August 22, 2007

America is a religious idea. America is a biblical (not secular) republic. Americanism is a biblical (not civil) religion. America and Americanism were shaped by Christianity, especially Puritan Christianity. Puritan Christianity was shaped by the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. The idea that liberty, equality and democracy were ordained by God for all mankind, and that America is a new promised land richly blessed by and deeply indebted to God—that is Americanism.

— David Gelernter, “Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion”

This captures the heart of David Gelernter’s important new book, “Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion” (Doubleday, 2007). And I do mean “heart,” for Gelernter’s book is no dispassionate essay on the meaning of America. Rather, with all the zeal of a Southern Baptist preacher at a summer revival meeting, Gelernter expounds his understanding of the American Gospel.

Gelernter unabashedly adopts biblical language to introduce the reader to terms such as “American Zionism” (the idea that America is a chosen people in a promised land), the “American Creed” (consisting of the “three-point sermon” of liberty, equality and democracy) and “Biblical Republic” (seeing the American Creed as more rooted in the Bible than the Enlightenment). In short, “The American religion is a biblical faith. In effect, it is an extension or expression of Judaism or Christianity.”

Gelernter, of course, is not the first in recent years to articulate the meaning of America in religious language. Michael Novak (“On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding,” 2003); Samuel Huntington (“Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity,” 2004); and Neil Baldwin (“The American Revelation: The Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War,” 2005), among others, have sought to highlight the religious ideals that animate America. Where Gelernter’s contribution is unique is in the evangelistic note he strikes:

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 and their biblical origins…and to make them real in a functioning nation. But Americanism goes further, to declare that these three principles are not the exclusive property of Americans or Christians or believers in God or descendants of white Europeans. According to the American religion, they belong to all mankind, and Americans have a duty not merely to preach but to bring them to all mankind.

And, according to Gelernter, bring them we have. With a sweeping view of American history beginning with the Puritan colonists and proceeding through the Revolution, Civil War, World War I, Cold War and our current fight against Islamic radicalism, Gelernter seeks to demonstrate the development of Americanism and its expansion for the world’s good.