Why God is American | EUROtoday

LAmerica’s obsessions will not be a spinoff of ours. Because its historical past follows that of Europe, at the least from a chronological viewpoint, we consider them to be our heirs. America will not be a toddler and, even when it may have been, it was by no means ours. The confrontation between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris doesn’t reveal two irreconcilable Americas, quite the opposite. It highlights a pressure international to our societies, that of a rustic the place materialism and the afterlife don’t stay individually however mixed with one another.

The United States will not be a rustic the place faith is essential and even the place faith is extra essential than it’s in France or England. The United States is a rustic the place faith is the nation. That’s no option to communicate: God is American. This is the title of a e book by Jean-François Colosimo, most likely one of the clever and shocking within the French language of the final thirty years. A piece of theology from which it emerged that America was neither Catholic nor Protestant. That she had not adopted the religions of the well-known Puritans who got here from the United Provinces to colonize the east coast however that she had invented her personal.

“Myth of modernity”

The founding fathers, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, imagined a singular political regime, the place human rights come from a supernatural power and are granted by “the Creator”. Colosimo writes: “It is […] the singularity of the United States in having constituted democracy in religious politics and political religion. The strength of this dialectic lies in the fact that it is original. Since the founding fathers, it has forged a myth of modernity where reason and revelation are not mutually exclusive but are aligned with the national idea. » Since then, all presidents have referred to this famous “providence”. The undertaking is much less messianic than millenarian.

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The United States will not be supposed to avoid wasting the world, or not solely, however to exchange evil kingdoms with a virtuous empire, their very own. Which partly explains expansionism. After September 11, Europe was disconcerted by the requires a “crusade” from an America that we believed to be so rational, cheap, free and smiling. Are our allies residing via their Middle Ages? Perhaps, however in any case it’s not akin to ours. This mystical and imperialist quest will not be carried out within the identify of the God of Christians, however within the identify of the God of America.

Contrary to what was repeated on the time, the assaults in New York didn’t awaken an evangelical and traditionalist nation, they highlighted a rustic that Europeans till now satisfied of belonging didn’t need to see. to the identical world. The Old Continent is accustomed to relative comparisons the place it believes itself to be the unique of all copies. The preferrred in the direction of which any human group ought to attempt. Donald Trump and the political second he provokes aren’t any exception to the rule.

America is split, nevertheless it has seen a lot worse. In the 1860s, its dissensions sparked one of many deadliest civil wars of contemporary instances, a prelude to the massacres of the First World War. In lower than 4 years, greater than 700,000 Americans have killed one another.

More not too long ago, within the Sixties, desegregation and demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War had been additionally the topic of inner clashes of unimaginable violence. As Jean-François Colosimo writes, the founding pact of the United States implies brutality: “The land of all violence is the actual nation of the Americans. In the land of civil faith, of confessional secularization and of the sovereign particular person, firmly asserting his proper to arm himself. » When you give somebody a gun, it’s uncommon that they use it completely defensively. If that had been the case, wars would not occur. The mass murders, so to talk with out motive, the assaults dedicated within the identify of causes perceived amongst us as loopy (“supremacists, anarchists, satanists or militarists”) are the inevitable results of a relentless strengthening of the ability of the person in a collective setting.

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Kangaroo of the day

Answer

Faced with Donald Trump, Europe is dismayed. Like all of the instances when America deviates from the thought we now have of it. This reflex doesn’t come from an extra of idealism, however from a painful confrontation with our personal cowardice. By renouncing its strategic independence, Europe has made excuses. The United States was a bit like us: similar values, similar aims. In brief, a wedding of comfort with a sister nation. Who is changing into an embarrassing cousin that nobody dares to ask to household events anymore.

Book reference: Jean-François Colosimo, God is AmericanParis, Fayard, 2006.