The Post-Christian American Experiment

Noah Webster of Connecticut, with not atypical New England Yankee arrogance, proclaimed in the preface to his spelling textbook (published in 1783), ‘Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny—in that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature debased.  . . . American glory begins to dawn at a favourable period, and under flattering circumstances.  . . . a durable and stately edifice can never be erected upon the mouldering pillars of antiquity’ (Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781-1789, Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass., 1981, p. 105).  From the outset, the United States have had an inclination away from reverence for the past and tradition and toward innovation (the South has done better in this regard, particularly before the War, but has lost her way lately). 
 
This is obvious in the attitude of US leaders towards Christianity.  For them, redemption of the world from the Fall was not to be achieved by uniting man and the creation with the Holy Trinity once again via the Church, but primarily through the work of political theories and systems.  Three authors uncovered some striking material in this regard, from amongst which is this crucial paragraph: 
 
‘This transference of religious fervor to national ideals became the heart of American civil religion.  Christians began to suggest, as the Congregationalist John Mellen did in 1797, “that the expansion of republican forms of government will accompany that spreading of the gospel . . . which the scripture prophecies represent as constituting the glory of the latter days.”  This shift greatly strengthened the American republic, endowing it with a new sense of lofty purpose.  The nation rather than the church easily emerged as the primary agent of God’s activity in history’ (Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, The Search for Christian America, Expanded Edition, Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, Col., 1989, p. 114; bolding added). 
 
Despite their Christian exterior, United States citizens interiorly are remarkably post-Christian.  The Church has been debased, and the union of States, particularly its political system, exalted.  God is no longer a Person with Whom they seek communion, healing from the brokenness of the Fall, and so forth; he is more of an impersonal deity who interests them only insofar as he/it will ‘bless’ their enterprises:  ‘God Bless America,’ as the old song goes, though it resembles more a magical incantation (i.e., a command directed at God) than a traditional Christian song or hymn.  Such a god has a very strong resemblance to the pagan, philosophical Greek conception of the divine:  ‘Ancient Greek philosophy developed a highly systematic theology governed by logic.  Logic defined God’s existence as necessary, but his existence remained a theoretical hypothesis.  God is empirically inaccessible, but must exist because logic demands a first cause.  We conceive of this first cause as an abstract essence, as the sum of the attributes which the first cause must have to be truly divine’ (Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, Chamberas and Russell, trans., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline, Mass., 2006, p. 25). 
 
Logic likewise makes some sort of deity necessary for the post-Christian American Experiment, and like the ancient Greeks, they have imbued it with the attributes they think it needs to have in order to be of use to them, attributes which have shifted over the years, from a cold, distant creator and governor found in the Declaration of Independence, to the pantheistic god of Thoreau and Emerson and the other Transcendentalists, to the god of retribution and judgment of Lincoln and Julia Ward Howe, to the indulgent god of Oprah and George W. Bush. 
 
But in deconstructing the True God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in this way, they have likewise deconstructed themselves, who are made in the image of the All-Holy Trinity.  If they feel that they are trapped in an oppressive bureaucratic machine-world (and many do), to borrow some imagery from Paul Kingsnorth, it is because they have made their primary god a political system of mechanical checks and balances that operates according to the laws of physics, with a philosophically and logically constructed deity of lesser importance that stands behind it. 
 
Making a secular political system their god means that the Trinitarian model of a community of Persons living in humility and love has largely been lost in the States, which results not only in the present oppressive technocratic structure of society – ‘This denial not only invalidates the mode of existence taught in the Gospels,’ Yannaras says, ‘but also destroys human life as community.  Bureaucratic and authoritarian structures dominated social life, and freedom was mortgaged to officialdom’ (p. 42) – but also in the erosion of the idea of the human person itself:  ‘ . . . their suffering was the result of the denial of personhood, of life as personal communion and relation, which diminished not only the Gospel’s transformation of sin and death into a loving self-denial and faith, but also our power to attain to the full stature of human maturity implied by risk and freedom’ (Ibid.). 
 
A purely political solution to this problem of an ontologically crippled and dissolving man does not exist, either in the US or anywhere else.  There must be an inward metanoia, a turning, away from the false gods, political and otherwise, they have set up and a return to traditional Christianity, to the Church, to the Holy Trinity, in which and in Whom we will find the means to reestablish ‘personal otherness and freedom as manifested in beauty, love and poetry – the logos of personal uniqueness’ (Ibid.). 
 
If folks of good will in the States feel that ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ (St. Matthew’s Gospel 26:41), they need not fear, for they have a multitude of intercessors in heaven before God’s throne – the saints of their ancestors in Africa and Europe, and the more recent saints of North America, men and women and children who have acquired true personhood through their cooperation with God’s Grace – who are ready to help them if called upon, part of the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12:1) watching ardently the drama of salvation unfolding in the US and in all the other countries of the world. 
 
Noah Webster’s insult intended for Europe, that she has ‘grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny,’ now ironically applies to the United States themselves.  It is difficult to lay aside beliefs that have been part of one’s society for hundreds of years, but for the peoples of the States – no matter which cultural kin-group they belong to:  New England, Dixie, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and so on – their future hinges on whether they can muster the wherewithal to do exactly that if they wish to stop their descent into the post-Christian abyss.  A truly good life can be found and experienced and enjoyed only in a union with the True God, and not in overzealous attachments to political declarations and constitutions, or in self-anointed missions to regenerate the world. 
 
This does not mean that Christians in the States should ignore politics.  That would be counter to the meaning of the Incarnation.  Jesus Christ the God-man has taken on human nature in order to heal it, all of it.  Thus, it is the duty of Christians to sanctify all human endeavors with the Grace of God, including politics.  In those countries throughout history where Christianity has been adopted by the people and their rulers, the Christian leaven will be seen at work even in that sphere.  The law code of Athelstan, King of England from 924-939 A.D., is but one of many examples.  The opening section deals mostly with tithes for the Church.  But rather than being simply a dry list of legal requirements, there are parts that are also religious meditations: 
 
‘2. Let us remember how Jacob the Patriarch declared “Decimas et hostias pacificas offeram tibi,” (I will offer you tithes and peace offerings) and how Moses declared in God’s Law “Decimas et primitias non tardabis offerre Domino.” (You shall not be slow to offer tithes and firstfruits to the Lord). 
 
‘3. It suits us to remember how terrible is the declaration stated in books; “If we are not willing to render tithes to God, he will deprive us of the nine [remaining] parts, when we least expect it, and moreover we shall have sinned also.”’ 
 
Nonetheless, it is not the primary duty of the Church to conquer the sphere of politics but to proclaim the Good News to all men, baptizing them and making them ‘new creations’ in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17). 
 
When a Great Feast of the Lord other than Easter or Christmas, the one celebrating His Ascension for instance, garners as much attention and enthusiasm as a presidential election day, the peoples of the States will know they are beginning to make progress in properly orienting their affections.