In a recent press conference in Turkey, President Obama made the statement that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.” In a short and to the point statement the President destabilized dominant sacred narratives in American culture—narratives that give profound meaning to what America is and what it means to be an American.
Most obviously, Obama denounced the running narrative of America as a Christian nation or, as John McCain and others have said, a Judeo-Christian nation. Beginning with the Puritan minister John Winthrop and his vision of a “city on a hill” in the New World, many Americans have found their identity and the identity of this country within the Christian Tradition. During the Revolution many Patriots enlisted Christianity as support for their cause. Similarly, abolitionists abhorred that slavery could occur in a Christian nation. And in the twentieth century, the Cold War rhetoric of the United States versus the “godless Communists” drew on this same sacred narrative of a Christian nation.
It is a powerful place for Americans to find meaning and values during key historical moments and in these moments Christian nation gave authority and meaning to ideas of liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy. But however powerfully this narrative drives movements of reform and national unity it is equally as insidious because it excludes and marginalizes anyone outside the dominant definition of “Christian.” In effect, the sacred narrative of a Christian nation offers citizenship—offers American-ness—only to those who fit the dominant mold of Christianity at that historical moment. To be a non-Christian is to be un-American.
More subtly, Obama also destabilizes the sacred narrative of America’s Providential place in the world. By “Providential” with a P, I mean the idea that America is somehow part of God’s special work in the world—that his providence is guiding the country through human history. This sacred narrative has its birth in the same vision of John Winthrop’s city on a hill—a place God was leading his people (the Puritans). Again, the Revolutionary rhetoric emphasized that God was on the side of the Patriots and afterward the victory was attributed to God and his servant General Washington. Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny utilized this narrative to push American Indians off their land and into Reservations, because God’s providence had destined this land to (White) Americans. Even the Bush administrations goal of “spreading democracy” smacks of the same sacred narrative that America has a Providential place in the world and its history.
Obama shifts the sacred narrative. The President moves the foundational narrative from one of religion (not Christian or Jewish or Muslim) to one of citizenship. In short, the sacred story isn’t religious—its political. Who we are is what we share—a political system built on values and ideals. Our shared values and ideals (read as public) give us our sacred narrative, not our religious (read private) identity. By ideals and values I take him to mean things like democracy, liberty, republicanism, etc. And while these ideals and values can be validated by our private religious identities, beliefs, and doctrines, they are sacralized nationally because they are our shared national story. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca, or whichever belief system or world view one chooses certainly can endorse liberty but it cannot corner the market on it.
But Obama’s statement also fits into another sacred narrative of American culture: the story of American pluralism. In the colonial period there were a variety of Christianities throughout America—Presbyterians in New Jersey, Puritans in Massachusetts, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and whole host of heretics in Rhode Island. Then with immigration during the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth century American religious pluralism exploded and continues to grow. The first half of the President’s statement heads down this pluralism path “Christian…Jewish…Muslim,” but it takes a sharp turn—“citizens.” The pluralism narrative has reached its necessary end. The story of pluarlism is encompassed by a citizenship characterized by religious difference but mollified by a shared ideology. Obama’s sacred narrative offers meaning, identity, and American-ness to every citizen.
