Constantino Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington, 1865, fresco, US Capitol rotunda. HooverStreetStudios. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-NC 2.0
The United States Is Not the Hope of the World
SUMMARY
If history is the scene of the unfolding of the good will of God, in which all wrongs shall be made right, and if this consummate hope of setting all things to rights has begun in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, then to wed this hope to America—indeed to any nation-state—is to bastardize the hope. And if the church of God’s people in America is not to further propagate such a bastardized hope, then it must be neither prostitute nor chaplain. But more, the church must tell the truth and make clear the implications of the gospel: that the United States of America, even with all of its beauties, is not the hope of the world.
EXPOSITION
In his First Inaugural Address of 1801, Thomas Jefferson referred to the United States as the “the world’s best hope.” Abraham Lincoln, in his 1862 report on the state of the union, called the preservation of the union of the United States through the Civil War “the last best hope of earth.” Woodrow Wilson would see the United States entry into World War I as vitally important for the unfolding of human history, and in naive, idealistic anticipation of the biblical hope, insisted that the war would be the “war to end all wars.” More pointedly, following the war, Wilson repeatedly said America would “save the world.”1
I have lived to see a day in which, after saturating myself most of my life in the history and traditions of America, I seem suddenly to see the culmination of American hope and history—all the orators seeing their dreams realized, if their spirits are looking on; all the men who spoke the noblest sentiments of America heartened with the sight of a great Nation responding to and acting upon those dreams, and saying, “At last, the world knows America as the savior of the world!”2
And in his 2019 State of the Union address, President Donald Trump insisted, “We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America’s destiny—that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!”3
Alongside the Republican Lincoln, the Democrat Wilson, and the Republican Trump we can add all manner of others, such as the Democrat Beto O’Rourke in his recent announcement of his candidacy for president: “The only way for us to live up to the promise of America is to give it our all and to give it for all of us. We are truly now more than ever the last great hope of Earth.”4 Or as the Democrat secretary of state Madeleine Albright said, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”5
Against such messianic pretense, displayed by both the American Left and the American Right, our hearts must be schooled and steeled. We must insist that such logic betrays the gospel, for in employing such logic America has laid upon itself the mantle of redemption, which is rightfully only laid upon, taken up by, the Holy Trinity.
“Hope” is first and foremost a theological category, and when such theological categories are exploited for the sake of the nation-state, hope has been bastardized.
We must not make such judgments out of hatred. We must root out condescension. There must be no “haters” among us. We must learn to love all that is beautiful and true and good about America and rightfully celebrate it all. Moreover, if we take seriously the prophetic voice as primarily an inside voice, and the kerygmatic voice as our outside voice, careful rhetorical judgment, careful strategic judgments must be made.
In any case, we must not reduce such observations to mere semantic arguments about a profligate use of the word hope. In any sort of nonultimate sense, hope may be an altogether helpful and appropriate term. We might rightly hope for peace among nations. We might rightly hope for the reduction of violence in our cities. We might rightly hope for the easing of partisan hostilities in our country. We might even rightfully hope that America might make global or domestic contributions to the reduction of hostilities or even to making durable peace in any given situation of conflict.
But when hope is used in an ultimate sense, it is a different matter. When we speak of the direction of history, the ultimate purpose of humankind, the meaning of life—when we speak of such ultimate concerns in terms of hope, we deny the most basic tenets of the gospel by claiming that the United States is the “last best hope of earth.”
Returning again to Woodrow Wilson speaking a century ago following the “Great War” which was to be the “war to end all wars,” he unashamedly ties together war making, redemption, America, and hope:
Every mother knows that her pride in the son that she lost is due to the fact, not that he helped to beat Germany, but that he helped to save the world. It was that light the other people saw in the eyes of the boys that went over there, that light as of men who see a distant horizon, that light as of men who have caught the gleam and inspiration of a great cause, and the armies of the United States seemed to those people on the other side of the sea like bodies of crusaders come out of a free nation to give freedom to their fellows, ready to sacrifice their lives for an idea, for an ideal, for the only thing that is worth living for, the spiritual purpose of redemption that rests in the hearts of mankind.6
Such high and noble rhetoric, we must learn to say again and again, is hope bastardized.
“In the 1940s, what could incite otherwise law-abiding white Christian Americans,” asks Martin Marty, “to treat a group of fellow white Christian citizens like this?”
In Nebraska, one member of this group was castrated.
In Wyoming, another member was tarred and feathered.
In Maine, six members were reportedly beaten.
In Illinois, a caravan of group members was attacked.
In other states sheriffs looked the other way as people assaulted group members.
The group’s meeting places were also attacked.
Members of the group were commonly arrested and then imprisoned without being charged.7
The offending group? The Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their offense? They had circulated various pamphlets the likes of one titled Reasons Why a True Follower of Jesus Christ Cannot Salute a Flag. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1940 that schoolchildren could be compelled to salute the flag. The Jehovah’s Witnesses would have none of it. And so they received their measure of retaliatory violence.
This case highlights the fact that we are not here dealing with mere semantic arguments. We also are not dealing with matters of mere intellect. These are matters of practice, of formation—what we do and how we do it shape our appetites, our desires, and the pitter-patter of our hearts.
William Cavanaugh ironically notes that “ritually putting one’s hand over one’s heart and reciting a pledge of allegiance to a piece of cloth endowed with totemic powers” has been thought not to be a religious practice.8 Neither Cavanaugh nor I am interested in necessarily making the case that the Pledge is a religious practice (simply because of the intellectual complexity in actually defining religion), though I find such a proposal fascinating. Here I am more interested in simply noting the ways in which oaths to the nation-state—and the sort of implicit hope entailed thereby, hope in the nation as savior—legitimate certain forms of violence (which is the task that Cavanaugh takes up at great length and in an immensely helpful way).
Because the United States has a policy of the nonestablishment of religion, we Christians in America have too often falsely assumed that the nation-state cannot be an idol. But idolatry is not merely an act of bowing down, of falsely making a self-conscious religious act of prostration or worship. Central to the practice of idolatry is giving ultimate status to some power that does not rightly wield such status. It is a practice that shapes our allegiance, our appetites, and our desires. It is a practice that engenders our sense of security, our sense of neighborliness, our sense of who our enemies are, and our sense of where to build walls and when to build them.
And the biblical witness exhibits on more than one occasion the sorts of consequences that come to those who challenge imperialist conceits. The tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—their imperialist-given names—in the book of Daniel displays the social humiliation and threat of death heaped on those who will not bend the knee to the idolatrous empire. Even today the Jehovah’s Witnesses—who refuse to pledge allegiance to any nation-state—have been designated an extremist group and are suffering arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and in some cases torture in Russia.9 And one wonders, what if Daniel’s story had been told more steadfastly alongside the case of the Christian Colin Kaepernick, who sought to bear nonviolent witness to his own convictions? In what ways did an idolatrous nationalism engender the sort of visceral contempt evoked by the Christian Colin Kaepernick kneeling instead of standing—as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had stood instead of kneeling?
With all this in mind, consider the US Capitol. When Abraham Lincoln was calling the United States the “last best hope of the earth,” when Lincoln had insisted that the unity of the federation of states required a war that would kill 600,000, at just this time was the dome of the US Capitol being painted with the Apotheosis of Washington, a depiction of the founder of the nation-state among the gods.
Washington sits in the heavens, exalted among the gods and goddesses, himself becoming one of them, an apotheosis. It is clearly allegorical, but allegories matter. Allegories matter as much as the bedtime stories and fables we read our children matter. They are powerful forms of shaping both the personal and social psyche. They are powerful means of legitimating forms of social and political power.
There are significant academic subdisciplines that study the manner in which pagan storytelling legitimated certain sets of social relations and forms of social power. For example, the ancient Babylonian creation myth, by telling a tale of a violent and bloody creation of the universe in which humankind was created to serve the gods, legitimated the enslavement of the masses of the populace to serve the few powerful men who represented the gods.
Constantino Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington, 1865, fresco, US Capitol rotunda. HooverStreetStudios. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-NC 2.0
If paganism does, in some such way, give divine sanction to social structures, give transcendent endorsement to the forays of the powerful, then perhaps the Apotheosis of Washington is more pagan than we might like to consider. We have Washington among the goddess Victoria, representing Victory, and the Goddess of Liberty. Arrayed between them are thirteen maidens, representing the original thirteen colonies, some with their backs to Washington, perhaps representing the rebelling colonies. Above Washington’s head is this: E Pluribus Unum. This assertion of “out of many, one” served as one piece of the ideological justification for the civil war then under way.
For the apostle Paul, E Pluribus Unum was a consequence of the baptism of water and the Spirit into Christ; for Lincoln and the Apotheosis of Washington, E Pluribus Unum was a consequence of the baptism of blood and slaughter into the Union. Thus it is appropriate that directly beneath Washington is Columbia, goddess of war, with her raised sword and a shield that looks like an early model for Captain America’s comic book shield, she trampling upon her enemies. The gods and goddesses of agriculture, science, commerce, mechanics, and the seas likewise are depicted, the various sources of American power, ingenuity, and accomplishment.
During this same era, of course, was the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” popularized, divinizing the military might of the federal forces. Note it is the “Battle Hymn.” First published in 1862, the hymn originally, and throughout its patriotic history in the republic, has served as a public liturgical performance in which “the Lord” is made manifest in the fire and fury of the US military.10 The rhetoric of the sacred, the affect of the melody and harmonies and climactic “Hallelujahs!” and the social and historical contexts of this liturgy all combine for a profound and moving formation of both the private and the public self: that America and its military triumphs are manifestation of the triumph of God in the world, a foretaste of the consummation of the end of history.
Within a few decades of the painting of Washington’s Apotheosis and the publication of the “Battle Hymn,” the senator and historian Albert Beveridge said this, speaking before the US Senate:
God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigned. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you rule over many things.”11
Beveridge is insistent that the Constitution, in the doctrine of implied powers, “affirm[s] this essential and imperial power.”12 But more in our concern here is the continued manner in which Beveridge conflates his vision of American imperialist glory with the “divine mission,” even employing the language of “great commission”:
What shall history say of us? Shall it say that we renounced that holy trust, left the savage to his base condition, the wilderness to the reign of waste, deserted duty, abandoned glory, forget our sordid profit even? . . . Shall it say that, called by events to captain and command the proudest, ablest, purest race of history in history’s noblest work, we declined that great commission? . . . No!13
In Senator Beveridge’s statement, says historian Ernest Lee Tuveson, “in capsule form are the elements of the idea I have called ‘the redeemer nation.’ Chosen race, chosen nation; millennial-utopia 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.”14
Let our would-be Christian eyes be opened to such idolatry and our prophetic voice set free to denounce it.
But some may ask, Where is the harm in such hopefulness? Is it not simple academic snobbery to pick at the use of the biblical visions in US political rhetoric?
At least three responses are important at this juncture. First, the harm is in the social propagation of falsehoods. It simply is not true that America is the hope of the world. Getting at the truth is always and undoubtedly a slippery and challenging matter. But to accept the cavalier use of language, the lax employment of lies, and the casual use of fake news, the careless use of theological constructs, we Christians must reconfigure one of our primary contributions to the world first as this: to speak the truth, to let our yes be yes, and our no be no. To say things as we see them without a shred of hatred in our hearts but always to speak truthfully. It simply is not true that America is the hope of the world.
Second, the harm is in the death and destruction. To take on messianic visions and wed these visions with imperial might and military force is to embrace a violent zeal against all those whom one counts as Canaanites, as those who are not us. If we are the chosen people, then others are not. The “other” then becomes the target of our violence and contempt. They become the legitimate targets seen in the dispossession of the people from this land, our fire-bombing of cities, our employment of torture, our dropping of the A-bomb, our harsh policies of exclusion.
Much scholarship has made clear, for example, the correlation between such messianic visions of American history and the genocide against Native Americans.15 As the Europeans, newly come to the Americas, are to Israel, so the indigenous population are to the ancient Canaanites, and thus the Native Americans become the target of the genocidal wrath of the new Israel.
(Thus in the US Capitol one also finds the momentous mural painted by Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. Twenty by thirty feet in the House of Representatives, Leutze’s vision, also painted in the opening years of the Civil War, depicts a valley of darkness and a valley of light, America and its explorers as agents realizing the manifest destiny of the westward expansion of the United States. Leutze and apparently the nineteenth-century US government had no problem with the use of the term empire, painted as it is on the walls of the Capitol itself.)
Third, the harm is in failing to comprehend the new possibilities made possible in the Christian vision and witness: the hope of the world is not dependent on any geographically bounded nation-state, not dependent on any king or prime minister or president, any congress or supreme court. It is dependent on a God who has revealed the ways of suffering love, vindicated in the resurrection, and now calling together a people not bounded by geographical boundaries, a people who will sow the seeds of such hope and possibility into the rich soil of human possibilities.
All this leads us to yet one more myth that must be rejected if would-be Christians in America would regain their political witness: the United States is not and never was a Christian nation.
1. On Wilson saying “save the world”: he uses this phrase with regard to America in a number of speeches following World War I. Addresses of President Wilson: Addresses Delivered by President Wilson on His Western Tour, September 4 to September 25, 1919 . . . etc. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919). “America, if I may say it without offense to great peoples for whom I have a profound admiration on the other side of the water, is the only national idealistic force in the world, and idealism is going to save the world” (147); “America—the constructive force in the world, the people who have done the most advanced thinking in the world, and the people who, God helping them, will lead and save the world” (174); he explicitly ties together the social function of hope, America, and the salvific nature of hope in America as well: “Throughout America you have got a conducting medium. You do not put forth an American idea and find it halted by this man or that or the other . . . but it spreads, it spreads by the natural contact of similar ideas and similar ambitions and similar hopes. For my fellow citizens, the only thing that lifts the world is hope. The only thing that can save the world is such arrangements as will convince the world that hope is not altogether without foundation” (205). A digitized version of the book is available at https://archive.org/details/addressesofpresi00wilsuoft.
Similarly, see Woodrow Wilson, The Hope of the World: Messages and Addresses [. . .] (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), another collection of speeches made following WWI in which the theme of the “hope of the world” plays repeatedly.
2. Addresses of President Wilson, 206.
3. “President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address,” Whitehouse.gov, February 5, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address-2.
4. Beto O’Rourke, quoted in Brian Schwartz, “Beto O’Rourke Enters 2020 Presidential Race,” CNBC, March 14, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/beto-orourke-enters-2020-presidential-race.html. My thanks to Tracy Hester for drawing my attention to this quote.
5. Madeline Albright, quoted in Bob Herbert, “In America; War Games,” New York Times, February 22, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/22/opinion/in-america-war-games.html. My thanks to Rebecca Frazier for drawing this remarkable assertion to my attention. The State Department archive puts the language slightly differently, but the import is the same: “Let me say that we are doing everything possible so that American men and women in uniform do not have to go out there again. It is the threat of the use of force and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.” Madeline Albright, interview by Matt Lauer, Today Show, February 19, 1998, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.
6. Addresses of President Wilson, 275.
7. Martin E. Marty, with Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 23, quoted in William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181–82. Cavanaugh recounts this story and then notes: “One would think that the lesson Marty would draw from this story would be a warning against the violence of zealous nationalism. Astonishingly, the punch line of the story is a warning about the dangers of religion in public.”
8. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 182.
9. Marlo Safi, “Religious Persecution in Russia: A Jehovah’s Witness on Trial,” National Review, May 13, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/religious-persecution-in-russia-a-jehovahs-witness-on-trial. And Scott Simon, “Opinion: Jehovah’s Witnesses Cling to Faith Despite Arrests in Russia,” NPR, February 23, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/02/23/697234127/opinion-jehovahs-witnesses-cling-to-faith-despite-arrests-in-russia.
10. “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 52 (February 1862):10, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic#/media/File:Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic.jpg. My thanks to my colleague Robert Chandler for pointing me on numerous occasions to the manner in which such rhetoric of the sacred has operated in American discourse.
11. Senator Albert Beveridge, “Policy regarding the Philippines,” U.S. Congressional Record—Senate, January 9, 1900, 711, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1900-pt1-v33/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1900-pt1-v33.pdf.
12. Beveridge, “Policy regarding the Philippines.”
13. Beveridge, “Policy regarding the Philippines.”
14. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), vii–viii.
15. Two examples: Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), and George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).