US Idolatry and False Messianism, Part VI

America, the World's Bloody, False Messiah

Ideas have consequences. Often tragic consequences. This is certainly true in the case of the United States, where the original founding fathers believed that God had led them to America to establish colonies which would be instrumental in bringing the light of the Gospel of God to all the peoples of the earth. Within two hundred and fifty years, this great Christian hope had been diabolically perverted and secularized into a false belief that the government of the United States was to be the world's policeman, bringing all the nations of the world into freedom, peace, and prosperity.

The event which led to the floodgates opening and the heresy of “America as world saviour” pumping its poison into national life was the fateful decision, taken by Woodrow Wilson, to enter the Great War. This was the Archimedian point which tipped the United States into a nationalist idolatry of viewing itself as a messianic nation which in turn has led to its unceasing war footing around the world.

It is relatively easy to trace the connections. If America was to lead the world into the righteousness of world peace, freedom, and liberty, and if it had to lead through the actions of the State, and if the State held the authority and power to make war, it followed that sooner or later one would have to include war-making as a “tool” that could be employed for world peace.

Herbert Croly was the founding editor of the (now ultra-liberal) New Republic magazine. He wholeheartedly accepted the doctrine of American Manifest Destiny but suggested that although America had an obligation to make its foreign policy serve the cause of international peace, it also had to reckon that in the short term war might need to be waged to achieve ultimate and permanent global peace. Richard Gamble recounts the argument:

“At some point, Croly warned, the United States, isolated in days past for the sake of its own peace, might be required to go to war for the sake of world peace. 'Peace will prevail in international relations,' he promised, 'because of the righteous use of superior force.' America could not shirk this responsibility since peace 'would enable the European nations to release the springs of democracy.' (Richard M Gamble, The War For Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), p. 76)

If this sounds exceptionally modern, as if it could have come out of the mouth of President Obama's justifying using military force for “nation building” in Afghanistan, or when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, one hundred years later, it is because Croly and his ilk have been the comprehensive shapers of an idolatry which captured the United States from the Great War onwards, and to which it is still enslaved today. It is destructive. Its fruit is evil. American Christians must repent of it, acknowledging to our shame that it was their Christian forbears who did more than anyone else to insinuate it into the warp and woof of US national life.

The election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency brought the idolatry into US foreign policy deliberately and overtly for the first time. Gamble, once again, takes up the story:

“At Arlington National Cemetery in June [1914], he [Wilson] claimed that it was America's 'duty' and 'privilege' to 'stand shoulder to shoulder to lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of freedom to all the world.' Indeed, or so he claimed on Flag Day, the American banner stood for 'the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world . . . ' and it 'has vindicated its right to be honoured by all the nations of the world and feared by none who do righteousness.' The unstated, but obvious, corollary was that other nations had a great deal to fear if they did not act righteously. (Gamble, op cit. p.87)

Looking back down through the twentieth century it is hard not to shiver in dread at this statement. President Wilson's sentiments were soon to become enshrined in national policy and have held sway for nearly one hundred years. These perverse doctrines of of a perverted Christianity, would result in thousands upon thousands going to untimely deaths. For there is nothing more deadly than a national leadership which thinks that going to war is for the good of the people it is waging war against. It becomes doubly deadly, and horribly offensive and blasphemous, when it is believed that in so doing the war-maker is doing the redemptive work of Christ.

Here is the idolatry full blown and matured in the following words of President Wilson:

“[America's] object in the world, its only reason for existence as a government was to show men the paths of liberty and of mutual serviceability, to lift the common man out of the paths, out of the slough of discouragement and even despair; set his feet upon firm ground; tell him, Here is the high road upon which you are as much entitled to walk as we are, and we will see that there is a free field and no favor, and that, as your moral qualities are and your physical powers, so will your success be. We will not let any man make you afraid, and we will not let any man do you an injustice.” (Cited in Gamble, p. 129)

But this idolatry is particularly bloody. It leads to a total war of non-compromise. When war is no longer “diplomacy by other means”, as von Clausewitz so famously asserted, it risks becoming a holy crusade. It leads to a hatred of whom you fight, an implacability, a viciousness, a refusal to compromise. The enemy becomes the wicked, and the wicked deserve only death. This is why the United States has found itself fighting ceaselessly, killing “evil men”, on every continent apart from Antarctica. History has never seen the like before.

Some may seek to console themselves believing there is a substantial difference in these things between Republicans and Democrats. There is not. Both alike agree on America's responsibility to act as a messiah and resist evil in the world with armed force. The only difference between Obama and Bush on this score is the former wants other nations to join with the United States to engage in the same holy crusade, whereas Republicans have been more likely to act alone. Thus, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was seen recently to lecture the Pakistani government on how they should deal with their enemies, hectoring it to do as the United States does. “We do it; it's time you started doing it too” was her message. This was also the not-so-subtle sub-text of Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. “We, the United States, have stood up against evil all around the world: it's time other nations did as well,” was his admonition.

For the Left in America, internationalism means trying to get other nations to follow America's lead in being a messianic nation. That is why both Democratic and Republican presidents throughout the past one hundred years have differed little: both alike have fought wars for righteousness that have had nothing to do with the defence of their own people.

Maybe an argument could be mounted which excused the United States global military involvement during World War II; possibly another could be offered for combating international communism in Korea and Vietnam. But with the dissolution of the Evil Empire, the United States just keeps finding new enemies—and this is the point. It always will. For evil exists in the world, and if, as a nation, you believe you have a divine calling to punish and stamp out evil, you will always be finding enemies, you will always be fighting someone, and you will frame it as your god-given duty, the Manifest Destiny of the nation.

When the ancient Jewish people, our covenantal forefathers, corrupted the faith into a crass nationalism; when the descendants of the Maccabees saw themselves as fighting God's holy war against the Romans; when they used this idolatrous self-righteousness to put to death the Son of God (for did not Caiaphas reason that it was politic to kill one man to defend the nation against the Romans); when they hardened their heart to the Gospel of God's free grace in Christ—at that point, their cup of iniquity became full. Unless America repents of precisely the same evil, its end will be the same. The Living God will not allow the honour of His Son to be so besmirched.

It is time, is it not, for Christians everywhere, and particularly in the United States, to seek His face and plead with Him to come forth to heal and to restore. The alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.