the New Pantagruel

Why Catholics Should Be Wary of “One Nation under God” : Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War

by Michael J. Baxter, C.S.C.

This article appeared in the Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2005 and an earlier version appeared in God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist, D. Brent Laytham, ed., (Brazos, 2004). Reprinted with the author’s permission.

know you’re all going to think this is crazy, but I always thought Jesus was an American.” This statement was uttered by a young woman in a seminar at the University of California at San Diego on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era. The seminar was taught by Mark Slouka, who reported the incident in an article entitled “A Year Later: Notes on America’s Intimations of Mortality.”¹ The main point of the article is that Americans think of themselves as separate from the rest of the world, that they imagine themselves living in a strange physical and metaphysical isolation, so that even after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon they had yet to come to grips with death. Americans only manage to absorb what Slouka called (in a variation on the poem by Wordsworth) “intimations of mortality,” subtle hints that history is not, as they suppose, of their own making, under their own control. But such intimations are fleeting; they pass, allowing them to remove themselves from the filth, the rotted flesh, and the smoldering bones of the world beyond these shores. Thus, in the year following September 11, 2001, Americans dealt with the reality of death in their usual way: by denying it. “We erased it,” he observed, “carted it off in trucks. It had nothing to do with us. There was nothing to learn. We were still innocent, apart.”²

What makes Americans so resilient in their denial of death? This is where Slouka’s article is most insightful. It is, in a phrase, American exceptionalism, the myth of “America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation.”³ It is this myth of exceptionalism that the young woman articulated in the seminar that day. And this same myth, Slouka observes, has been articulated by a host of better known actors in American history: from John Winthrop, who in 1630 sermonized that the people sailing aboard the Arbella had been chosen for a special covenant with God to be “as a City upon a hill”; to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century best-selling author who in 1854 wrote that “the whole world has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by god to advance a cause of liberty and justice”; to the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, who envisioned an America “bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium”; and to President Ronald Reagan, who drew on Winthrop’s city-on-a-hill image for his first inaugural address in 1981. Slouka argues that “although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it—however secularized and given over to Mammon—remained intact.⁴ America’s national myth of exceptionalism is, so to speak, still Christian after all these years.

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