Americanism The Fourth Great Western Religion

CHAPTER 1 "I BELIEVE IN AMERICA" "I believe in America." Many people have said so over the generations. They are not speaking of a nation. They are expressing belief in an idea, and not just any idea but a religious idea of enormous, transporting power. In this book I will argue that America is no secular republic; it's a biblical republic. Americanism is no civic religion; it's a biblical religion. Americanism doesn't merely announce the nation's ideals on its own authority; it speaks on behalf of the Bible and the Bible's God, as Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address. Its goal is for America to move forward "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right," as Lincoln said in that same speech. That America is a biblical republic and Americanism a biblical religionboth facts are perfectly consistent with absolute religious freedom; both are supported by mountains of evidence. So how come nobody knows them? Is the evidence secret? Hardly. But we live in a secular age. No book will change that fact, but our secular prejudice can't change history either. If we look the facts in the face and don't flinch, we will seeAmerica the biblical republic and Americanism the biblical religionemerge clearly. "America" is one of the most beautiful religious concepts mankind has ever known. It is sublimely humane, built on strong confidence in humanity's ability to make life better. "America" is an idea that results from focusing the Bible and JudeoChristian faith like a spotlight's beam on the problem of this life (not the next) in the modern world, in a modern nation. The ideas that emerge in a blaze of light center on liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind.These ideas are often attributed to ancient Greece and to eighteenthcentury philosophy. I will show how they grew in fact from the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity. They were present implicitly (unopened buds) in the Puritan America of the early 1600s. During the revolutionary era the climate was right for the buds to bloom. And they were beautiful. But they reached maturity only decades later, under the ministration of the greatest religious figure of modern centurieswho was also President of the United States. The religious idea called "America" is religious insofar as it tells an absolute truth about the meaning of human life, a truth that we must take on faith. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident," says the Declaration of Independence. No proofs are supplied.) I will try to show that the "American Religion," which gives "America" its spiritual meaning, consists of an American Creed in the context of a doctrine I will call American Zionism. Virtually everyone agrees on the existence if not the details of the Creed, but the phenomenon I call American Zionism has been discussed by relatively few historians. I will try to show that the American Religion incorporates the biblical ideas of a chosen people in a promised land. Those concepts are the source of America's (sometime) sense of divine mission; of her (not invariable yet often powerful) feeling of obligation to all mankind; of her democratic chivalryher nagging awareness of a duty to help the weak against the strong. This "chivalry" has nothing to do with knights and ladies; it is a deep sense of duty to the suffering, and comes straight from American Zionism. I will try to show how the American Religion was shaped by American history and how it shaped that history in turnAmerica's history and its religion in a centurieslong embrace. And I will try to show that the America ReGelernter, David is the author of 'Americanism The Fourth Great Western Religion', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385513128 and ISBN 0385513127.