CHAPTER 11         

ENDURING CHALLENGES

Each tradition’s teaching of chosenness contains an aspirational quality. It presents an invitation to examine one’s attunement to divine purposes, with a humility that stands as the beginning of self-critical faith. Particular voices, historical and contemporary, have sought a sense of their essential role in God’s unfolding plan without assuming that everyone else stood against it. They discerned a global perspective that did not require taking over the world. They found compelling teachings within the matrix of election—teachings that endowed their efforts with meaning, nurtured hope, sewed their community together, and shaped their culture. Yet the dangers of chosenness remain. Hateful expressions and oppressive applications are still cultivated in the soil of election.

One objective of this book is to demonstrate that the dangers are not all located among extremists. The drives that feed chosenness are so fundamental that even those who resist denigrating religious difference sometimes struggle in the inescapable co-formation of self and other. Groupishness and bias seem hard-wired into the human psyche. The desire to mold a community in particular ways is integral to religious instruction and it invites the exercise of power. Election also bursts the bounds of religion to find compelling expression in nationalism, with attendant politicization and racialization of religious difference.

This chapter explores contemporary expressions that demonstrate the continuing volatility of chosenness in the Abrahamic traditions and in American exceptionalism. Some of the examples come from the margins, but they are growing in power, numbers, and visibility. In these reactionary times, it becomes increasingly important to shine a light on such manifestations and on the voices that rise to contest them.

JUDAISM

The first chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), cautioned that “the narrow-mindedness that leads one to see whatever is outside the bounds of one’s own people . . . as ugly and defiled is a terrible darkness that causes general destruction to the entire edifice of spiritual good.”¹ Making a place for Jewish particularity without bias against non-Jews, aspiring toward chosenness through a life of Torah and righteousness, he believed Judaism cultivated divine sensitivity toward the absolute good. Still, his perspective did not escape chauvinism: “It is a fundamental error for us to retreat from our distinctive excellence, to cease recognizing ourselves as chosen for a Divine vocation. We are not only different from other nations, differentiated and set apart by a distinctive historic experience that is unlike that of all other nations, but we indeed surpass the other nations. If we shall know our greatness then we shall know ourselves, but if we forget it then we shall forget our own identity.”²

Many Jewish voices today, more rigorously committed to avoiding ideas of exceptionalism, still recognize how chosenness has been vital to the continuing existence of Jews and Judaism. Like Kook, they build on historical themes.³ They may emphasize the humility that chosenness should inculcate, as well as a sense of undeservedness that traces back to the narratives of Genesis.⁴ Or, as in the story of Babel, they see it unfolding within a celebration of mutually enriching, divinely ordained diversity. Similar to ancient midrashim, some see Jews as the choosing rather than the chosen people.⁵ Or, like Rabbi Greenberg, who was quoted in chapter 8, they affirm that God calls many peoples, each in unique relationship. The prophet Amos (9:7), Saadiah Gaon, and Moses Maimonides said as much long ago.

There is certainly much more critical examination of chosenness in contemporary Jewish discourse than in previous eras. Jewish Emancipation, the late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century development in which Jews were awarded citizenship rights and legal disabilities were removed, contributed substantially to this growth. As Jews became increasingly integrated into society with a variety of religious others, the other became more familiar. A classic 1966 edition of Commentary magazine posed five questions to leading Jewish thinkers of the day. One of them wrestled with the meaning and validity of chosenness. Responses ranged from classical defenses to that of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, who was prepared to forfeit chosenness as a theological conviction. Kaplan believed that it promoted self-infatuation, and that the correlate concept of “mission” promoted religious imperialism. In its place, he suggested the idea of vocation—a call to establish truth and goodness for which Jews and others strive. He stripped traditional references to chosenness out of the Reconstructionist movement’s liturgy. What began, he imagined, as a psychological defense against persecution ultimately bred prejudice among Jews and resentment among the nations.⁶

His fears were not unfounded. The previous chapters relate multiple examples of both concerns. An alarming expression of contemporary Jewish bias can be found in Torat haMelech (The King’s Torah), a racist tract published in 2009 by two right-wing ultra-orthodox Israeli rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. The text tries to build halakhic arguments for distinguishing the value of Jewish life over others, for denying housing and employment to Arabs and migrant workers, and for encouraging acts of revenge. They do not explicitly name chosenness as justification, but it is deeply embedded there.⁷ While their opinions are extreme, they help fuel an increasingly powerful group of ideological settlers in the West Bank and a rising tide of racism in Israel. The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), a social justice organization aligned with the Reform Movement, urged the Attorney General to indict the authors for incitement to violence, but his office has proved itself hesitant to pick a fight with rabbis. So IRAC filed a petition in the Israel Supreme Court, forcing legal action. IRAC also challenged the book on religious grounds in their publication Love the Stranger as Yourself? Racism in the Name of Halacha (2011). Jewish leaders from across the religious spectrum vehemently condemned Torat haMelech, including one yeshivah student who wrote a book-length rebuttal with carefully constructed halakhic arguments.⁸

As indispensable as these critiques are, it is facile to assume that problematic versions of chosenness today always belong to those “other” Jews, such as ideological settlers on the West Bank, without seeing how they also float closer to home. Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer acknowledged that a sense of Jewish superiority can still appear in progressive Jewish subcultures: “I discovered this from listening to Christians condemn other Christians for their antisemitism. After renouncing the theology those ‘others’ believe, they would then reveal, in much subtler form, the same prejudices.” Her encounter with religious others, “self-critically but lovingly engaged with the breadth of their traditions and communities,” deepened her perspective on her own.⁹

The dangerous linkage of chosenness to conquest may be more contained on the extreme, but it remains salient. Even though rabbinic circumscription of conquest shaped an ethos in which most Jews understand chosenness in wholly different terms, their hermeneutic solution merely postponed the problems until the messianic era. (Messianism, of course, could stand as its own section in this volume, with the potential to inspire deep commitment to social justice and world repair, as well as violence and upheaval—often simultaneously.) The election of land and people are still linked. With the restoration of Jewish political autonomy after the founding of the modern State of Israel, the potential dangers have returned ahead of schedule.

Most nineteenth-century Zionist thinkers were secular in orientation and specifically rejected the notion of the Jewish homeland as a messianic fulfillment of election; they strove instead for “normalcy” as a national liberation movement in the age of nationalism.¹⁰ They were driven by ongoing persecution of Jews, alongside abiding attachment to the land of Israel as the only national home Jews had ever known. A minority, however, saw God’s hand in bringing about messianic redemption through the unwitting vehicle of secular Zionism. Ascribing to the latter opinion did not necessarily mean promoting military aggression. Prominent orthodox Zionists, including Rabbi Kook, insisted that human participation in the messianic drama must be conducted without initiating violence—even as they rejected the passive waiting modeled by rabbis of old and some of their non-Zionist peers.¹¹ They grappled with the serious challenges of a Judaism that again could wield political power and echoed the prophetic charge that chosenness entails a standard of ethical and spiritual excellence rather than entitlement.

Rabbi Kook’s son (R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, 1891–1982), however, helped to transform and radicalize a branch of messianic religious Zionism. Stimulated by the global rise of fundamentalism as well as regional political developments, various ultranationalist orthodox groups took shape. Their numbers are relatively small, but their influence grows. As they endow the political state and its army with holiness, conquest becomes reinscribed within election. Rabbi Zvi Tau’s (b. 1936) theology is emblematic: “From the perspective of faith we see the divine hand spread over us, and especially over our wars. It leads us to recognize the righteousness of our actions and our wars and their indispensability, not only for us but for all the nations! . . . The wars of Israel are essentially wars against war, for whoever rises up against Israel rises up against the light of God in the world, which is the supernal peace!”¹²

With Orwellian logic, Tau strips out any capacity for self-critical examination. The interests of the state become the interests of the world, authorized by God. Again, this reading of election prompted vociferous opposition, both secular and religious. Other orthodox thinkers, like Yeshayahu Leibowitz, warned against the idolatry of turning the state into an absolute that overrides moral judgment and worship of God.¹³ Religious Zionist groups working for peace, such as Oz veShalom-Netivot Shalom and Meimad, insisted that chosenness requires rigorous ethical principles that restrict the use of violence and strive for a “purity of arms.”¹⁴

Such a brief discussion cannot do justice to the diversity and complexity of Zionism, and there is no straight line from the ancient texts to the realities of Middle East politics. The ultranationalist voice is lifted up here simply to illustrate that the problems of chosenness are never cured; they are only treated. Rabbis of the classical era provided a way to decouple chosenness from conquest long ago, but hermeneutical movement does not travel in only one direction. Contemporary voices who argue passionately against interpretations that legitimate violence and discrimination cannot prevent others from promoting them. Neither can the longstanding precedent of more enlightened readings in biblical and rabbinic literature, or the rich development of a peace tradition, completely thwart the will to power.

Nor can we claim that progressive voices are the “true” expressions of the traditions while all the oppressive ones are “false.” That would be a type of the reductionist analysis of religion that I contested at the start. But self-critique necessarily includes explicit opposition to dangerous interpretations and must continue to provide alternative understandings. Precisely because chosenness is so powerful a concept, and because it has been essential to Jewish survival, those who see its problems cannot respond by abandoning the concept altogether. As Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibowitz wrote: “It would be unwise to allow sole custody over this volatile idea to zealots of any persuasion. The idea of chosenness is too deeply ingrained in us to be overlooked, patronized, or definitively repealed. Whether or not we believe that the descendants of Abraham were singled out, in perpetuity, by God, and whether or not we find this to be an outlandish, if not offensive, notion—no matter what, we must grapple with it, for it is, behind our backs, grappling with us.”¹⁵

ISLAM

Contemporary Islam also continues to exhibit diverse perceptions of religious others, ranging from polemical to pluralistic. These responses are not driven solely by religious influences, but also by intellectual, political, and social developments—from the epistemological revolution to the rise of individualism, from European colonialism to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, from the birth of the State of Israel to the Arab Spring, from the terror campaign of Al Qaeda to the dramatic expansion of the interfaith movement after September 11, 2001.

Historically European antisemitic tropes have migrated into the Arab and global Muslim world, with new blood libels and copious printings of the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.¹⁶ Geopolitical and cultural conflicts are sometimes drawn in classical form, with the West cast as a reincarnation of the Crusaders and the rise of secularism decried as jahiliyya (the period of religious “ignorance” in pre-Islamic Arabia).¹⁷ Although this analysis arose in Muslim-majority countries, it had certain appeal among immigrant Muslims communities in the West who were anxious about assimilation as well as international politics. Marcia Hermansen has expressed concern about the rise of “Identity” Islam among second-generation American Muslims, with “rigid rejection of ‘the Other’” overtaking genuine spirituality and self-critical faith. She nonetheless acknowledged how a sense of Islam’s preeminence could be compelling: “One can well imagine the problems of Muslim youth, often isolated by having distinctive names, physical appearance, and being associated with a stigmatized culture and religion. No wonder the concept that they were actually the superior ones, fending off the corrupt and evil society around them, rang pleasant.”¹⁸

At the same time, there has also emerged an extensive collection of Muslim voices committed to constructive engagement with religious difference, building on historical foundations of tolerance, coexistence, and the recognition of common ground. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sought to invoke the vibrant crosscultural aspects of la convivencia in calling his proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan “Cordoba House”—a project that was ironically torpedoed by anti-Muslim discrimination after 9/11. A Common Word, the 2009 outreach initiative to Christian communities, cited scriptural invitations for cooperation and called upon the shared values of loving God and neighbor. It was signed by hundreds of Muslim leaders and launched a range of academic, media, and public initiatives.¹⁹

Muslim writers who embrace the multifaith context regularly go back to the sources to recover a richer, thicker reading of the Other. They disavow prejudicial readings of tradition and assert the fundamental equality of all human beings. Jerusha Rhodes examined all the relevant Qur’anic verses and identified a range of dynamic, overlapping categories that yield a more complex reading of difference in Muslim tradition—mu’min, muslim, mushrik, kafir, ahl al-kitab, munafiq, ḥanif—commonly translated as “believer, submitter, associator, disbeliever, People of the Book, hypocrite and [non-denominational] monotheist.” She concluded that all claims of chosenness based on membership in an essentialized “religion” are suspect, and emphasized that Qur’an is not primarily a verdict on difference. It is a guide.²⁰ As discussed in chapter 10, numerous scholars affirm the religious value or even the theological sufficiency of other faiths. Like Abdulaziz Sachedina, they accept “the dignity of all humans as equal in creation and as equally endowed with the knowledge of and the will to do the good.”²¹

Theological pluralism is not uncontested, however. Tim Winter, for instance, took issue with Sachedina and others, arguing that they contorted the tradition in order to “harmonize the faith with the modern axiom of equality.”²² It is true that pluralist scholarship is more common in the West, where Muslims are a religious minority and equality is a fundamental cultural value. This cultural shaping of attitudes toward pluralism is also reflected in the general Muslim population, especially in the United States: Pew surveys reveal a majority of US Muslims believe that many religions can lead to eternal life, while the global median is 18 percent.²³ Although inclusive perspectives are not unanimous, they are authentic, indigenous, and profound readings of the tradition. The contemporary context merely amplifies Islam’s multivocal history, sophisticated hermeneutics, and self-critical capacity.

An even more animated conversation ensues in relation to modern Islamism, including concerns regarding conquest. Islamism refers to “those ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of ‘Islamic order’—a religious state, shari’a law, and moral codes in Muslim societies and communities.”²⁴ The rhetoric of election is embedded in a number of ways. First, Islamism seeks to reclaim “true” Islam by relying on the foundational texts of Qur’an, sunna, and hadith. Actual relationship with the accumulated store of Islamic juridical and exegetical tradition is more complex than the oratory, revealing significant continuities as well as radical breaks; nonetheless, the desire to restore the absolute primacy of the early texts undergirds Islamists’ claim to be the rightly guided ones. Second, they tend to view Islam as the “antidote to the moral bankruptcy inaugurated by Western cultural dominance from abroad, aided and abetted by corrupt Muslim rulers from within the umma.”²⁵ Islam is regarded as the curative force that can usher in a just and ethical society. While establishing religious authority through the power of the state is a key feature of Islamist politics, different from calls for personal spiritual renewal and religious reform, there are diverse emphases and strategies.

The founder of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (later the transnational Muslim Brotherhood), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), is frequently described as the father of modern Islamism. He recounts a history in which Islam arose “under the shadow of God’s banner, with the standard of the Qur’an fluttering at its head,” rescuing the world from tyranny and injustice, leading the world to Allah and to peace. In the modern age, the West is crumbling, leaving all of humanity “tormented, wretched, worried, and confused, having been scorched by the fires of greed and materialism. They are in dire need of some sweet portion of the waters of True Islam to wash from them the filth of misery and lead them to happiness.”²⁶ Even though the rhetoric is often universal, most Islamists concentrate their efforts on transforming Muslim-majority countries. Radicals who promote global jihad, like Osama bin Laden, represent a minority.

Many Islamists, however, presume that coercion and/or violence will be necessary to accomplish their goals. According to Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), an Egyptian Sunni thinker who has influenced Islamist voices both radical and moderate, “Nothing of all this is achieved through verbal advocacy of Islam. The problem is that the people in power who have usurped God’s authority on earth will not relinquish their power at the mere explanation and advocacy of the true faith.”²⁷ In a pamphlet entitled The Neglected Duty, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj (1954–1982, Egypt) cited the Qur’anic admonition, “Those who do not govern by what God has revealed are unbelievers” (5:44), to support his conviction that insurrection against irreligious Muslims rulers is imperative.²⁸

Other Islamist leaders challenge this militant approach to varying degrees. A prominent scholar among the Muslim ulama, Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926, Egypt/Qatar), compared it to the seventh-century Khariji rebels who attacked Muslim rulers when they judged their leadership insufficiently Islamic. The verdict of history is that their violent sectarianism was enormously destructive. Yet he has justified violence in other instances, specifically regarding suicide attacks against Israelis.²⁹ The Justice and Charity group in Morocco, on the other hand, renounces violence as a method of achieving political aims. A prominent leader, Nadia Yassine, characterized the original ummah as participatory, egalitarian, committed to freedom, expressive of Allah’s mercy, and governed by a deliberative philosophy of power that places sovereignty within the community.³⁰ She emphasized that Islamic law has always adapted to context, so contemporary values necessarily inform their endeavors, and she acknowledged that efforts to legislate the rightly guided path are inherently imperfect. In her primary work, Full Sails Ahead, Yassine argued for the importance of ijtihad, ongoing reason and adaptation applied to reading the sacred sources of Islam. Quoting Michel Jobert, she wrote: “Revelation is thus not a moment in history. It is continued in our efforts to find ‘the right path,’ and to make our own progress intelligible. This effort is ijtihad. It is to be performed in uncertainty and humility.”³¹

The degree of moderation is strongly associated with the political, religious, and cultural climates in which the thinkers and activists live.³² Nonetheless, there are also Islamists in places like Iran who advocate greater separation of powers and narrowing the scope of shariah, expressing concern about oppressive tactics and religious standards becoming subservient to political goals. Mohsen Kadivar, for example, maintained that religious commandments must be “just, moral, reasonable and normal” to be part of God’s eternal law; aspects of Islam that are not experienced that way in the present must be considered part of variable tradition and cannot wear the garb of absolute truth. In 2018 he was among fifteen prominent Iranians who called for a referendum on the theocratic state. Their statement reads, “The state has become the main obstacle to the progress and liberation of the Iranian nation by abusing and hiding behind religious concepts.”³³

The idea that one might fashion a society as God has asked, with a promise that it will yield justice and goodness, is compelling, but it is also fraught. While these thinkers labor to check Islamism’s most coercive tendencies, many Muslims reject all efforts to embed Islam in state governance. “Renewalists” in Southeast Asia echoed concerns about the politicization of religion and sought stronger separation of religion and state; they advocated governance based on religious pluralism, civic freedoms, and constitutional protections, citing the Medina charter as precedent.³⁴ Bassam Tibi has opposed Islamism as dangerously bound up with religious conquest: “It is a great mistake to view Islamism as liberation theology characterized by an ‘attempt to repair.’ No, it is an agenda of cultural-totalitarian purification.” He cautioned against differentiating much between those who embrace violence and those who condemn it, viewing their goal as identical—the supremacy of Islam in a theocentric universe and shariah-based social order. Yet Tibi acknowledged that Islamism in some form is popular within Muslim-majority countries.³⁵ It often appeals as grassroots resistance to ruling elites who impose Western socioeconomic models and do not represent public interests; Islamist organizations sometimes build support by offering basic social services that the state fails to provide.

The vibrancy of intellectual debate does not simply interrogate to what extent the religious notion of a chosen path might be implemented on a national level without conquest as its byproduct. It also presses a broad critical conversation about modern constructions of “Islam” both inside and outside Muslim communities.³⁶ As noted in chapter 7, the dominant (elect) culture defines itself over against others, presenting them as inferior. So the thousand-year-old discourse in “the West” that presents Islam as inherently violent, irrational, misogynistic, and antiscientific continues to be recycled. Driven by economic, cultural, and political motives, the imagery does not reflect the complex reality of Islam and Muslim history, including its substantial contributions to “Western” science, culture, and philosophy. Nor does the discourse acknowledge that secular humanism has been the reigning ideology of nations that pursue conquest and even genocide. Muslim leaders are regularly called upon to renounce the dangers of Islamism, but liberalism is not subjected to the same critique, even though it can also be accused of cultural totalitarianism and violence.³⁷

Women’s rights offer a case in point. American leaders who are not exactly advocates for feminism raged against oppression of Muslim women in order to solidify support for war against “radical Islam.” They did not demonstrate comparable anguish about continuing patriarchy, misogyny, discrimination, and violence against women in the US. They did not consult the women who lived in Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead they campaigned against the veil using age-old tropes that had helped to justify colonial domination of the Muslim world a century ago.³⁸ They trotted out native informants like Ayaan Hirsi Ali to demonstrate that they are not bigoted against Islam.³⁹ Western ideas of women’s liberation, however, fail to recognize the possibility of agency within religious observance. And secular values can be just as oppressive, increasingly evident as European states legislate what Muslim women cannot wear (niqab, hijab, etc.) in the name of women’s equality.⁴⁰ Even Muslim feminists who mirror liberalism’s idea of political and social equality, excavating indigenous resources for the cause, are forced to struggle against the false dichotomy between secular freedom and religious domination.⁴¹

CHRISTIANITY

Scholars have sometimes pointed to Christianity’s negative images of Jews and Muslims, along with its history of violence and discriminatory legislation, in looking for the roots of modern antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias. Although these hatreds are often expressed in secular ways, many of the old religious figures continue to be deployed and there are archetypes of otherness (legalism, carnality, exoticism, etc.) that are difficult to dislodge.⁴² It cannot be a coincidence that Jews—Christianity’s paradigmatic “other” for centuries—are the targets of 59 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US, while they represent only 2 percent of the population.⁴³ When white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and when Robert Bowers murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018), many Christians agonized about how their faith contributes to the hate.

The precise role of religion is rarely clear. Christian relations with Muslims and Islam, for example, are complicated by a history of military conflict and the current war on terror, the legacy of colonialism, economic agendas, current events, the residual impact of historical polemics, and other factors. Contemporary racial and political issues, however, are frequently filtered through the lens of religious ideology and conflict, with special intensity after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent US invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this volatile context, religious responses of American Christians range broadly, reflecting the same contrast we have seen in contemporary Jewish and Muslim ideas about religious difference. While white evangelical Christians largely supported President Trump’s anti-Muslim policies, mainline Christians of all races were out on the front lines protesting the “travel ban.”⁴⁴ Christians who embrace the clash of civilizations paradigm often perpetuate the vilest of medieval anti-Muslim bigotries, and help fuel a media engine of fear about terrorism, shariah law and “civilizational jihad” to destroy America from within.⁴⁵ At the same time, other Christians reach out to build bridges of understanding and cooperation with Muslim communities, contesting the racialized image of the Muslim “other.”⁴⁶

Efforts to undo the legacy of hostility are not new. The World Council of Churches, in its first assembly in 1948, denounced antisemitism as a sin against God that is irreconcilable with Christian faith. Denominational statements repudiating the teaching of contempt and denouncing anti-Judaism/antisemitism abound, including the “Relationship Between the United Church of Christ and the Jewish Community” (1987), the Episcopal Church’s “Guidelines for Christian-Jewish Relations” (1988), and “Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church to the Jewish Community” (1994). Official religious bodies also issued statements seeking to heal Muslim-Christian relations, with urgent declarations against Islamophobia in the last decade.

Christian scholars have developed (and critiqued and revised multiple times) a tripartite theological framework for thinking about other religions—exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist—that tends to focus on a central Christian question: can non-Christians be saved?⁴⁷ While there are lifestances with different questions or no need to explain religious diversity, the categories can be useful in Christian theology. Pluralist perspectives draw on a variety of Christian conceptions, including the multiplicity of a triune God, the manifold ways in which the Holy Spirit works in the world, an emphasis on the multiple perspectives within the New Testament and early Christianity, faith in God’s continuing power of creative transformation, and celebration of God incarnate in the riotous diversity of creation.⁴⁸ They tend to be less invested in questions of election than exclusivist and inclusivist attitudes, which can vary among and within denominations but tend to hew closely to historical dogmatic positions.

Many Christians continue to affirm Christianity as the one true path, however, even if they do not use the language of election to salvation. Recognizing the associated issues of othering, they often pursue civic pluralism to engage constructively with religious diversity while maintaining their theological differentiation.⁴⁹ Vatican II’s Nostra aetate (1965), the most famous Catholic statement of interfaith fraternity, is an interesting example that tries to walk this middle road. The Catholic Church believes its own path is the fullest expression of God’s redeeming grace. Yet it affirms the Jewish covenant with the assertion in Romans 11:29 that God does not revoke divine promises, and expresses regard for Muslims by delineating ways in which Islam approximates Christian teaching:

They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.⁵⁰

By grounding the work of reconciliation deeply in the soil of Christian values, the proclamation cannot avoid the mutual construction of self and other. It also continues to privilege theistic traditions. The goal is clearly respectful coexistence, but the tendency to interpret religious difference in our own categories also perpetuates more subtle forms of othering.

With serious commitment to ongoing self-critique, confessional Christian scholars call out the problems within such constructions. Caryn Riswold cautioned how Christian privilege also distorts academic study and teaching of religion; it is a fundamentally Christian construct that defines categories, norms and curricula.⁵¹ Mary Boys challenged misleading claims that reveal residual disdain for Jews and Judaism: 1) the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, while the God of the New Testament is a God of love; 2) Jews rejected Jesus because they could not recognize the profound truth of a suffering savior; 3) the self-righteous and hypocritical Pharisees reveal the legalistic nature of Judaism; 4) Jews were unfaithful to their covenant, so it was replaced by the covenant of Christ. She wrote, “Supersessionism is still deeply ingrained in the church because it is carried in a ‘story line’—what I will call the ‘conventional account of Christian origins’—presented in countless Christian education classes, sermons, and theological works.”⁵² Christian leaders who recognize such dangers are working diligently to tell a better story.

Analogous to these efforts, Letty Russell and others have struggled with the ways in which the doctrine of election is historically bound up with colonialism and can still perpetuate imperial practices, using difference as a means to oppress people.⁵³ A little historical background is helpful: even after Christianity began to be uncoupled from state power, colonialism—with religious mission at its side—sustained the links between spiritual, cultural, and political domination. Christianity was almost inseparable from European life and thought, so its presumption of religious superiority was built into the imposition of Western culture on colonial states.⁵⁴ Physical aggression was frequently justified as protecting missionaries even when there were clear political objectives, and Christian education was the “civilizing” tool used to destabilize native cultures like those in the United States.⁵⁵ Rev. Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis was a bestseller in the late nineteenth century. Warning against what he viewed as perils threatening America’s destiny (immigration, Catholicism, secular education, Mormonism, intemperance, socialism, urban decadence, materialism), Strong argued that the nation must be “God’s right arm” in battle against the world’s ignorance and sin. He claimed that the “Western races,” especially those living in the US, “must take the lead in the final conflicts of Christianity for possession of the world. Ours is the elect nation for the age to come. We are the chosen people. We cannot afford to wait. The plans of God will not wait.”⁵⁶

While there has been profound spiritual reckoning with the religious role in colonialist oppression,⁵⁷ recent decades have also revealed the momentum of Christian “dominion” ideologies in America. They unabashedly promote the doctrine that the US is a Christian nation and they should rule over nonbelievers as God’s elect.⁵⁸ This form of fundamentalist Christian nationalism is vigorously opposed in many quarters, but it stands in uncanny relationship to American exceptionalism. Religious communities are not the only groups to see themselves as chosen. Nations do as well.

ELECTION AND NATIONALISM

Without mention of Christianity, national chosenness still justifies conquest and cultural imperialism. In 1900, Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge stumped across America to advocate for the annexation of the Philippines, and his arguments were incorporated into the Republican platform. Advancing the cause, he declaimed on the Senate floor that God “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.”⁵⁹ Less bombastically, Woodrow Wilson stated that America is “chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”⁶⁰ Presidents are generally still expected to affirm a unique, divinely ordained destiny for the United States. Although it is called American exceptionalism, the thinking is not all that exceptional. Literature of the European colonial powers was rife with similar claims, as was literature from the Third Reich. One of Dostoyevsky’s characters in The Possessed proclaims that Russians are “the only god-bearing people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the world.”⁶¹

There is allure in imagining one’s national history as the fundamental story of the universe. Modern nationalism is particularly deft in drawing on longstanding cultural resources, especially religious ones, that shape and strengthen the “sacred communion” of the nation. Anthony Smith identified four elements, several of which are redolent of chosenness, that magnify nationalism’s power to frame group identity and ideals: (1) a myth of ethnic election; (2) attachment to particular terrains; (3) yearning to recover a golden age of communal heroism and creativity; and (4) belief in the regenerative power of sacrifice to ensure their glorious destiny. He did not argue causality: religion is not the reason for nationalism or its destructive excesses. Smith stated simply that the traditions provide some of the most salient structures for developing the imagined community of a nation, and he highlighted powerful parallels: “The nation state replaces the deity, history assumes the role of divine providence, the leader becomes the prophet, his writings and speeches form the sacred texts, the national movement becomes the new church, and its celebratory and commemorative rites take the place of religious ceremonies.”⁶² It is easy to see how election of nation or faith fulfills the fundamental human needs discussed in chapter 1: the will to meaning, pleasure and power, the building blocks of a society, the framework for cultural values. There is a transcendent purpose, a compelling claim on our ultimate concern, institutions that can mediate between thought and action, and an abiding community that transcends our own finitude. Yet national chosenness also comes with a dark side, just as it does in religious forms.

Conor Cruise O’Brien called this holy nationalism “chosen people with tenure,” believing it to be more sinister because it is less likely to imagine forfeiting its status for moral failing.⁶³ It is possible, however, that the most important parallel between “chosen” nations and “chosen” religious communities is that they share a dialectical tension in regard to their vocation. Their claims can justify bellicosity, conceit, and self-absorption, but they can also catalyze ethical aspiration, humility, and self-critique. En route to Washington in 1861, Abraham Lincoln told the New Jersey Senate that he was honored to serve as “an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people” in his efforts to preserve the Union, the Constitution, and American liberties.⁶⁴ The single word, almost, bore the weight of a nation in crisis about its very character. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke of a frontier that remained unconquered; he was not referring to Manifest Destiny or foreign acquisitions but rather “the nation-wide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear. This is the frontier—the America—we have set ourselves to reclaim.”⁶⁵

Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Let America Be America Again” reckons with the fact that the idea of America was largely defined by and reserved for white Christians. Yet he invoked faith in the promise of a place, like Eden, that has never existed yet shapes the very vision of what the nation seeks to become:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again. . . .

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!⁶⁶

We see how secular and religious ideas of election can serve both as a catalyst of violence and oppression and as impetus to self-critique and improvement. They can inspire and justify domination or restrict the natural human drive to establish power over others. Neither conquest nor chosenness is likely to be uprooted from the human catalog of concepts; they can only be interpreted and channeled. Even though moderates’ investment in election may grant “legitimacy” to a dangerous religious idea and inadvertently hone its usefulness as a weapon, its power can be wielded for good. As Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz remarked, “We began writing this book wishing to put out the fires of chosenness, but completed it thinking that—however dangerous they are if allowed to rage out of control—they are here to stay and just might light a way forward.”⁶⁷