In the previous essay (here) I argued that the American founding was not the sober cousin of the French Revolution but an earlier chapter of the same rebellion — the non serviam carried from Lucifer through Milton and Cromwell across the Atlantic and into the ideological foundations of 1776. A reader might reasonably have asked whether this reading imposes a theological framework on what was, after all, a secular political event. I want to answer that objection now, and I want to answer it with an unlikely witness: a Yale computer scientist and one of contemporary Judaism’s more serious interpreters, a man who intended to praise the very thing I mean to indict.

In 2007, David Gelernter published Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. His thesis, offered admiringly, is that America is not a secular state at all. It is a religion.

Originally published in Integrity Magazine. Read original article

Original Tags: Catholic Social Teaching, Church History, American Founding, Americanism, Liberalism, Political Theory, Pope Leo XIII, United States