Unseen hand of religion extends America's reach

1 Comment | Insight on the News, Nov 5, 2001 | by Robert H. Nelson

President George W. Bush wondered in his Sept. 20 address to Congress, "Why do they hate us?" A first impulse is to consider economic factors -- to believe that terrorism must be bred by poverty and deprivation. But Osama bin Laden was born into fabulous wealth and most of the airline hijackers had better economic prospects than their countrymen. It also can't be about just jealousy of American political and economic power in the post-Cold War era.

Until the World Trade Center towers were hit, anti-Americanism was thriving from France to China -- not just in the Middle East. No more. Now it seems that the real reasons lay in religion: The common view in the Islamic world that America is a dangerous competitor.

Islam and Christianity are almost unique among world religions in having billions of followers, in seeking to convert the whole world and in maintaining a continuing vitality. Indeed, the two faiths have been rivals for fully 14 centuries. For the first 1,000 years Islam was advancing; although the crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, they were expelled by 1187. In the last 300 years, however, as Christianity has emerged ascendant, the Islamic world increasingly has felt distressed and deflated.

As Bernard Lewis, a respected scholar of Islam at Princeton, explains: For many Muslims the success of the West has been "too much to endure" and led inevitably to an "outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society and finally violated the sanctuary of his home" with subversive ideas.

As there is increasing interaction between the West and Islam in the months ahead, we need to understand the religious underpinnings of our own civilization. The political and economic history of America is incomprehensible without its Judeo-Christian origins. The spread of secular and modern ideas in the last 200 years has not ended Judeo-Christian influences as much as transformed them into new and partially disguised "modern" forms. Many people who formally think they have renounced the institutional churches of America still are unknowingly wedded strongly to the Judeo-Christian heritage.

Although the exertion of American power may not seem a religious act to most Americans, the lack of a state church does not necessarily mean the absence of a religious mission. The United States is a religious challenge to Islamic countries simply by virtue of the contents of American civilization. G.K. Chesterton once commented that the United States is "a nation with the soul of a church." Michael Novak, a scholar of religion at the American Enterprise Institute, explained that the separation of church and state meant that "no one church was allowed to become the official guardian of the central symbols of the United States. Instead, the nation itself began to fill the vacuum where in many cultures a church would be. The nation became its own unifying symbol system, the chief bestower of identity and purpose." Indeed, it was important in many situations to understand that "America conducts itself like a religion."

In the 1950s the sociologist of religion Will Herberg famously noted that Americans were quite accepting and tolerant with respect to the contents of their various "official" religions. President Dwight Eisenhower understood that "our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." However, as Herberg also noted, Americans were "unashamedly `intolerant'" with respect to their belief in "the American way of life," and others have used terms such as "the religion of the republic" or "the civil religion of America." This belief in America, as Herberg found, and whatever it is called, provides "the framework in terms of which the crucial values of American existence are couched. By every realistic criterion the American way of life is the operative faith of the American people."

The prophets and saints of the American religion are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and other central figures of U.S. history. It is not a departure from the Judeo-Christian heritage but a recasting of this heritage in a new and now secular form. Following Lincoln's assassination, as Allen Guelzo recently argued, he "was compared to Washington, to Moses. And almost irresistibly, he was compared to Jesus Christ." He had given his life to save America.

In the "bible" of the American civil religion the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and other founding documents from the period of the American Revolution provide an "old testament"; the history of the Civil War and of Lincoln's ultimate sacrifice serve as a "new testament."

With fluid denominational lines, and with the Protestant dominance of American public life, it was not difficult for the Protestant churches of the nation to accommodate themselves to the American civil religion. For the Roman Catholic Church, however, matters were more complicated. America was not only a secular state but also potentially a religious competitor. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII in 1899 condemned a rising tide of "Americanism" within the Catholic Church.