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Monday 6 September 2010
Land of the Free, Home of the Exceptionalists?

Historians have very little use for the idea of American exceptionalism and its supporting religious rhetoric. The historical record points not to the exceptional experience of America but to its common history with other nations. America is, after all, a nation of immigrants, and it is one shaped by both transatlantic and transpacific exchanges. Apart from this historical challenge to American exceptionalism, insistence upon the nation’s unique greatness raises the specter of America’s exceptionally violent history and culture. Not only was America among the slowest of nations to abolish slavery, it is well known that America’s violent crime rate and prison population exceed that of any other industrialized country on the planet.

Yet these are not the only problems with the exceptionalism narrative. Exceptionalists like Beck claim that colonial America was a haven of religious practice and freedom that anticipated the founding of the United States on Christian principles and religious tolerance. While respected historians affirm the importance of Christianity in early America, they have also demonstrated that both colonists and the first citizens of the new United States subscribed to a variety of faiths—or none at all. They have shown that figures such as George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin may have been sympathetic to Christianity, but they were hardly orthodox Christians.

Colonial Americans, moreover, were not exceptionally tolerant of religious dissenters. Prior to the writing of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Puritan and Anglican state churches dominated colonial religious life, and they actively limited the free expression of groups such as the Quakers and the Baptists. Even with the free exercise clause in place, Americans practiced toleration fitfully. This is why Catholics were considered by a substantial number of Americans to be un-Christian and un-American well into the 1960s and why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The recent controversy about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero is simply the latest episode in America’s checkered history of religious freedom and “tolerance.”

These historical realities have no effect on Beck and other proponents of exceptionalism because their vision of America depends upon a combination of historical amnesia and revisionist history. For example, Beck repeatedly implored Americans to focus not on the “scars” of history but on the good America has done and will do. It was the height of irony for Beck to ask Americans to forget the scars of our past on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and in the shadow of memorials to Abraham Lincoln, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. Americans visit these sites precisely to remember, to grieve, and to honor the scars left by the horrors of assassination, slavery, and war.

(via The Way of Improvement Leads Home)

15 notes

  1. tenderstatue reblogged this from d2fang and added:
    I know plenty of people who need to learn the term “historial realities.”
  2. d2fang reblogged this from azspot
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