How the conservative belief in American exceptionalism has become a matter of faith.

My Comment: Christopher Hitchens wrote and posted this article last November. Like me, he was an Englishman who made his home in the United States. Unlike me, he was an accomplshed thinker and writer. Unfortunately, he died late last year after a battle with cancer. Fortunately, I’m still here and not now battling cancer.

The phrase “In God We Trust” has been with us in this country for a long time. I first remember it as something that appeared on the stamps my grandfather encouraged me to collect. It appears on our currency. It appears on monuments and Federal buildings. My impression of God is derived from my English childhood, as a white, anglo-saxon male, and can be expressed as a mental impression not unlike the image of God that appears on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel. However, we now live in a wired, webbed and internet driven world and it’s very possible your God has a totally different expression. It doesn’t mean mine is right and yours wrong, or vice versa, just that they are different.

Chances are if you are reading this, you live in the US and are a citizen in good standing. You will soon be asked and expected to vote for someone who will serve as President for another four years. If your image of God is not that of a white, anglo-saxon male, you may be uncomfortable putting someone in charge who seems to favor only those who share my image of God. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I put more faith in those with an ability to adapt to these changing times, and who don’t want us to return to the “good ol’ days”. I’m not sure that putting our trust in God is what “He” had in mind.

The following is to my mind a key paragraph in Hitchens article:
Especially to the extent that it starts to look like a loyalty oath, I think that the underlying question here should be dismissed as rash or stupid or both. Is the United States “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world”? Anybody claiming to have the answer to that question—as George W. Bush once seemed to do—would be a fool. For a start, what would be his sources of information? And how good a historian would he be? In the long view, very few of the survivors of the Roman Empire would have predicted that the inhabitants of the frozen and backward British Isles would be among the next builders of a global system, but so it proved. And there was no question that the British or English, especially the Protestant fundamentalist ones, believed that they had God on their side. In fact, I know of no European state that doesn’t have some kind of national myth to the same effect. The problem, as everybody knows, is that not all these myths can be simultaneously right.

Read the full article HERE…