Inventing Our Myths: A Response to Thomas Massaro

The False Glory of Exceptionalism

American exceptionalism has meant many things, but three characteristics stand out: that the United States manifests a unique moral purpose, that this purpose has a universal appeal, and that this purpose in some fashion is a participation in a divine mission to the world. ⁶ A Catholic theological recovery of the idea should address the meaning of each characteristic. But I think the final characteristic is the most problematic, both in terms of historical manifestations of exceptionalism fueled by a divine, murderous mission (e.g., the era of Manifest Destiny) and in terms of the social imaginary that should guide Catholic theological engagement with the idea at all.

First, then, some Augustinian deck-clearing is in order. Massaro refers to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr as an example of an acceptably historical version of universalist principles. I think that we need to draw more deeply from the Augustinian roots of Niebuhr’s thought to call out how often exceptionalism in past and present has gone badly wrong by its explicit or implicit adoption of a theology of glory that imputes a timeless and high moral purpose to the United States at the same time as it absolves the country of sin. As one critic described the workings of such a self-deceptive and divinized idealism, American exceptionalism too often has meant exemption from history. ⁷ Or, as another critic said of invocations of the idea ranging from the Reagan to the Obama eras, in exceptionalism “lay the promise of the nation’s enduring uniqueness—its exemption not only from the dynamics that shaped the course of other nations but from the rules of history itself.” ⁸

In City of God, Augustine’s relentless critique of the pretensions of the Roman Empire provides a necessary corrective to this dangerous tendency. Rome declared its conquest of Alba a “glory” animated by the conviction that “the highest glory lay in the widest empire.” ⁹ For Augustine, the very use of such language of glory signaled a self-deceptive effort to obscure imperial choices to conquer others for the pleasure of satisfying the lust for domination: “Let us strip off the deceptive veils, remove the whitewash of illusion and subject the facts to strict inspection,” he insisted. ¹⁰ Moreover, biographer Peter Brown describes the crucial transition for Augustine from viewing history as a series of prophetic, timeless moments to understanding history instead as marked inescapably by the time-bound drama of choice between the love of self and the self-sacrificial love of neighbor and of God. These loves clash in the will and lead to two cities tethered in tension in history—with the self-love of the city of man turning in on itself and the agapic love of the city of God leavening the world and pointing in pilgrim fashion toward the eschatological heavenly city. ¹¹ Any recovery of American exceptionalism must embed the idea firmly in the inescapable drama of the two Augustinian cities.

Musk, Empathy, and the Refusal to Think

Augustine’s law of history could help resist the pretensions of timelessness that have bedeviled the idea of American exceptionalism. But the challenge of the idea for Catholic social ethics today must engage not only the pretense of a false glory but also the selfish inwardness of a populist nationalism. The MAGA movement has little interest in universal claims like human rights. As one historian of exceptionalism put it, “Donald Trump rejected American exceptionalism in favor of America First, offering little by way of American history and declaring that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” ¹² In his essay, Massaro says, “It would be crucial not to concede that the American people as a whole have somehow suddenly lost their sense of solidarity and concern for our global neighbors.” ¹³ In light of the depth and breadth of the inward turn of MAGA, my assessment is more grim. And so I started the essay by referring to Musk because of his widely shared rejection of empathy on the American Right and because of the immense power he wields (a little more immense before his public break-up with Trump) due to his wealth and the supreme place of X in the power games of the politics of attention. Musk’s comment about empathy referred to the view that Western societies are overrun by poor, unassimilable migrants who knowingly exploit empathy extended to them and who themselves are exploited by liberal elites in the hope of eventually securing the votes of those coming over the border. Musk’s comment also occurred at a time when the Christian Right in the United States is undertaking a major campaign against a type of empathy that, they believe, evokes a misplaced compassion for acts at odds with biblical truth (e.g., not only illegal border crossings but, more importantly, certain types of sexual acts). ¹⁴

Musk and his libertarian tech bros are one leg of Trumpism. For a Catholic theological rehabilitation of American exceptionalism, we could explore the moral challenges posed by other problematic strands—the Steve Bannon wing of the movement, right-wing evangelical Christian nationalism and Catholic Trumpism, and the sectarian ideologies of identity politics that provide a steady supply of fuel for the Trumpist fire. But I note Musk’s comments about empathy because they articulate a view broadly held by the populist nationalist American Right and because they provide one powerful instance of the great challenge faced by any Catholic theological effort to recover a generous interpretation of the meaning of American exceptionalism. Among other things, that effort must battle the anti-Christian refusal to understand the world through the eyes of another and the destructive consequences that follow—a refusal that is very well-funded, systematic, and tech-driven. ¹⁵ Pope Francis said of the evasive personal logic of this pervasive populist nationalism, “No one will ever openly deny that [migrants] are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human.” ¹⁶ To be clear about the stakes of this challenge for Catholic theology, we should also remember that when Hannah Arendt said Eichmann’s great flaw was his failure to “think,” she specified that this meant “his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.” ¹⁷

“We Shall Be as a City on a Hill. The Eyes of All People Are Upon Us”

Massaro has noted the changing meanings of American exceptionalism across time. ¹⁸ But I think a greater engagement with the historicized nature of the idea is in order. Doing so allows us to see how the idea emerges with a certain shape at a given time. Doing so also creates pathways for a possible Catholic theological renewal of the concept.

That the United States considered itself exceptional appears to have been a strain in American thought from the revolutionary era and beyond. The sheer fact that the polity of the United States endured after the American Revolution contributed to these convictions. “In a world where nations without monarchs and established social hierarchies were assumed to be inherently unstable, the nascent United States managed to survive intact for most of a century as a republican outlier in a world of monarchs, revolutionary violence, and recurrent civil wars,” said historian Daniel Rodgers. ¹⁹ The awareness of this distinct national experience and the threat that failure in the Civil War meant for the liberty and equality of all persons surely informed Abraham Lincoln’s famous words associated with exceptionalism: “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.” ²⁰

But it is clear, too, that the idea of exceptionalism has waxed and waned and changed its shape over the years. Two things stand out of special relevance to Catholic social ethics in this historicized understanding of the idea. The first is the surprising trajectory of the word “exceptional” itself in its application to a distinct notion of American experience or purpose. Ironically for an idea now commonly associated with a zealous sense of liberty, the word “exceptional” was first prominently applied to the American experience by early twentieth-century American communists. Locked in a futile argument with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, these Americans claimed that the United States was “exceptional” because its economy defied the iron predictions of the collapse of capitalism that followed from Marxist laws of history. ²¹ In the late 1950s, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Lipset transformed the use of the term by arguing that the creedal commitments of the United States allowed the country to emerge as a singular, exceptional power in an otherwise ravaged, postwar world. ²² In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan next picked up the idea of exceptionalism but disfavored the use of the word “exceptional” in making his case. Instead, Reagan famously spoke of the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” an image adapted from a 1630 sermon by noted Puritan John Winthrop. ²³ More recently, American commentators have returned to the language of “exceptionalism” but with a specific, timeless twist. Against arguments that the United States has a flawed past and troubled present, writers have appealed to an idea of exceptionalism intimately tied to a defiant sense of unique and irreproachable moral goodness. “We see America as a force of good in this world,” said then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “We see an America of exceptionalism.” ²⁴ Here we confront anew in the twenty-first century the false glory that has long bedeviled the idea of American exceptionalism. Rodgers said of this intensified idea that has factored in contemporary debates about education and history in the United States:

What was new in the term “exceptionalism” was not its boast of uniqueness. It was not its claim to dispensation from the rules that other nations’ delegations to the institutions of international law and justice might decide. It was a claim of exemption from the general rules of history themselves. It was an insistence that the departure from the dynamics of every other people’s histories flowed through the very core of the nation. ²⁵

Given this shifting and troubled rhetorical path of the usage of the word “exceptional,” it may be wise for Catholic social ethics to find other terminology entirely to address what is unique and universal and blessed about the purpose of the United States.

But another problem is raised if we dive more deeply into the historicized nature of the idea. Here the issue becomes clear if we consider the surprising fact: The image of the “city on a hill” meant by Reagan to connect the noble principles of America’s Puritan beginning to the country’s present-day exceptional character hardly ever appeared in American letters before the middle of the twentieth century. ²⁶ Or, even more, as historian Abram Van Engen argued, “Hardly anyone in the seventeenth century gave Winthrop’s sermon a second thought. It was never printed or published in either England or America.” ²⁷ So how did an obscure Puritan sermon become the resonant touchstone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century invocations of American exceptionalism? And what lessons can Catholic social ethics learn from such a story? Van Engen argues that mid-twentieth-century Harvard professor and American literary scholar Perry Miller was a central figure in this powerful cultural branding. Miller was troubled by the global chaos facing the United States and turned to American literature to create a cultural ground of values on which the country could stand. In this spirit, he resurrected Winthrop’s sermon and its totemic image from the Puritan past especially in response to the civilizational challenge of Nazism. Only by going back to the past understood in such a way could America find its unique purpose and face the present. Or, as Van Engen puts it, “Puritan origins did not invent the myth of America. Americans, much later, invented the myth of Puritan origins.” ²⁸ Miller’s successful excavation of the sermon points to questions for Catholic social ethics as it considers the rehabilitation of American exceptionalism today. Massaro favors a return to the moral principles of Catholic social ethics. But the enduring power of the sermon points to the need to find for our day an image as resonant as Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” Perhaps the recovery of the idea will not come as much from principles as from images and stories and texts from the past.

Miller’s mid-twentieth-century canonical elevation of Winthrop’s long-forgotten sermon may rightly surprise us. But the content of sermon, rhapsodized by Reagan and many others since as a paean to liberty, may surprise us more still. To be sure, for Reagan and others, part of the appeal of the sermon was the fact that Winthrop gave it aboard the sailing ship Arbella on the way from the constrictions of life in Europe to the hoped-for freedoms of Boston. But, even so, Winthrop’s sermon contains no flowery rhetoric about freedom and hardly devotes any attention to the idea. Instead, the noted Puritan preached a message of seventeenth-century solidarity. “We must love one another with a pure heart fervently,” he said. “We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” ²⁹ Moreover, even his reference to a “city upon a hill” is not the shining cutout that Reagan created. Instead, Winthrop used the phrase as a cautionary note to his fellow Puritans. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” he said. “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken . . . we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world . . . to speak evil of the ways of God.” The image is not of a saved remnant chosen by God and divinely removed from the perils and pitfalls of time. Rather, it’s the language of moral and spiritual accountability before the eyes of the world—an accountability measured by how well or badly the Puritans take care of each other. As Rodgers noted, “To be a New England Puritan was not to live outside history but within it, within the possibility that the New Englanders would prove that they were no different than others.” ³⁰ Moreover, Van Engen argued that it was precisely such language of horizontal accountability that drew Miller to the sermon as a response to Nazi hatred of Jews and so many others. ³¹

We can admire Winthrop’s sermon as a resource that offers a forgotten Christian social vision for reimagining American exceptionalism today: as a call to concrete, accountable love, not abstract, glorified liberty. We can also read Winthrop’s sermon as a cautionary tale of the self-deception that lurks behind many of our most earnest moral pronouncements: Winthrop feared the moral shipwreck of his own community but was by and large indifferent to the Indigenous whose land the fleeing Puritans came to occupy. Moreover, the account of how the sermon emerged in the twentieth century to provide a new rhetoric of exceptionalism invites Catholic social ethics to do the same: to turn anew to the American past for the stories and images and texts that speak to the possibility of a unique and universal and graced purpose of the United States in the present. I think of known and unknown Catholic American stories of freedom, courage, truth-telling, and reconciliation. For example, I think such stories associated with Georgetown University’s extensive efforts to atone for the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved persons in order to keep the university afloat would be a promising place to start. ³²

Religion, Exceptionalism, and Social Imaginaries

In A Secular Age, the moral philosopher Charles Taylor argues that one of the keys for evaluating the role of religion in public life is to understand the social imaginary within which any religion exists. Among aspects of such an imaginary are background assumptions about political order, civilization, spirituality, and character. ³³ For our purposes, this is a helpful way of thinking about the challenge for a religion in the public square speaking today of the idea of American exceptionalism.

In particular, Taylor argues that the preeminent expression of an exceptional American political community occurred during a historical period ranging from the Declaration of Independence to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. This was, in Taylor’s terms, the Age of Mobilization in which religions understood themselves as upholding an idea of social order derived from providential design—an order that is part of an ever-deepening historical process (as in Lincoln’s description of America as the “last best hope on earth”). But, even so, religions also understood themselves to be parts of societies of disembedded individuals who had chosen to come together for the purpose of mutual benefit. Religions could rely on governments or ecclesiastical hierarchies or socially elite modes of influence to push or persuade (hence, “mobilize”) people to implement new visions of society. Taylor describes religions in this period as neo-Durkheimian: A church shares public space with many other churches and all nevertheless retain the conviction of belonging to something wider and more inclusive. Here is Bellah’s civil religion, identified by Taylor—and noted by Massaro—as key to this age and to the idea of American exceptionalism. ³⁴

But we are no longer in that age—and, I think, a Catholic theological recovery of the idea of American exceptionalism must adjust accordingly. In Taylor’s telling, we have moved from the Age of Mobilization to the even more disembedded Age of Authenticity with its emphasis on the importance of each person having her own way of realizing the good. Positively, this emphasis is a welcome turn from a constraining sense of order in which conformity to moral, racial, and gender-based codes was considered the doorway to the divine. Negatively, the resistance to conformity has morphed into bohemian and bourgeois excess that has led to loneliness, the loss of a shared world, and blood-and-soil populist nationalism. ³⁵ Here, as Taylor says, “my placing in the broader ‘church’ may not be that relevant for me, and along with this, my placing in the ‘nation under God,’ or other such political agency with a providential role . . . there is no necessary embedding of our link to the sacred in any particular broader framework, whether ‘church’ or state.” ³⁶

The bad news here is the loss of a common, public language of faith. But the good news is that such language alone, apart from a renewed social imaginary fostered by faith, will not get us very far anyhow toward an idea of American exceptionalism that Catholic social ethics should accept. Instead, we can turn our focus toward a consideration of the constitutive parts—political, civilizational, spiritual, character-based—of a new religious social imaginary. We can challenge the rise of an American authoritarian nationalist state by insisting that the inalienable dignity of each person demands due process and that the love of our neighbor can never be disqualified by a border. We can see in our Catholic universities a civilizational resource in which to preserve the possibility of truth in the face of brute power and of scientific fact in the face of conspiratorial delusion. We can insist that Catholic spirituality is always mediated: Our empathetic love for our neighbor is the way by which we love God. And we can proceed with the conviction that nothing will be more credible in our claims about a unique, universal, and graced purpose for the United States than the witness of the character formed in our schools and parishes for active, vibrant, courageous love—here and now, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters. Whether the country will accept what comes from such a Catholic theological effort to reimagine American exceptionalism is another matter entirely.