- Through much of its history, Americans understood their republic as a nation ‘under God,’ relying on a providentialist narrative to provide a shared community, identity and national purpose.
- Beginning in the mid-20th century, this framework dissolved as the nation followed the West into a secular individualism, accelerated by Supreme Court rulings that mandated secular neutrality and effectively established a non-religious public philosophy.
- Today, America operates as a nation without spiritual foundations and with a prevailing focus on personal fulfillment. Devoid of a shared providential narrative or common purpose, American public life has fractured into hyper-individualism, cultural polarization and mutual hostility.
Adapted from “The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic” by Steven D. Smith, published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission.
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Through much of the country’s history, Americans understood themselves as constituting a nation “under God.” This understanding was not merely peripheral; it was essential to what made America the nation it was.
The providentialist understanding provided Americans with a sense of purpose: Their republic was not just an association formed for the benefit of its members but rather a crucial chapter in a larger providential narrative.
The providential perspective was central to Americans’ ability to imagine themselves as a community or as a nation. And Americans understood their Constitution, in itself religiously agnostic, not as mandating a providentialist public philosophy but as permitting such a philosophy.
From ‘piety on the Potomac’ to mandatory neutrality
This providentialist self-understanding lasted at least through the mid-20th century. It was conspicuous in public rhetoric in the 1950s — the era of “piety on the Potomac” — as the nation acted to distinguish itself from “godless communism.”
But now, conversely, as the 21st century unfolds, public providentialism has been largely lost, as Americans increasingly follow the rest of the Western world into a secular individualism in which the prevailing object of obeisance is not God but rather something like personal fulfillment or authenticity.
As one contributor to this trend, the Supreme Court officially banished the providential perspective. Borrowing from the assessment of John Courtney Murray, this effectively established atheism — not as any comprehensive philosophy (as it had been in Marxist regimes) but as a component of or constraint on the public philosophy.
Perhaps unwittingly, the Court instigated this transformation when it reconstrued or reconstructed the Constitution to require the government to be “neutral” toward religion and to confine governance to the domain of the secular.
In an odd reversal, it is now the formerly communist and atheistic countries (along with the Islamic nations, of course) that, however opportunistically, publicly embrace God and religion to distinguish themselves from the (officially) godless, secular West.
A nation without foundations
What has replaced providentialism as the foundation for national purpose and public discourse and for a sense of national identity as a community?
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps the nation’s destiny, as thinkers like John Rawls and Richard Rorty have contended, is to manufacture its own destiny — to do without foundations.
But is nationhood without foundations a viable project?
The indications as of now are not encouraging. The highest purpose currently imaginable in American culture is to facilitate each individual in satisfying personal preferences and achieving personal fulfillment or authenticity in whatever form they may prefer.
This highly individualistic and self-centered ideal is pervasively reflected in our public discourse — when it manages to remain civil and positive, that is. Increasingly, those qualities seem to elude us, and our discourse deteriorates into clashing accusations of irrationality, selfishness and bigotry.
And instead of conceiving of America as a community engaged in some common project, it often feels, as longtime foreign correspondent Nick Bryant observes, “as if the only thing that unites the nation is mutual loathing. America seems to be engaged in a forever war with itself.”
Will America return to God?
So then, what is to be done? Can anything be done? My own book on the Constitution generates an obvious prescription: The nation needs to return to its providentialist foundations.
This is the course often taken in the biblical history that served as a sort of paradigm for America and Americans (the “new Israel”) at an earlier period. The people of Israel are depicted in the Hebrew scripture that Christians call the Old Testament as following a cyclical path in which they fall away from worship of the One God; they accordingly forfeit the support and protection of that God; they are conquered by a foreign power (the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians); they are humbled by this adversity into an awareness of their transgressions and thus into a condition of humility and repentance; and they are eventually restored to self-rule and prosperity.
Might America today follow a similar path? It’s conceivable — but hardly probable. At least as a formal constitutional matter, actually, such a return seems more permissible today than it once did: To the consternation of the devotees of the “secular neutrality” regime, the Supreme Court has some of that regime’s precedents and commitments (though not the ideal of neutrality itself).
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Even so, it is hard to be hopeful. If anything, current trajectories are moving in the opposite direction, as more and more Americans abandon churches and reject any sort of traditional faith.
Ours is the age of the “nonverts,” as Stephen Bullivant has said, or of the “nones.”
The dominant modern conceptions of history are not cyclical but rather progressive: We do not return to earlier conditions but rather continually move forward, or at least onward, into … something else.
“You can’t turn back the clock,” as the saying goes.
And if God really does exist?
An objector might say you are too persistently focused on the consequences or implications of believing in God, or of believing that God directs the courses of nations.
Nothing has turned, it may seem, on whether there actually is a God who directs the course of nations. After all, the benefits of national identity and purpose flowed from the fact that Americans believed in a providential God.
There may be a glimmer of hope in this criticism. How so?
Well, if from a purely human perspective we merely look at current trajectories and project them forward, any sort of return to a providentialist foundation seems unlikely; and it is hard to see either what new foundation might be found to replace the former one or how a deeply polarized nation can long endure without any common foundation.
The “House Divided” teachings of Jesus — and of Abraham Lincoln — almost seem devised for times like ours.
But if there actually is a God … well, who knows?
Seeking supernatural assistance
In a famous interview in which he attempted (unpersuasively) to explain away his earlier association with Nazism, philosopher Martin Heidegger was asked whether he believed that any philosophy could rescue life and politics from the ills that afflict modernity.
Heidegger replied that no philosophy could perform these restorative functions. The most that philosophy could do would be to render us open and potentially receptive to the possibility of extra-human assistance.
Spiegel asked the philosopher,“Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it?”
Heidegger responded, “If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor.
“Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing, we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god.”
Only a god can save us.
But will God save us, as a nation? Why on earth, why, for heaven’s sake, should he?
Here we might turn again to the reflections of a humbler but wiser and more admirable figure. “Fondly (may) we hope, fervently (may) we pray” for some sort of divine, restorative intervention, Abraham Lincoln once said.
Ultimately, though, as the president acknowledged, “the Almighty has his own purposes.” We cannot know what they are. And whatever may come, “still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
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