Chapter 7 of Gelernter’s book is on “The Emergence of Modern Americanism,” basically covering the period of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. As in all his chapters, he is full of interesting and useful information, but he applies it in wildly skewed ways.
If Americanism is a religion (and he is right, it is), then Gelernter is one of its popular evangelists, not one of its theologians. There are scads of basic questions that he just breezes right by in order to get to the altar call.
One of those basic questions arises in this chapter.
“What does it mean — what could it mean — that each one of three worst criminal states, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial Japan, had recently gone over to a national system of state paganism? (Those systems were Fuhrer-worship and the ‘Fuhrer principle’ in Germany, Stalin-worship in the Soviet Union, and a newly aggressive and militaristic form of Shinto and emperor worship in Japan.) And what does it mean that the two states that led the crusade to annihilate tyranny and reestablish decency — Britain and later the United States — both called themselves, informally, Christian states? (p. 185).
It means that Gelernter’s bright idea of rendering to Caesar that which is God’s was a whole lot further advanced in Japan, Germany, and Russia than it was here. It means that while syncretism was going on here, and the idolatrous impulses were all present and accounted for, the Church here was still strong enough, and explicitly Christian enough, to challenge any garlanding of the bull of Zeus on the Capitol steps. So that didn’t happen, and explicitly religious language (of Gelernter’s sort) tended to stay away from the realm of politics. I am quite prepared to grant that the Second World War was a collision between self-conscious pagans and confused Christians. I am glad the confused Christians won. But that is no reason to celebrate the victory by advancing the confusion further. This is because at a certain point confused Christians cease to be Christian at all, and the state religion — necessarily pagan — takes over completely.
When there is a loss of faith and confidence in the Church, the idolatrous state naturally fills the void. There was no church to speak of in Japan, the Russian Orthodox Church was in no spiritual shape to challenge Stalin, and apart from a few heroes in the confessing church movement, neither was the established Lutheran Church in Germany spiritually vibrant enough to be outraged publicly at the religious prerogatives that Hitler assumed to himself. Just like the American church today — a vast, religious operation is assembling right in front of our eyes, with Gelernter cheering it on. We don’t have enough spiritual discernment to see what is happening to us.
Gelernter is an activist, and “an activist is glad of any prudent opportunity to spread the Creed, including by force . . .” (p. 202). I’ll say this for him. He knows what he thinks, and he really believes it. The means of measuring this is found in that word force. What are you willing to force people in the name of? That is a real test.
Some Christians talk about the ultimate measurement of conviction being what you are willing to die for. Our Lord established that as our basic pattern, and we are to take up our cross and follow Him. But there is also another indicator of depth of conviction, outside the realm of personal convictions — what you are willing to kill for. These are public convictions, and Gelernter certainly has them. Christians generally don’t.
This is what I mean. A society unwilling to execute a man convicted of raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl is a society that is crumbling epistemologically. They don’t know what they think, and they don’t know what they believe anymore. And this is the case even if (especially if) there are many in that society who would die for that seven-year-old (if given the personal opportunity) who would refuse to sentence the killer to die (if they were the judge in the case). In this sense, the faith that the neo-cons have in their Creed is much more of a public faith than is Christianity. I am using the word Christianity here in Leithart’s sense — Christianity is a private ideology. Christendom is public faith. The neo-cons have a public faith. Christians used to, but we don’t anymore. Muslims also have a public faith, and this is why the neo-cons and the Muslims are fighting.
Christians have the option of watching this fight, bewildered, or of joining one side or the other in the name of an alien god. They don’t join with the Muslims, for obvious reasons, and so they find themselves in the U.S. Army with public explanations of their mission being provided by men like Gelernter.
What Gelernter is trying to do is provide American Christians with an amalgam — keep your Christianity private, and Americanism will fill the public void. Christians do have an instinctive need to see public justice — but virtually all American theologies from all our Christian denominations prohibit this. Wall of separation, two kingdoms, rapture any minute, yadda yadda. And so the naked public square is being filled with political idols, and American Christians are being told that these public idols are somehow consistent with our private worship of the true God. But they are not. And the only way out of this impasse is to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord of these United States.
Gelernter says, “If there is to be justice in the world, America must create it” (p. 205). When I read things like that, I usually have the jumpin’ Jehoshaphat reaction. Did he really say that? Yes, he did, but the reason he is able to get away with it is because of the massive loss of confidence and faith that Christians have in Scripture. How can we be appalled when he says that if we are not willing to counter immediately with, “No, if there is to be justice in the world, and in this nation, Jesus must do it”?
In his last chapter, “The New Covenant,” Gelernter longs for a religious revival that will restore our nation’s clarity of vision. I also long for that, and I actually agree with him that it is likely to happen. But the problem with restored clarity of vision is that you then see a bunch of things that you weren’t seeing before. One of them is that America is just a blessed country, and not a divine ideal. The reason Gelernter is able to reach so many Christians with his persuasive appeal is that we don’t have a public faith at all — and we find that we need one.
And this means, in closing this review of Gelernter’s book, that debates among Christians over things like the rapture, and amillennialism, and theonomy, and the two kingdoms, and so on, are not merely intramural debates among various Christian persuasions. They are that, certainly, but they are also a debate over whether we will eventually decide to fight the central idolatry of our generation.