Richard M Gamble

[...]our panel at the Conference on Faith and History in October 2018, I doubt I had spent much time thinking about religious sources per se, that is, religious sources as a distinct category with their own peculiarities and problems that demand a distinct approach or at least a certain caution to handle them well. In America (not uniquely but perhaps especially) we have long experience with sermons that sound more like moral philosophy or political speeches than homilies, and we have long experience with "secular" speeches that not only sound like sermons and operate in the prophetic mode but quote a lot of scripture and mimic the rhetoric and cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. [...]I have also learned to take seriously Oakeshott's problem of "survivals." Consider James Byrd's widely praised book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution.4 Byrd undertook a massive project to assemble sermons from the late eighteenth century in order to understand how patriots (mostly preachers) used the Bible to justify the war, define the meaning of their cause, and characterize colonial resistance and the British enemy.

After quoting from this section and contrasting Hawthorne's love of history with Emerson's open contempt for the past, McDougall notes that while Hawthorne embraced American democracy and individualism he "could not bring himself to believe Americans were somehow released from the human condition." [...] the front is "show and humbug." If our national history teaches us anything, it ought to show us that so-called exceptionalism can never mean that Americans are exempt from original sin, self-interest, the limits of power and material resources, or, in short, that we alone among the peoples of the world escape from being part of the City of Man.

Considers Woodrow Wilson's almost messianic outreach to Europe and the world following the first World War, to the end that such interference and involvement by the US goes against the core of America. Traces his political philosophy from the corridors of the American Founding Fathers and their pursuit of equality and prevention of concentrated power. The ideas of these Fathers, too, is investigated, from their enlightenment and Christian backgrounds, to the world scene, as in France and its greatest revolution. Men such as Alexander Hamilton were extremely practical, realizing that mere idealism would not carry the day in the new nation, without more trenchant measures and institutions to protect against emotion and desire. Reviews early ideas in the new nation of withholding excessive power, as of declaring war, from the executive branch. Further, by reviewing Washington's desire for American unilateralism and even isolationism, makes the strong case for America to not involve herself in the woes of the world. Adapted from the source document.

  A modest version of American history would make more room for the mystery of God's providence; develop a greater capacity to see tragedy in the nation's past and present; refuse to accept its own partial history as key to the meaning of the whole; reject democratic ideology as an ersatz theology of history; and not assume that Western civilization has reached its highest and final form in American institutions. Voegelin's concept of the authoritative present brings intellectual coherence to habits of mind that helped shape the American identity in the late eighteenth century, spiritual pathologies to which even a staunch anti-Jacobin Federalist like Timothy Dwight was susceptible.