . . the latter-day-glory, TWO GREAT REVOLUTIONS are to take place; the first outward and political; the second inward and spiritual. (David Austin, cited in Hatch, p. 150)Now, it is impossible to adopt such blasphemous and idolatrous beliefs without incurring the wrath of God Himself. Is He not a jealous God? He will brook no rival for worship and adoration.
American christianity, by the end of the eighteenth century had begun to worship both God and Baal. The idolatry had progressed to the stage where Protestant theologians and minister and teachers ardently believed that the United States was to play a special role in God's Kingdom: it was to be as John the Baptist was to the Messiah. It was to prepare the way for the Gospel's progress in the world. It was to liberate people from oppressive political regimes, wherever they were found, so that they would then be free to hear the Gospel and believe.
The Bible is very clear. The State is not a means of God's grace and mercy, but of His vengeance and judgement. By making the United States the primary means to grace to a lost world, not only was the relationship between Church and State being distorted, but the Gospel itself was being perverted and subverted.
As time passed, the Gospel was relegated farther and farther to the rear, whilst the place and importance and glory of the nation, these United States, ascended to an ever brighter refulgence. There was a new star over Bethlehem, the whole world was about to see the revelation of a new messiah.
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