In the previous essay (here) I argued that the American founding was not the sober cousin of the French Revolution but an earlier chapter of the same rebellion — the non serviam carried from Lucifer through Milton and Cromwell across the Atlantic and into the ideological foundations of 1776.
A reader might reasonably have asked whether this reading imposes a theological framework on what was, after all, a secular political event. I want to answer that objection now, and I want to answer it with an unlikely witness: a Yale computer scientist and one of contemporary Judaism’s more serious interpreters, a man who intended to praise the very thing I mean to indict.
In 2007, David Gelernter published Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. His thesis, offered admiringly, is that America is not a secular state at all. It is a religion.
Gelernter argues that what we call Americanism is a secularized biblical faith, a form of what he calls American Zionism, seeded by the Puritan founders who understood themselves as a new chosen people building a new Jerusalem in a new promised land. Its creed, he says, rests on three pillars: liberty, equality, and democracy. Crucially, Gelernter insists that these Puritan and biblical ideals shaped the founders more profoundly than the Enlightenment did. He stands athwart the secularist account of American origins and declares that America was religious from the beginning, that the religion never died, and that it remains a militant faith dedicated to spreading its creed across the world.
I could not have asked for a better hostile witness. Gelernter is no Catholic apologist and no counterrevolutionary; he is a conservative Jewish thinker who admires the American religion and wishes it well. He meant this book as a tribute. Read through Catholic eyes, it is a confession.
For if Gelernter is right — and I believe on the historical merits he largely is — then Americanism is not a neutral civic framework within which Catholics may comfortably dwell. It is a rival religion. And a Catholic cannot hold two religions at once. This is precisely the point that Michael Knowles and the whole tradition of Catholic apologists for the American order must avoid, because the moment Americanism is understood as a faith rather than a form of government, the question is no longer whether Catholics can be good citizens. The question is whether they can serve two masters.
Consider what Gelernter’s three pillars actually assert when examined theologically rather than sentimentally. Liberty, in the American creed, means the autonomy of the individual conscience — the right of each person to determine truth for himself, unmediated by any authority above him. Equality means that no man and no institution possess a divinely ordained authority over another, that hierarchy as such is illegitimate. Democracy means that the source of all legitimate power is the will of the people, ascending from below, rather than the authority of God, descending from above. These are not merely political preferences. They are propositions about the nature of authority, truth, and the human person, and the Church examined every one of them and found them wanting long before Gelernter assembled them into a creed.
Catholic social teaching
Leo XIII did this work with a thoroughness that ought to embarrass anyone who imagines the Church ever blessed the American religion. In Immortale Dei of 1885, his encyclical on the Christian constitution of states, Leo taught that the source of all right and civil authority is God, not the multitude, and he condemned directly the doctrine that the people are the ultimate source of all rights and all power, from which it follows that the state acknowledges no duty toward God. He praised instead the flourishing of civilization that occurred when states were “governed by the philosophy of the Gospel,” and he identified the destruction of that harmony as the work first of Protestantism and then of the erroneous philosophies that followed from it.
The Dispatch
Three years later, in Libertas, he pressed further, teaching that any liberty except that which consists in submission to God and subjection to His will “is unintelligible,” and that in the refusal of that submission “the chief and deadly vice of liberalism essentially consists.” He condemned the freedom of worship, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of teaching as understood by the liberal, precisely because they treat truth and error as though they had equal rights.
This was not a stray opinion. It was the sustained teaching of the Church, extending back through Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors of 1864, which condemned the proposition that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization,” and back further still to Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos of 1832, which condemned religious indifferentism and the unbridled freedom of opinion as a pestilential error.
Set Gelernter’s three pillars beside these condemnations and the collision is manifest. What he calls the American creed of liberty, equality, and democracy is, point for point, what the pre-conciliar magisterium named as the deadly principles of liberalism. Gelernter says America is a biblical religion built on these pillars. Leo XIII says these pillars are a rebellion against the divine order dressed in religious language. They are describing the same thing. They disagree only about whether to worship it.
Americanism vs. Catholicism
And here the Catholic critic of Gelernter has an advantage even the secular critic possesses. A reviewer at the Mises Institute — no friend of throne and altar — observed that Gelernter never asks how literally the Puritans meant their claim to be a chosen people, and pointed out that in the doctrines of orthodox Christianity no modern nation occupies any special place before God. This is the fatal flaw in the American religion. The Church knows only one chosen people, Israel, according to the flesh fulfilled in the Church according to the Spirit, and one promised land, which is not Massachusetts but the Kingdom of Heaven. To transfer the language of election and promise onto a temporal nation is not piety. It is idolatry, the oldest of sins, the worship of the creature in place of the Creator. Gelernter has documented, with a scholar’s care and a believer’s enthusiasm, the precise mechanism by which a Christian people substituted its nation for its God.
This is why the Americanist heresy condemned by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae was never merely a dispute about pastoral tactics. It was the point at which the fourth religion attempted to absorb the one true Church, to persuade Catholicism to adapt its doctrine to the American creed, to relax its ancient severity, to trade the supernatural for the civic. Pope Leo saw it. Brownson saw it before him. And Gelernter, a century later and entirely by accident, proved them both correct by writing the American religion’s catechism and calling it a compliment.
There is a final irony worth naming, and it comes from Gelernter’s own mouth. Surveying his students at Yale, the “seminary” of America’s elite, he once remarked that “there’s only one sacred word in their lives: career.” He meant it as a lament, and rightly so.
But it is also the fourth religion’s confession of what it finally produces. Strip the biblical vocabulary from Americanism, let the American Zionism fade while the Creed of autonomous liberty remains, and what is left is precisely the religion of the self I have described elsewhere: a people who have forgotten they have souls, worshipping at the altar of their own advancement. The American religion promised a new Jerusalem. It has delivered a career.
The Catholic in America therefore faces a question sharper than the one the anniversary rhetoric permits. It is not whether he loves his country, for a man may love even a country that worships a false god, as the early Christians loved Rome while refusing its incense. The question is whether he will offer that incense. The fourth religion asks for it constantly, in language so familiar it no longer sounds like a demand. There is only one answer a Catholic may give, and it is the answer the martyrs gave to a religion of the state that also called itself eternal. We serve, but not this! Non serviam was the first rebellion. Serviam, addressed to God alone, is the last word of the only true faith.
