Though perhaps imperfect, that document is what built an America that people could admire. If there is a model of Americanism, it is found in the Constitution of the United States. I would not want to see my country led astray by their demonic ideas, which are echoed today by the theocratic Right that would rid us of the Constitution. The Puritans were the sect that destroyed centuries’ worth of religious art in England during the English Civil War, that claimed that Baptists and Quakers were witches, that beat and exiled dissenters in their New-World colony, and that saw only themselves as elect and eligible to enter heaven. They have seen, correctly, that God is part of the problem-especially when humans have the conceit that they are doing His will.īy presenting the Puritans as the forerunners of Americanism, David Gelernter manages to show just why people should look askance at America. Western Europeans now have a more evolved view of democracy than Americans. In later times, chosenness inspired the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and produced the largest body count in human history. Gelertner also does not offer a critique of the pernicious idea of “chosenness.” Chosenness has had a disastrous track record ever since the Israelites were ordered by God to purge Canaan of its indigenous people. One might also cite the current Bush administration’s continued support for openly dictatorial re-gimes like Saudi Arabia. One need only think of the American or American-sponsored interventions in Iran, Southeast Asia, and Latin America that overthrew democratically-elected governments and left millions of innocent people dead. While no reasonable or humane person would champion Islamist terrorists, there are nevertheless valid reasons why a genuine advocate of democracy and equality might be suspicious of America’s newfound missionary zeal in the Middle East. The first is a glaring absence of any substantive critique of the “anti-Americanism” Mr. David Gelernter’s essay is a persuasive exposition of the Bible’s influence on the evolution of the American ethos, but it suffers from a number of shortcomings.
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