The Demon in America's Sacred Narrative

America is a religion consumed by the eternally recurring apocalypse, and war is its cleansing ritual.

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

America is a Religion. On July 4, 1776, the United States was baptized with these words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”. By this oath, a nation was born and launched on its mythic passage of becoming. The Founders—our “creators”—had imagined more than a nation, however. They had also drafted the story arc of a divinely heroic journey, centering the United States as the culmination (to be) of History.

This is America’s sacred narrative. Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervor, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth. While France, Britain, Germany, and Russia stalked the world in search of new colonies and conquests, America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of divine mission as “God’s New Israel”. Whereas the mythical narratives of other great powers were cruelly self-centered, American scripture was—and remains today—“To Serve Man”. 

Thus, among all the revolutions unleashed by Modernity, the United States declares itself—in its own scripture—to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity. America is the exceptional nation—the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden: The “last, best hope of earth”.

This is the catechism of the American Civil Religion. In the world’s eyes, all this may seem like a ritual of self-serving vanity, yet the Civil Religion is the national article of faith for Americans. It is Holy Writ, which takes rhetorical form through what Americans take to be History. Yet this vision of history is better understood as a body of sacred literature, in many ways comparable to Islam. 

In place of the Qur’an, America has its Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead of the Sira (السيرة النبوية), Hadith (حديث), and Tafsir (تفسير), America has the Federalist Papers, presidential homilies beginning with Washington’s Farewell Address, and traditions, stories, and sayings of the Founders—all the way to modern-day interpretations offered by successor “great Americans”. Instead of Fiqh (فقه) and its Madhhab (مذهب) system, America has its own schools of jurisprudence to interpret and translate—in a sort of Ijtihad (اجتهاد)—its scripture into the proper “way to act” (cf. Madhhab).

We can only truly apprehend American thought and action today through the lens of religion. Indeed, America is a religion as uncompromising as Islam. For instance, one may assume that Americans lack Shahada (ٱلشَّهَادَةُ), or “the testimony” to the faith—but it was not so long ago that students in all American public schools would recite The Pledge of Allegiance (“the oath”) daily. Not only is America’s national anthem a pure hymn, but its sacred words—Freedom and Democracy—are also chanted ritually by its people just asʾIn shāʾ Allāh is by Muslims.

American Civil Religion is in many ways comparable to Islam. Just as Dar-al-Islam relentlessly pushed for a global community “by fire and sword”, the United States has sought a no less relentless universalism.

Our sacred literature defines who we are, where we come from, and where we are going—and as they do for the Islamic Ummah (أُمّة), they form the riverbed of our national self. Moreover, like Islam, America’s mission is also “rightly” guided, to be fulfilled only when all humanity is gathered in its “democratic” embrace. Just as Dar-al-Islam, in its heyday, relentlessly pushed for a global community “by fire and sword”, the United States has sought a no less relentless universalism in its apogee century.

Our sacred literature defines American identity as a grand narrative arc endowed by God—to be realized through a recurring series of ever-ascending epiphanic stories: a historical cycle of ecstatic struggles shaping America’s mythic passage of becoming and culminating in an apocalypse—“revelation” or “unveiling” (Ancient Greek apokálupsis). Within these apocalyptic cycles, the hidden meaning of the American sacred story arc is revealed only through the realization of universal democracy. As with Islam, the American religion too culminates in an apocalypse.

As such, the American story arc can only be fulfilled through battle. Every “peak life” moment in the American sacred narrative has been realized through mutual sacrifice and the transcendental power of victory in battle. From its founding moment to today, war has been the anvil of America, and blood its divine annealing.

Not only is each major American war regarded as a benchmark of progress toward a millenarian Grail, but each American generation has been encouraged to move the yardstick forward. While not every struggle succeeded, each drive built a launchpad for the next big push. So all-consuming, so all-powerful is the American sacred narrative that, in over 250 years, there has been no significant historical break in the unyielding American drive for Jihad.

Sacred narrative rules Americans: it rules what they think, say, and do. The question is, who controls this sacred narrative? Of course, the American Gospel is the creation of the American people. However much we believe—if often figuratively—in its divine inspiration, America’s “good news” is of our own making. And just as with the Constitution itself, we theoretically have the power to amend it. Yet, given that the imperative for exegesis is carved into the Ur-tablets of American Civil Religion, sectarianism becomes inevitable. 

American Civil Religion is inextricably linked with the Reformation, Calvinist Christianity, and the bloody history of Protestantism, with America’s sacred narrative shaped and christened through the country’s first and second Great Awakenings. Although its scriptural reading became secular in the Progressive era, the American religion still remained tethered to its formative roots. Indeed, even our contemporary “Church of Woke” cannot escape its original Calvinist Christian tubers.

Time and again in American history, autochthonous native sects have tried to “revise” the sacred narrative, perhaps even transfiguring it. What is more—given the Jihadi messianism that frames America’s national scripture—this revisionist path must pass through the valley of kin bloodletting and civil war.

The apocalypse that brings the promised Millennium to Mankind must necessarily reflect the apocalyptic yearning in the American Gospel itself: if fallen into corruption, we must be purified and made worthy again to act as the World Redeemer. For its sins, a corrupted sacred narrative cannot find expiation. Rather, a New Testament that is stainless must replace a corroded Old Testament. Rebirth thus requires passage through the cleansing fires of war. Indeed, obsession with the purifying, consecrating potential of the trials—and terrors—inherent in war is the demon that lurks hidden in the warren of our sacred literature.

This demonic possession with war has been hard-wired into America’s very birth as a nation. The American Revolution compelled the new nation to cast out its own brothers and cast off its ancient kinship with Britain. The very source code of America’s sacred narrative—the Declaration—was predicated on the transfiguration of our (former) kin into (henceforth) alien outsiders—if not enemies. Independence required metamorphosis. The passage to “revelation” lay through the fire of existential, internecine war.

In American Gospel, rebirth requires passage through the cleansing fires of war. Obsession with the purifying, consecrating potential of the trials—and terrors—inherent in war is the demon that lurks hidden in America’s sacred narrative.

The Declaration also foreshadowed America’s second demonic possession. The American Civil War evolved from a pronounced sectarian split that raced increasingly out of control after 1815. Two wildly different, and yet eerily similar evangelizing, neo-Christian sects drove a schism in the Civil Religion that took on the passionate intensity of Europe’s religious wars (1545-1648).

America’s third possession with holy war swelled into nothing less than a global apocalypse. Here the United States had to confront not rival sects within the American Civil Religion, but rather the (gnostic) Demiurge itself in a series of dark manifestations—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—which could only be defeated by the Light.

Since 1945, the United States has often conflated the neo-sectarian battles it has faced at home with its universal jihad to uplift and redeem humanity abroad. The core of America’s sacred narrative—its self-understanding as divinely-ordained, universalist, and apocalyptic—is, in its intense religiosity, troubling. That Americans are wholly oblivious to such religious zeal is disturbing. Nevertheless, this sacred narrative has driven Americans in every generation, urging them to recreate and relive their original story arc—an eternal recurrence that now has global ramifications.

This brings us to our current predicament. Since 2014, a rapidly-growing new sect—“The Church of Woke”—has sought to transform and fully possess the American civil religion, to reign as the successor faith. Ironically, the fervor of its evangelism channels the post-millennialism of the First Great Awakening, whose messianism was codified in Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages). 

How did the American civil religion take shape? What is the lineage of the critical moment in which we find ourselves today?