Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

In his book, Upon the Altar of the Nation, a moral history of the Civil War, Harry S. Stout describes the origins of the American Civil Religion. This “religion” was created during the American Civil War, as both sides made enormous and unexpected sacrifices. Steeped in the Christian religion, with little influence from Catholic, Jewish, Native American or Muslim religions, Americans compared the “blood bath” to a baptism. From the horror something good had to be born.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address expressed and gave voice to this new religion. The nation emerging from the Civil War will have demonstrated to the world its belief “that all men are created equal.” The reborn United States has a mission, not unlike the Christian mission, to the whole world. It will promote freedom, or liberty. Its creed will prophesy God’s blessing upon a democracy of equals, which necessarily leads to prosperity.

Its government must be “of the people, by the people, for the people,” because, as Thomas Jefferson believed, an enlightened nation of fully-franchised and educated, citizens will invariably make the right choices. Nor will that nation “perish from the earth.” Baptized in the blood of these honored dead, it will endure until the second coming of Christ.

150 years later Americans still believe in our "American Exceptionalism." We believe we must be a city on the hill for the world; and that our principles of freedom and equality, which have brought us unprecedented prosperity, are the envy of the world. 

I once attended a lecture at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I was the only Catholic in a room full of Lutheran ministers. The lecturer declared, “You can talk to any Catholic and you will discover that he knows what few Americans understand: the church is two thousand years old and the United States is only two hundred years old.”
I replied, “Guilty!”

Catholics may be loyal citizens but we never quite buy the American Civil Religion, which brings me to today’s scripture passage from Jeremiah:

Our hero is in trouble again. He has said what no one should say, that God will not save Jerusalem against the Babylonian siege. Because of their sins, God will let city and nation fall just as other nations have fallen. We enjoy neither exceptionalism nor special blessings, although we have the temple, the priesthood, the law, the covenant and the promises!

Of course the beleaguered citizens were enraged by his prophecy. Surrounded by the Babylonian army with no help from Egypt, their only hope was to maintain "hope against all odds," and Jeremiah spoke only of doom.

Unfortunately, he was right. The Babylonian army captured the city and installed its own puppet government. When that government rebelled a dozen years later, the city was attacked a second time, and leveled. The devastation was terrible.

Out of the wreckage of that sovereign nation, which would not reappear until 1948, the Jews kept their scriptures and traditions. In many ways their prophets sounded as strident then as some Christian preachers sound today. Their advice was taken no more seriously than it is today; although, like our priests and ministers, they were accorded religious respect. History proved them right about their pessimistic predictions; but every nation collapses sooner or later. 

More important than their fulminations, we learn from the prophets the intense, passionate, even jealous love God has for his people. They would let no one forget the covenant: 

I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers' wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation; but bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation, on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.  

The prophets proclaimed the infinite tenderness and the terrible jealousy of God. In that the prophets were never wrong.