Like, say, Russia or the Serbs? Or, at their best, Britain or the Croats?
If only!
The American Republic was founded by, and continues to idolise, fanatical anti-Christians. American Christians need to face up to that fact.
Americanism, its practical outworkings, and its imitations, require constantly to be subjected to a comprehensive, coherent and constructive critique drawing on the whole Biblico-Patristic tradition as mediated by, in, through and as sources variously Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox.
The Catholics include Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Thomas More, Blessed Pius IX and all his successors, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (comte de Saint-Simon), Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, Charles Fourier, G K Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, Engelbert Dolfuss, António de Salazar, B A Santamaria, Dorothy Day, and others.
The Protestants include Robert Lewis Dabney, Chales Hodge, Friedrich Julius Stahl, Abraham Kuyper, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, James Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, Ben Tillet, Tom Mann, Katherine Glasier, Margaret McMillan, Rachel McMillan, George Lansbury, Arthur Henderson, Joseph Clynes, Norman Thomas, Tommy Douglas, and others.
And the Orthodox include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others.
All the while, both Americans and others who engage in this critique must do so seeking to recover, in the given contemporary context, that which was lost by the failure in the 1930s to unite Enclycism in the North, Agrarianism and the Share Our Wealth movement in the South, and the Farm-Labor Party in the West.
America is currently behind the treatment of Turkey as a Western country, and the Islamic secession from at least one Christian country, as well as the genocide of the Chaldo-Assyrian Christians in Iraq.
And American policy currently pays no heed whatever to the Greek, Latin, Melkite, Maronite, Syrian Catholic, Armenian, Anglican and Lutheran communities in the Holy Land.
Christian America, wake up!
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I recommend that you have a look at Leo XIII, on true and false Americanism: 'Moreover, we have often considered and admired the noble gifts of your nation which enable the American people to be alive to every good work which promotes the good of humanity and the splendor of civilization.' Certainly it is worth bearing in mind that the term can have more than one meaning. '[I]f by this name [i.e. Americanism] are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name.'
ReplyDeleteAs I said, "a comprehensive, coherent and constructive critique drawing on ... Blessed Pius IX and all his successors".
ReplyDelete