The puffery of political pietism

“Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy,” said Margaret Thatcher.

That was a memorable aphorism, and it was almost right. Yet, like all such adages, it needs unpacking, which is what I’ll try to do.

Thatcher meant specifically the Enlightenment afflatus that inspired the American Revolution and its founding documents. And it’s true that, while European polities developed organically over centuries, the American state was created in one fell swoop as a political embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy, or rather ideology.

However, this doesn’t mean that European history was free of philosophical inputs. Any state probably, and any Western state certainly, is a physical expression of a metaphysical fact. It’s just that the metaphysical core of Europe took more time to develop – after all, as an older civilisation Europe did have more time at its disposal.

America’s Founders, on the other hand, were men in a hurry: their task was to form not just a new state but a new nation, and to do so quickly. And a nation has to have not only genetics but also metaphysics at its foundation, for without that symbiosis of body and soul it would remain stillborn.

That’s where the Founders ran into a problem. After all, their country was first settled by religious dissenters who had to believe God was on their side because no one else was.

The new continent greeted them with the fangs and claws of wild animals, and the tomahawks and scalping knives of irate natives. The new settlers had to find inexhaustible resources of strength, and they found them in a sense of their messianic mission.

As early as 1630 their leader, the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. That was the beginning of American exceptionalism: the neonatal nation saw itself as a messiah destined to lead the world to goodness – after all, Winthrop and his friends knew the rest of that proselytising verse: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Such was the country’s metaphysical heritage, and the Founders had to take it into account. Yet their Enlightenment provenance left no room for divinity. Most of them were deists at best, if not agnostics or downright atheists (to me, the differences there are anyway slight).

Hence they faced the task of wrapping their secular project in religious verbiage. Having started with the message of a nation worshipping God and doing his work on earth, they gradually replaced it with the idea of a nation worshipping itself – while paying lip service to God.

In 1809 Jefferson tried to express the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America wasn’t “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. England, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Subsequent American politicians have had to find a workable blend between their secular desiderata and requisite quasi-religious cant. Even today every political speech in America has to have divine references, if only “God save America” at the end.

In his acceptance speech the other day, Trump – who has never been accused of excessive piety – acknowledged that tradition by saying: “I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God.” Though rather tame by the standards of American politics, that statement tugged on the heart strings of the nation. The country stood ready to believe that Trump had been saved by divine interference rather than by Crooks’s poor marksmanship.

At least Trump didn’t ascribe divine powers to his country, as did, for example, Thomas Paine in his revolutionary gospel Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”

Later the lexicon of American exceptionalism was expanded by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan who in 1840 coined the term ‘manifest destiny’. Said destiny was according to him divine: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

At about the same time, John Quincy Adams averred that America’s founding document was a simulacrum of Genesis: “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence.”

Such sentiments had to find an artistic expression, not just the verbal kind. That’s why sacral visual imagery abounds in American politics, as do mock-religious shrines to past leaders.

George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in D.C. displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington, where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan deities, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching that: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism”.

It’s useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a man who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. Jefferson also openly despised every Christian dogma and sacrament.

The statement would therefore be either hypocritical or even cynical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’. Thus the sacred shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin attract millions of secular pilgrims every year, those eager to worship at the altar of American exceptionalism.

Margaret Thatcher was right: Europe will never be like America. Europe has abandoned her religious heritage; America has converted hers into pagan self-worship.

It’s hard to say which is worse. But it’s easier to understand why British conservatives wince every time an American politician waxes quasi-devout to an audience happy to put their hands on their hearts.

Yet by now that reaction is more aesthetic than philosophical. Which, of course, makes it much stronger: taste runs deeper than any philosophy. One thing for sure: contrary to Churchill’s quip, it’s not just the common language that divides the two nations.