The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
Press.
Gutjahr. Paul C. 2001. “Sacred Texts in the United States.” Book History 4: 335–70.
Peterson, Jonathan. R. 2017. “The Religious Content of the Presidents’ Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, 1953–2016.” Congress & the Presidency 44(2): 212–34.
Willsky, Lydia. 2014. “The (Un)Plain Bible: New Religious Movements and Alternative Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 17 (May): 13–36.
Winder, Mike. 2019. Favorite Scriptures of 100 American Leaders. Springville, UT: Plain Sight.
America as New Israel
The fact that Christians divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments is but one indication that this book (or collection of books) focuses on two distinct but related subjects. Most, albeit not all, of the Old Testament describes God’s dealings with the nation of Israel, which it presents, as a chosen people. Thus, Deuteronomy 7:6 observes that “thou are an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.” Most of the New Testament deals with the life of Jesus (who, as a Jew, would have been part of this Israel) and the founding of the church, which is often presented as a New Israel, and which is further described as inheriting many of the blessings and obligations of its predecessor. Matthew 16:18 thus notes Jesus’s intention to found the church upon a rock “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
As Christianity later split into Catholic and Protestant divisions, which would themselves break into many additional subdivisions including the Church of England, it was common for its members to understand themselves as 23continuing to perpetuate the struggles and blessings of their spiritual forbears, who did not, at the time, have their own homeland. Richard Hughes notes that William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1534), who translated the Bible into English, was especially interested in the idea of the covenant between God and Israel as described in Deuteronomy 28 and that he was further struck with “the twin themes of chosen people and covenant,” which he applied to England (2009, 21).
As Puritans sought to purify this Church, they regarded themselves as having a special mission, which those who came to America hoped might find its full fulfillment there. This mission is often epitomized in John Winthrop’s speech entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which, citing an analogy from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, he referred to America as “a city upon a hill” that could serve as a model for others. Puritans, and later American revolutionaries, would compare themselves to Jews who had crossed the Red Sea in order to enter their own promised land, a motif that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would contemplate as part of the American Seal. In 1784, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), a congressional minister, authored a massive work on American history entitled The Conquest of Canaan. There had, of course, been those who had questioned the connection between America and Israel, perhaps most notably Roger Williams, who had observed, “The State of the land of Israel, the Kings and people thereof in Peace & War, is proved figurative and ceremonial, and no pattern nor precedent for any Kingdom or civil state in the world to follow” (quoted in Hughes 2009, 25).
Still, long after many Americans had shed many of the beliefs that were tied to Puritanism, they continued to think of themselves as a “chosen people,” or as God’s New Israel, with the earlier religious mission often melded into the mission of advancing knowledge and liberty. John Berens observes that what he calls American “providentialism” was often at odds with European Enlightenment thinking, which largely divorced world events from God’s design. Berens tied this providentialism to five themes, which he identified as follows: “(1) the motif of America as God’s New Israel; (2) the jeremiad tradition; (3) the deification of America’s founding fathers; (4) the blending of national and millennial expectations; and (5) providential history and historiography” (1978, 2).
Writing in “A Dissertation on the Feudal Law,” John Adams described the settling of America as “the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth” (quoted in Richard 2016, 140). In 1783 Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, delivered a message entitled “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” in which he elaborated on what he perceived to be America’s link to Israel. In his Second Inaugural Address in 1805, President Thomas Jefferson observed that he would need the help “of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a land flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life” (quoted in Richard 2016, 144). In later years, America would consider their conquest of the American West as a “manifest destiny,” and their obligation to foreign colonies like the Philippines to Christianize them. Mormonism would further emerge as a distinct American religion, which was based in part on the belief that Jesus had come to America to reveal Himself to the lost tribes of the house of Israel. 24In White Jacket, American novelist Herman Melville wrote, “Escaped from the house of bondage, we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world” (quoted in Hughes 2009, 24). Harriet Beecher Stowe observed that early Americans “spoke of Zion and Jerusalem, of the God of Israel, the God of Jacob, as much as if my grandfather had been a veritable Jew; and except for the closing phrase, ‘for the sake of thy Son, our Saviour,’ might all have been uttered in Palestine by a well-trained Jew in the time of [King] David” (quoted in Shalev 2013, 155).
Notably, England and America are not the only nations to embody the notion that they are a chosen people. The Confederate States of America sought to emphasize what it believed to be its special ties to God by specifically referring to God in its constitution. Such a notion was embraced by the Dutch, French, and Germans, known as Afrikaners, who settled in South Africa and long practiced a policy of racial separation and discrimination (Hughes 2009, 28). In a more secular context, fascist nations have considered themselves to be the protectors of a favored race while communist nations have believed themselves to be the unique representatives of the proletariat class.
Perhaps because of the way they identify their own founding with that of ancient Israel, Americans have generally supported the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Israel, with the United States being one of the first nations to recognize that state when it was founded in 1948. Modern American Jews and evangelical Christians, many of whom believe the nation’s reestablishment was a fulfillment of biblical prophecies, are often very supportive of that country.
See also Confederate States of America; Great Seal of the United States of America; Model of Christian Charity (Winthrop); Moses as Political Archetype; Political Hebraism; Williams, Roger; Zionism
For Reference and Further Reading
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 1976. “The Religious Dimension of American Aspiration.” Review of Politics 38 (July): 332–42.
Berens, John F. 1978. Providence & Patriotism in Early America, 1640–1815. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Goldman, Shalom. 2014. “‘God’s New Israel’: American Identification with Israel Ancient and Modern.” The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life, ed. Mark A. Chancey, Carol Meyers, and Eric M. Meyers. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, pp. 81–92.
Guyatt, Nicholas. 2007. Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Richard T. 2009. Christian America and the Kingdom of God. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
LaFontaine, Charles V. 1976. “God and Nation in Selected U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses, 1789–1945: Part One.” Journal of Church