Americana

From Wilsons Blog Mablog. I continue to slowly digest this type of thing, the untangling of the Kingdom of God with Americana.

America as Religion
Topic: Americanistas

The first chapter of Americanism is entitled "I Believe in America," and it reveals the basic problem. A number of people have wanted to say that America is "dedicated to a proposition," and that we are not bound together by those ties that bind other nations -- things like language, culture, music, food, and common descent. Because of this assumption, believing or not believing in America becomes a choice, like a religious choice, and that means you can fault people for not making it...

..."You can believe in Americanism without believing in God -- so long as you believe in man" (p. 20).

This kind of thing takes the breath away, or ought to, and the initial reaction of many Christians will be to say that Gelernter must be a lone whackadoo, and why are we paying attention to this? For several reasons. The first is that he is highly educated and competent. He is a professor of computer science at Yale, a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, and a member of the National Council on the Arts. A number of the people mentioned in the acknowledgements are at the center of our national life, and not part of the Glazed Eye Crowd. The second reason for taking him seriously is that he is right. Americanism has become a religion, and he accurately identifies how and where it happened. Where we part company is to be found in his (religious) conviction that this development was a good thing. Faithful Christians will necessarily see it as a tragic fall into idolatry -- and into one of the easist forms of idolatry for conservative Christians to be tempted by....

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