The United States symbolizes wealth, opportunity and freedom to many. Yet, it symbolizes something much more than the familiar topics of rhetorical, ‘patriotic’ frequency. The palavering of Rush Limbaugh, for example, does not asymptotically approach the ends of symbolism in the U.S. But no single person could speak to the immense wealth of variety. In terms of its behemoth, symbolic status, we simply recognize that the U.S. has an unimaginably diverse population.
The U.S. might very well be on the avant-garde in terms of leading other nations in domestic diversity; it also surpasses any in its amount of polemics, polemics having both direct and indirect connections to that diversity. Take, for instance, the popular, symbolic notion that the U.S. is a “Christian nation.” This idea is highly problematic whether a ‘democratic’ majority favors it or not. The widely disseminated idea that even non-Christians belong to a “Christian nation” persists. This idea has been abuzz for centuries, and it continues to affect numerous American institutions today as always.
Slavery is one prime example, a more obvious institution affected by Christianity in U.S. history. The slaves in the U.S. were often times spoon-fed Christianity, and one safely speculates that slaves were inculcated against their wills at one time or another. One might also wonder about the unchristian nature of slaves’ quotidian mistreatment at the hands of their masters—or, “fellow Christians.” No intelligent person would deny the incongruity here. And it is likely that this unchristian treatment grew even more oppressive to the salve, who, after the Civil war, came to understand that he or she chiefly remained a cog for the industrial wheel of the North.
Is it peculiar, though, that so much presidential and representational rhetoric teems with religion and especially Christian-natured themes in a country like the U.S.? It is, after all, a country which adamantly defends its claim to the separation of church and state. Blanketing a diverse nation of millions with the uniformity of one sole religion is a logical problem—even if politically it is poorly assessed on the whole. At the very least we can distinguish truth from sentiment: it does not stand to reason that, because “so many Americans” are Christian, the nation itself is Christian. It would not matter if the majority in the U.S. is Christian. This predicament is par excellence an example of the informal logical fallacy known as the “fallacy of composition”—when one infers that something is necessarily true of the whole because it is true of a part of that whole. It is akin to saying that the bolt which fastens the wing of the plain to the plain weighs little, and therefore the plain itself weighs little. It is nonsense.
How then does a country of 300-plus million people—containing all the diversity in the world—symbolize religious pluralism? Or does it care to do so? Religion as a matter of fact affects the diversity in the U.S., and is forever present, always participating in the most urgent conflicts which arise day-in and day-out. One need only witness the burning of a Mosque, or to find gays condemned by Evangelical Fundamentalists to savor the political nature of religious affiliation in the U.S.
Today, the Christian population of the U.S. spans all sects and traditions, and largely constitutes the makeup of the country’s general religious base. American Christians (be they ancestors of slaves or otherwise) are not anomalous either. In the West, Christianity has long since domineered religious traditions. Wittingly or not, American Christians are ultimately participants in this unfurling history of the Occident. They are the inheritors of a religion of empire, as they are the inheritors of Western imperium altogether. And perhaps American Christians are emboldened by a religious tradition that complements national pride. It may just be an easy paradigm to accept, a paradigm that makes sense.
But if a nation with such diversity purports itself to be ‘Christian’ (by the voices of some and obviously not all), and if the tradition of Christianity’s overall role in the West has served imperial as well as formative purposes, then heralding any country as such—Christian—is nothing new. In fact, little is new about Christianity’s role in the unfolding of Western civilization. It is a religion that served the Roman emperors—starting with Constantine—and procured many votes for U.S. Presidents including George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike.
In so many ways the history of the U.S. has been written with the blood, sweat and tears of many marginalized and disenfranchised groups. But this is not the reflection to be found in today’s proud and popular symbolic rhetoric of the United States’ past. Nevertheless, we should not exclude or forget paramount ideas, clues and examples we can implement to illuminate the paradigm of centuries past. For example, Christianity served a purpose in Manifest Destiny, and thus it played lackey to the atrocities of both murder and displacement of so many American indigenous groups.
It is not merely a religious tradition of which we speak; Christianity is an example of history’s own prostitution of religion for the purposes of governing powerful groups, and for waging wars and conquests. True, religion may govern the politics of some in ways much more far-reaching than public policies or campaign promises. However, it too has been subjugated for the purposes of profit and for the acquiescent domestication of millions—and not slaves alone.
It is not merely a religious tradition of which we speak; Christianity is an example of history’s own prostitution of religion for the purposes of governing powerful groups, and for waging wars and conquests. True, religion may govern the politics of some in ways much more far-reaching than public policies or campaign promises. However, it too has been subjugated for the purposes of profit and for the acquiescent domestication of millions—and not slaves alone.
