Biblical Promise and Threat in U.S. Imperialist Rhetoric Before and After September 11, 2001

Covenantal Thinking

As scholars of religion and American history have repeatedly shown, American national identity has been shaped by the biblical language chosen by the first settlers, leaders, and preachers to emphasize both covenant and apocalypse. Of particular appeal to early Americans – from the Puritans to the architects of the American constitution – was the text of Deuteronomy, outlining the covenant between God and Israel. ¹ The Deuteronomic covenant provided a hopeful and motivating narrative on which to model a perceived calling in the world and relationship to God. For instance, as sociologist of religion Robert Bellah recalls in his study of covenant and the American myth of origin, the Puritans who were to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony had already forged an “Agreement” between each other and God, before they departed England for the new world. ² Covenant became the template for documenting and justifying communal decisions.

Like the Israelites, early Americans understood themselves to be entering into the Promised Land. Following the covenantal pattern outlined in Deuteronomy of prescribed moral and legal obligations to be kept by the people of Israel in return for God’s blessing, the settlers understood themselves to be obligated to do God’s will in return for God’s blessings; the threat within both Deuteronomic and American covenantal thinking lay in the prospect of divine punishment for breaking covenant. Bellah points to John Winthrop’s oft-cited sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” as a prototypical instance of early covenantal thinking, strongly influenced by Deuteronomy. Given while still aboard ship in 1630, Winthrop’s sermon urged the people to live according to God’s will, in order that the “city on the hill” might prosper. Patterning his sermon along the biblical lines of promise of blessings for kept covenant, and curses for broken covenant, Winthrop suggested that if the people kept their side of the covenant with God, they would be blessed, but if the covenant were broken, they would be punished. ³ Thus, Winthrop’s covenantal exhortation was accompanied by the warning,

But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship . . . other Gods, our pleasures, and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land wither we pass over this vast sea to possess it. ⁴

The Puritans and their covenantal documents have had a lasting influence on American political life. As Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of American literature, puts it,

[T]heir influence appears most clearly in the extraordinary persistence of a rhetoric grounded in the Bible, and in the way that Americans keep returning to that rhetoric, especially in times of crisis, as a source of cohesion and continuity. ⁵

Some scholars have gone as far as to argue that the covenantal model was foundational for American political theory and practice. ⁶ Political scientist Donald Lutz makes the argument that many of the early documents of the settlements prefigure the U.S. Constitution in their covenantal nature, even where they were not specifically named as covenants. ⁷ Bellah shows that the idea of a covenant between America and God persisted even once church and state were officially separated. Covenantal thinking has manifested itself in presidents’ speeches in what Bellah calls the “tradition of American civil religion.” Presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan have drawn on the analogy between the United States and Israel to affirm the status of the United States as the chosen people of God. The United States has consistently been described as the new Israel, divinely appointed by God to bring light to the nations. ⁸

Within the tradition of American civil religion, the United States takes on a messianic role with respect to the rest of the world. From the mid-nineteenth century on, national self-understanding includes the notion of a special mission, a “manifest destiny,” to lead all humanity toward civilization and progress. ⁹ American studies scholar Amy Kaplan suggests that it is precisely this understanding of the mission to save the world from various dangerous aggressions and dictators that grounds the notion of American exceptionalism. As long as the United States can present itself as safeguarding freedom for the world, its own pretensions to empire can be ignored. As Kaplan puts it, “imperial politics denied at home are visibly projected onto demonic others abroad, as something only they do and we do not.” ¹⁰

1. George E. Connor, “Covenants and Criticism: Deuteronomy and the American Founding,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 32, no. 1 (2002): 4-10; Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and Donald S. Lutz, A Preface to American Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 136.[↑]
2. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 15-16.[↑]
3. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 13-15; Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Biblical Basis of the American Myth,” in The Bible and American Arts and Letters, ed. Giles Gunn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 221-32, at 221-22; and Edward J. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 11-12.[↑]
4. Cited in Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 15.[↑]
5. Bercovitch, “The Biblical Basis of the American Myth,” 219.[↑]
6. See Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions, Covenant Tradition in Politics series, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995); Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, eds., Covenant, Polity, and Constitutionalism, vol. 10, no. 4 of Publius: The Journal of Federalism (Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, 1980). For more tentative statements of the similarities between the biblical notion of covenant and the U.S. Constitution, as well as American constitutional law, see Edward McGlynn Gaffney, “The Interaction of Biblical Religion and American Constitutional Law,” in The Bible in American Law, Politics, and Political Rhetoric, ed. James Turner Johnson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 81-106; and Neal Riemer, “Covenant and the Federal Constitution,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 10, no. 4 (1980): 135-48.[↑]
7. Donald S. Lutz, “From Covenant to Constitution in American Political Thought,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 10, no. 4 (1980): 101-34; Donald S. Lutz, “The Mayflower Compact, 1620,” in The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 17-23; and Donald S. Lutz, “The Declaration of Independence, 1776,” in The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 138-49.[↑]
8. Bercovitch, “The Biblical Basis of the American Myth,” 221-24; Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post Traditionalist World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 175.[↑]
9. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), xii-xiv.[↑]
10. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3-21, at 13.[↑]