March 2008 Print

 

This is a message book, not a history book. It has messages for three types of persons. For modern secularists: the American Religion is humanist in the best sense of the world....Christians and Jews ought not to see Americanism as a blasphemous replacement for Christianity or Judaism. Anyone can ask a theologian, "What does Christianity say about this problem?" If the answer is satisfying, it is incorporated into the questioner's religion. The American Religion is traditional religion's response to modern political reality. It is an extension to the structure of Judaism or Christianity, an extra room out back. For Christians specifically: you built America and Americanism. In so doing you gave mankind one of the greatest gifts it has ever received. Do not allow yourselves to be spiritually dispossessed in your own homes! This country will never have an established, official religion; it will never abandon religious freedom. But neither should it be allowed to abandon its history and origins, or lie about them. Christians are (rightly) prohibited from preaching Christianity in public schools; secularists should be prohibited from preaching secularism, too!"–from Americanism: A Catholic Critique.

 

Americanism as an issue for Catholics first surfaced during the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878-1903). The Holy Father initially sounded his concerns in Longinqua Oceani, addressed in 1895 to America's archbishops and bishops. In that document, the Pope paid tribute to the progress of the faith in the United States of America, even allowing that America's 19th-century government policy of Lockean toleration tacitly contributed: "For the Church...unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation...is free to live and act without hindrance." Leo XIII, however, refused to conclude that American political conditions represented the ideal government for Catholics:

Yet...it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.

Clearly the Pope did not think that the American idea of religious freedom applied to all peoples.

The Pope's warnings became more pointed when he issued Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in 1899. Superficially restricting his comments to Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, the Holy Father clearly wanted the whole American hierarchy to hear. The controversy began with a biography of Fr. Isaac Hecker, a 19th-century American convert and founder of the Paulists. When Leo saw the French translation of the biography, he became disturbed. Whatever Fr. Hecker's views actually were, the Holy Father saw–particularly in the book's preface–a troubling set of views that he characterized as "Americanism," the first time a Pope had used that term. At its core, the Holy Father noted, Americanism posited a false distinction between the "passive" and "active" virtues. The Holy Father rejected the idea that the "passive" medieval monasteries had had their time "while our age is to be characterized by the active (virtues)." Such a distinction was false anyway because each virtue contributes to the others: ultimately, the "passive" and "active" virtues are indissolubly united.

Leading contemporary bishops, like Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop John Ireland of Minneapolis-St. Paul, roundly denied that "Americanism" actually existed in America. They, as well as their later biographers,¹ suggested that the Pope had much more concern about such tendencies in the French clergy: after all, Leo, they contended, had reacted to a French translation of Fr. Hecker's biography. Therefore, "Americanism" was a "phantom" heresy. However, the public statements of Archbishop Ireland consistently radiate Americanist views. In an 1890 essay about Fr. Hecker published in Catholic World, the Archbishop stated:

Each century calls for its type of Christian perfection. At one time it was martyrdom; at another it was the humility of the cloister. Today we need the Christian gentleman and the Christian citizen. An honest ballot and social decorum among Catholics will do more for God's glory and the salvation of souls than midnight flagellations and Compostellan pilgrimages.²

Ireland's biographer, interestingly, noted that the published essay was "brief and relatively bland" compared to the original version!³

Reduced to a sentence, Gelernter's theme is: America constitutes a "biblical republic" whose embodied ideals of liberty, equality and democracy represent the deepest yearnings of all mankind. Here follow a few samples of his argument, chronologically arranged. What God first adumbrated to the Old Testament Jews was more fully articulated by 17th-century New England's Puritans. The American Revolution, far from reflecting Enlightenment principles, had John Locke who "turned repeatedly to the Bible as an authority" (76) as its fountainhead. Abraham Lincoln shepherded America through the Civil War, Lincoln another Moses with the Americans as Israelites (145): like Moses on Mount Pisgah, the subsequently "martyred" Lincoln could only glimpse the "promised land" of full racial equality. Later Presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman took necessary steps toward global implementation of America's ideals. Their religiosity laid the foundation for the luminous League of Nations and its subsequent muscular embodiment, the Truman Doctrine. Bible Christians, which is to say Protestant Christians, need to reclaim the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, both "Judeo-Christian" epiphanies.

Gelernter is a Yale University professor of computer science. The book abounds in the errors of scholarship. Professor Gelernter commits the classic mistake of conflating the Old Testament exclusively with the Jews: if a Pilgrim Governor Bradford "is again equating the arrival of Englishmen in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the Jews in Israel (67)," he is mistaken, and Gelernter should note as much. Catholics cannot state often enough that Moses led the 12 tribes of Israel, not the one tribe of Judah (source of today's Jews), out of Egyptian captivity.⁴ A Catholic understanding of the New Testament is not even tacitly acknowledged: Matthew 16:18, a primary verse on behalf of the Papal office ("thou art Peter, and upon this rock") is yoked to Lincoln's understanding of the Declaration of Independence. Nor does the historical Church fare any better. Blessed Ramon Lull's 13th-century guide to chivalrous behavior inculcates the knight as one who must "protect the weak, women, widows and orphans (33-34)." The author globalizes the requirement: "In other words, knights were to make the world [my emphasis] safe for decent people (Ibid)." Gelernter even slips into glib generalizations of entire peoples, my favorite being (Protestant) England's cultural superiority to (Catholic) France: "France is the place for good food, England for good men" (86).

A closer view of the work actually does return the Catholic reader to the issue of Americanism. On the book's back jacket can be found the endorsement of Bill Bennett, a Catholic: "David Gelernter is a national treasure, a patriot-scholar [my emphasis]....The City on a Hill has no greater or more powerful advocate." In his acknowledgments, Prof. Gelernter thanks another well-known Catholic, Michael Novak: "Novak and Leon Kass...are national treasures of the first order." He goes on to state that the "work and conversation" of both have "helped me understand America, religion and the Bible [my emphasis]" (ix). Just as one can reasonably conclude that an early 20th-century Archbishop Ireland did espouse Americanist tenets, one more quickly decides that Bill Bennett and Michael Novak possess undiluted Americanist ideas. The very Americanism Ireland denied possessing, Bennet and Novak enthusiastically embrace. A review of Pope Leo's century-old rejection of Americanism applied to their heartily endorsed The Fourth Great Western Religion is certainly in order.

Longinqua Oceani (1895) rejected the idea that America's government represented the best possible government for Catholics worldwide. In contrast, on page two, the reader encounters the following:

The religious idea called "America" is religious insofar as it tells an absolute truth about the meaning of human life, a truth that we must take on faith.

What exactly is the American idea of religion? Whatever it is, a 1783 Ezra Stiles sermon makes clear that Catholicism forms no necessary part. He is pleased that the (Catholic) Holy Roman Emperor "is adopting, as fast as he can, American ideas of toleration and religious liberty" (85). While Stiles goes on to limit such liberty to varieties of Protestantism, Gelernter provides a 21st-century update: "Yet Americanism is a religion that atheists...can and do profess, ardently" (11). America's proper religious idea, thus, is religious indifferentism, a doctrine far removed indeed from traditional Catholic teaching: "But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth" (Apoc. 3:16). In contrast to Catholic adherence to the one true Faith, Gelernter proposes a menu of religious preference that can constantly change. Our current President began as an Episcopalian. When nine years later he married a Methodist (Laura), he changed to that religion. Later still he became, or added, born-again Christianity. Interestingly, Michael Novak himself has had an influence in this context. He taught Gelernter that the Continental Congress added "Supreme Judge" and "divine Providence" to Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence (101): therefore, Gelernter (with Novak's assistance) concludes, the Declaration is much more religious than commonly depicted. In such a formulation, the concept of religion becomes totally meaningless. That does not matter, however, because the essence of the Americanist God is abstract and consequently susceptible to any formulation today's American citizen desires.

Professor Gelernter believes that America's religious indifferentism is "an absolute truth," one appropriate to the entire world. Here, with the assistance of Testem Benevolentiae's citation of the phony divide between the virtues, one better understands Gelernter's initially surprising ejection of FDR from the pantheon of great American presidents. The professor consistently embraces the superiority of the "active" virtues. For Gelernter, presidents who energetically promote America's religious creed get the highest marks. Lincoln, for instance, was great because he knew that America's drama applied to the whole world. In his first inaugural, the Union president cited the Declaration of Independence as a gift of "liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time" (142). Woodrow Wilson later proved comparably great because he acted after World War I to implement these ideas in the League of Nations:

America came into existence, my fellow citizens, in order to show the way to mankind in every part of the world to justice, freedom, and liberty. (156)

America then lapsed into the passivity otherwise known as isolationism. For Gelernter, isolationism is always bad: in its 1920s incarnation, the US "shut the windows, pulled down the shades, and went back to sleep" (150). Subsequently, a Harry Truman proved a greater president than FDR because he acted while the latter reacted. The Truman Doctrine, superficially restricted to protecting the liberty of Greece and Turkey, applied to everyone in its citation of "everyone's freedom of speech and religion" (191). In his 1948 recognition of Israel, Truman likened himself to Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem (193). FDR, in contrast, only reacted: the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's ensuing declaration of war on us meant that "America entered the Second World War because it was pushed" (183). Not even FDR's successful promotion of the UN can sufficiently compensate to the professor for his earlier passivity.

Catholics like Bennett and Novak promote the very Americanism Pope Leo XIII criticized. Unfortunately, the consequences go well beyond policies of war and diplomacy. When Leo XIII rejected virtue's fragmentation, he reminded us that good action flows from good thought: remove time for contemplation and mere manic activity ensues. Gelernter's argument illustrates the point all too well. One is not surprised he heartily endorses the "'gospel of work'; the Lord approved of hard work and successful businesses" (61). Europe in contrast is derided as a place where "it used to be considered admirable to have nothing to do, to enjoy absolute leisure" (ibid). With the medieval monasteries long since dissolved, even leisure and occasional introspection become increasingly rare in a society influenced by such ideas. Perhaps that condition helps account for the author's consistent support for modern war. Such statistics occasion no pause for serious reappraisal in him. In fact, Gelernter is annoyed at any sustained criticism of modern war. Thus, he sharply criticizes Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial wall because "it buries the honored names in a ditch (meant to suggest a wound or scar)" (151). The author explains that Europe after World War I engaged in just the same sort of self-lacerating criticism through memorials like those at Ypres and the Somme. World War I battlefields were not that bad, he thinks. A Mary McCarthy short story and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (a World War I veteran) are employed toward the same conclusion: "It was possible for a soldier of the Great War to enjoy [author's emphasis] it" (167).

Such blatant Americanism, unwittingly absorbed by American Catholics, will cumulatively obliterate all their Catholic cultural awareness. The Bible itself that Prof. Gelernter cites disappears in verbal mist. The Catholic Bible–as witnessed by the labeling of Machabees as "apocryphal" (34)–shrinks to Protestant dimensions. What remains of sacred Scripture is willfully interpreted. Deuteronomy (1:13), where Moses (not God) decides to choose subordinate officials, becomes a divine mandate in Thomas Hooker's 1638 Fundamental Orders for Gelernter's conclusion that: "The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people" (73). A more thorough study of Exodus suggests that Aaron, subservient to the masses in episodes like the golden calf, more truly embodied the "free consent of the people." The prophet Samuel (28) is later invoked as a relentless critic of monarchy, when closer inspection suggests that it was the people who offended God when they asked Samuel to "make us a king, to judge us, as all nations have" (I Samuel 8:5). Catholic historical consciousness disappears as well. "The English Bible was a needle that punctured the ancient weave of medieval ignorance" (60). Granted such a characterization of the Middle Ages, who could possibly know what St. Jerome did, much less what the Vulgate entailed? Similarly with major episodes in more recent history. Queen Mary I was "Bloody Mary" whose "brutal, beastly persecutions...created a disgust with Catholicism that lingered for centuries" (45). Elizabethan Catholics who died for the Truth at Tyburn disappear into historical oblivion. To be sure, St. Thomas More will probably remain but only within the shackles of the Americanist creed: he died for religious toleration, not the one true Faith.

The Jefferson Memorial is a key shrine in the Americanist religion. Inscriptions of his most telling declarations cover the walls of the domed interior. From a 1786 letter to George Washington, one reads:

But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered...institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Consider whom those "barbarous ancestors" included: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the builders of the Gothic cathedrals, Dante, Giotto, Palestrina, etc. To absorb unheedingly the ideas of a Jefferson is to endanger fatally the truth, goodness and beauty our Faith has brought, and can still bring, to the world. One hopes that a Bill Bennett and a Michael Novak did not have sufficient time to carefully read Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. Possibly, they were too busy in the frantic world that unleashed Americanism has helped bring about to give more than a quick perusal to the work. One sincerely hopes that they, more conversant with the book's actual contents, will, first, distance themselves from it; and, second, use their considerable influence among fellow Catholics towards reclaiming our faith and heritage.

Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (Doubleday, 2007), 230 pages. Mr. Patrick McCarthy received an M.A. in History from George Washington University in 1981. He is a retired high school history teacher with 27 years teaching experience, and resides in Annandale, Virginia.

¹ See John Tracy Ellis, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons (1963), and Marvin R. O'Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988).

² O'Connell, John Ireland, 288-289.

³ Idem.

⁴ United Israel only fragmented into northern Israel and southern Judah (with Benjamin) after the death of King Solomon, over 450 years after Moses.

⁵ Given Gelernter's anti-monarchy prejudice, very ironic.