To ascribe a special grace to America is outrageous, as outrageous as the idea
of special grace itself. Why shouldn't everyone be saved? Why aren't all
individuals, nations, peoples and cultures equally deserving? History seems
awfully unfair: half or more of the world's 7,000 or so languages will be lost
by 2100, linguists warn, and at present fertility rates Italian, German,
Ukrainian, Hungarian and a dozen other major languages will die a century or so
later. The agony of dying nations rises in reproach to America's unheeding
prosperity.
An old joke divides the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the
world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. America is one of the
things that sorts the world into polar
opposites. To much of the world, America is the Great Satan, the source of the
plague of globalization, the bane of the environment, the Grim Reaper of
indigenous cultures, the carrier of soulless industrialism, and the perpetrator
of imperial adventures. To hundreds of millions of others it is an object of
special grace. Whether one subscribes to the concept or not, America's grace
defines one of the world's great dividing lines, perhaps its most important.
Violent antipathy to America measures the triumph of the American principle,
and the ascendance of America's influence in the world. America's enemies make
more noise than her friends, but her friends are increasing faster than her
enemies. America's influence in the world leapt as result of her victory in
three world wars, including the fall of communism in 1989. Arguably, America is
ascending even faster today, despite the reverses in its economic position and
the strains on its military resources.
There are nearly a billion more Christians in the world today than in 1970,
including a hundred million Chinese, most of whom adhere to the House Church
movement on the American evangelical model. Denominations of American origin,
notably Pentecostals, led the evangelization of a quarter of a billion Africans
in the past generation. There are nearly 100 million additional Latin American
Christians, of whom perhaps 40 million belong to Pentecostal or other
Protestant denominations centered in the United States. Philip Jenkins has
chronicled the spiritual transformation of the Global South, I reviewed his
most recent book (A
new Jerusalem in sub-Saharan Africa Asia Times Online, Dec 12, 2006.)
It may be outrageous, but it is not far-fetched, to speak of a special grace
for America, because hundreds of millions of people around the world look
toward such a special grace, in the precise sense of the word.
No one is more keenly aware that all will not be saved than the fragile peoples
of the Global South. Christianity, it might be argued, is garnering in a
greater proportion of the world's population than at any time since late
antiquity precisely because conditions in so many parts of the world resemble
late antiquity. China alone is subject to the greatest migrations in human
history, adding to its cities 10 or 15 million people each year. The Great
Extinction of the peoples makes short work of the hope that all shall be saved,
for those who cling to blood, soil, ethnicity and hearth-gods will perish.
"Special grace is the grace by which God redeems, sanctifies, and glorifies his
people," in the Wikipedia definition. The fate of individuals cannot be
abstracted from the fate of nations. We derive our notion of salvation from the
concept of Israel's special grace, God's eruption into human history to redeem
his people from Egyptian bondage. From the Jewish idea of national redemption
comes the Judeo-Christian hope of resurrection, as Kevin Madigan and Jon
Levenson explained in their recent book (Life
and death in the Bible Asia Times Online, May 28, 2008). Individual
salvation means to participate in the salvation of the People of God, as
Benedict XVI emphasized in his last encyclical, Spe Salvi.
What is this special grace for America that, if it is not the Desire of the
Nations of which Isaiah wrote, nonetheless has become the desire of so many
nations?
Abraham Lincoln, the next best thing to an American prophet, called his
countrymen "this almost chosen people". Most Americans still would agree with
him. Americans may not love their country more than other peoples, but they
love it in a different way. This love is visible at any small-town celebration
of Independence Day, in the tearful eyes of older people. They have not
forgotten the humiliations that drove their antecedents out of their countries
of origin European states always have been the instruments of an elite;
Americans believe their government, is there to defend them against the
predation of the powerful.
For all its flaws and fecklessness, America remains in the eyes of its people
an attempt to order a nation according to divine law rather than human custom,
such that all who wish to live under divine law may abandon their ethnicity and
make themselves Americans. The rights of Americans are held to be inalienable
precisely because they are a grant from God, not the consensus of the
sociologists or the shifting custom of a particular historical period.
Ridiculous as this appears to the secular world, it is embraced by Americans as
fervently as it was during the Founding. Even worse for the secularists, it has
raised a following in the hundreds of millions in the Global South among people
who also would rather be ruled by the divine law that holds their dignity to be
sacred, than by the inherited tyranny of traditional society.
If America has been given a special grace, it is because its founders as well
as every generation of its people have taken as the basis of America�s
legitimacy the Judeo-Christian belief that God loves every individual, and most
of all the humblest. Rights under law, from the American vantage point, are
sacred, not utilitarian, convenient or consensual. America does not of course
honor the sanctity of individual rights at all times and in all circumstances,
but the belief that rights are sacred rather than customary or constructed
never has been abandoned.
America's founders did not anticipate that all would be saved. On the contrary:
when the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Delft in 1620, they fled a Europe already
two years into a war that would last for thirty years and kill off nearly half
the population of central Europe. America was at its first settlement and is
today a refuge and a beacon for those who seek special grace, that is, to place
God�s law above custom. America is not a new Promised Land and her
inhabitants are not a Chosen People - "almost chosen", perhaps, as Lincoln
said.
To those who despise religion and worship science, the idea of special grace is
an outrage, for science is neutral with respect to all peoples and all times.
Since Immanuel Kant's boast that he could devise a constitution for "a race of
devils, if only they be rational", the professors of political science and
sociology have wanted the authority to order the world's problems according to
their image of man: economic man, political man, anything but man in the image
of God.
From a secular viewpoint, moreover, the notion of special grace is doubly
horrible, for if only those who obtain it will be saved, all those who do not
will be lost. What of the soon-to-be-lost peoples of the world? Shouldn't the
application of scientific principles set them straight and make the world into
a neat row of little imitations of Belgium? There is nothing in the cookbook to
prevent the majority of the world's peoples from wishing themselves out of
existence. Political science stands mute before the disappearance of the desire
to live of cultures that have crashed against the modern world.
It is an irony that globalization itself has provided the means to a handful of
endangered ethnicities to assert themselves, sometimes in the most grotesque
fashion. Forty million Latin Americans have joined Christian denominations of
American origin. Perhaps a tenth that number adhere to indigenous movements
seeking to revive the loyalties of the pre-Colombian past.
Bolivia, one of Latin America's poorest nations, in 2005 elected as president
an Aymara Indian named Evo Morales. National Geographic magazine portrays
President Morales in its July 2008 issue, telling a crowd in a remote village,
"We are Aymara, Quechua, Guarani - the legitimate proprietors of this noble
Bolivian land!" Without the slightest sense of irony, the magazine adds that
Morales came to politics via the coca growers' association, that is, fighting
the American war on drugs. The indigenous peoples led by Morales demand not the
right to grow potatoes undisturbed in their native lands, but rather for the
privilege of exporting illegal drugs to the United States.
There exists a struggle for indigenous rights, in short, precisely because the
indigenous have found something specific to fight for, namely the drug trade.
Indefensible as the mistreatment of the indigenous might have been by the
Spanish conquerors and their successors, the indigenous movement in Latin
America is an excrescence of globalization, rather than its enemy. We hardly
need talk in this context of radical Islam, whose existence in the absence of
the global oil market is unimaginable. Without America's global success, the
undead of traditional society could not give voice to their rancor - much less
finance it.
To love America is to acknowledge its special grace, namely that a nation
founded not on ethnicity, language, or culture but rather upon the sanctity of
individual rights will prevail, while the remains of traditional society are
borne away by the current. Those who love America and seek to emulate her,
including hundreds of millions of new Christians in the Global South, well
understand her uniqueness. To demand success of every leftover of traditional
society must succeed is an expression of envy against America's special grace.
That is what I meant by asserting last February that Barack Obama hates America
(Obama's women
reveal his secret Asia Times Online, Feb 26, 2008) . Recently, blogger
Steve Sailer called attention to a passage in Obama's book Dreams of My Father
that explains the source of this hatred:
... As we walked back to the
car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly
colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window.
The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a
young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.
The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the
hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting
flies off their fruit with whisk brooms ... I saw those Djakarta markets for
what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there
might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago
housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty
pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And
yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a
tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe,
the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the
noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a
place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.
The
coherence of traditional society imposes a structure on life, a structure so
rigid that such societies cannot adapt to change and must crumble before
encroaching empire. In return for the sanctity of individual rights, Americans
are freed from the constraints of traditional society and made responsible for
their own actions. For an American presidential candidate to refer to
traditional society as the model for the solution to American problems has no
precedent. It is one thing to denounce American errors while upholding American
principles. Never before has America considered electing a president who
prefers the alternative, and that might just be the most dangerous thing to
happen to the United States since its Civil War.
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