American Exceptionalism

If one were to begin exploring the history of ideas about America’s role in the world—it wouldn’t take long before one bumped into a conspicuous and enduring theme called ‘American exceptionalism.’ Some call it exceptionalism, some simply American nationalism, while others call it the ‘redeemer nation’ motif. Writing in the middle of the Vietnam War, historian E.L. Tuveson, in his classic 1968 Redeemer Nation, summarized it succinctly. The ‘redeemer nation’ belief, in a capsule, was this: ‘Chosen race; chosen nation; millennial-utopian destiny for mankind; a continuing war between good (progress) and evil (reaction) in which the United States is to play a starring role as world redeemer.’ Sound familiar? Yet the relationship of Christianity to this mentality is complex. On the one hand exceptionalism is a view that shapes many Americans, whether Christian or not. And on the other hand, it has come out of Christianity itself. An American scholar named John B Judis wrote a paper in 2005 that sought to trace how this happened: how Americans went from Puritan expectations about the future in the 1740s to early nationalist expectations about the future at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Judis notes that it is … not Christian religion per se, but a secularized cultural derivative of religion—a translation—which has produced the ‘chosen-people’ idea in foreign policy.

In a space of fifty to eighty years, Judis argues, the founders of the United States ‘translated Protestant millennialism into the language of American nationalism and exceptionalism. The chosen people – whom 18th Century theologian Jonathan Edwards identified with the visible saints of new England’s Congregational Churches⎯became the citizens of the United States; the millennium became a thousand-year reign of religious and civil liberty; and the adversary became English tyranny and Old World Catholicism.’

Over time the adversaries changed into the ‘savages and barbarians’ of the nineteenth century, into Autocracy and imperialism around the First World War, into Communism during the Cold War, and today into ‘enemies of freedom’.

Importantly Judis notes that it is therefore not Christian religion per se, but a secularized cultural derivative of religion—a translation—which has produced the ‘chosen-people’ idea in foreign policy.

The notion of a special calling on America as a nation has had very concrete policy implications. The belief that God has acted through American history gave rise to what Columbia University historian Anders Stephanson called ‘Destinarianism’.  Destinarianism is a sense of historical destiny: that some divine being or ideal manifests its plan in time and space, in an historical moment. Destinarianism, argues Stephanson was the cultural and intellectual undergirding of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ movements of the nineteenth century, from which came the westward expansion of the 1840s.

If you think this is dusty old history: have a look at a map of the USA in 1800, and then a look at the USA in 1860. And then calculate how many battles, deaths, and displacements took place in one of the most radical continental expansions in modern history. You’ll be blown away.  

Stephanson goes on to show how this Destinarianism heavily shaped the rationale for the US’s war with the Spanish in the 1890s, in which they invaded Cuba and the Philippines and solidified their dominance in the Americas.

Stephanson showed how it was American Destinarianism that animated President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘making the world safe for democracy’ in 1917, and even the foreign policy of the later Reagan administration.  

We could go on. And there are plenty of historians and scholars to draw upon.

When we look at the relatively recent rise of neoconservative foreign policy we see a fusing of two historical traditions. Firstly, we have this exceptionalism and nationalism discussed above, an insistence that US national interest is in the world’s best interest. And secondly, we have an offshoot of the realist tradition: a relishing of the so-called ‘realities’ of power politics, an acceptance that violence, warfare, and whatever other means necessary are inevitable in the prosecution of national interest.  Inherent in this is a spurning of high moral approaches to foreign policy because of the risk of unintended consequences. We have then a curious mixture of power-political realism and exceptionalist idealism: and this is by no means a placid mixture.

So are the crazy Christians to blame?

Well at no point does neoconservatism purport to be Christian. Yet in the post 9/11 years, we have seen an all too easy alliance between Christians and this neoconservative and ultra-nationalist foreign policy agenda.

In order to address this, we need to take account of one more layer in the equation. That is, the worldview of so-called ‘fundamentalist’ evangelicalism, which has its own separate and colorful history.

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