Who are we as a People? 1 of 2

Who are we as a People? – 1 of 2
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But there is another way of viewing America, one that recognizes us as the only human beings at home with the truth about the human soul. According to G.K. Chesterton’s famous formulation, the Americans are “A NATION WITH THE SOUL OF A CHURCH."

Human beings, we Americans believe, are all equally beings with souls and God-given dignity existing between the other animals and God. The middle-class way of life, in this view, is the result of the movement from the chaotic “becoming” of historical force and the fraud to the truth about existence. To be middle-class is not to be a pragmatist or technologist in the most important sense; other dignified beings with souls do not exist for our manipulation or exploitation.

So the American view of middle-class existence, Chesterton noticed is at heart our distinctively spiritual adventure of discovering all human beings at home with each other, living in common awareness that nihilism isn’t true.

America, Chesterton says, is about “making a home of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.” Our nation is an “asylum,” a “home for the homeless.” Like the church it is a place where all human beings can find a home.

Each and every human being – despite race, class, gender, physical deformity, etc. – can be a member of the universal church if he or she accepts its creed. And each and every human being can become an American if he accepts our political creed. The Puritans left their homeland not for wealth and power but to “make an idea triumph.”

And “partly by original theory and partly by historical accident,” America is the one nation held together by citizens’ common belief in an idea. That idea is not to be confused, Chesterton explains, with “internationalism” but is actually “the nationalization of the internationalized,” the placement of those who find themselves displaced – usually for quite unjust reasons – from their previous national homes. Being bound by an idea or creed, according to Chesterton, is “what is called Americanization” – the making of patriotic American citizens.

To be an American is to be bound by the “creed… set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” That document, “the highest point of democratic idealism,” declares, above all, that Americans are “dedication to the proposition that all men are create equal.”

Chesterton’s account of the Declaration’s dogma comes not from Jefferson but from Lincoln, showing that this “piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics” is than individualistic or self-interested or merely utilitarian calculation about one’s own liberty. The “proposition” is a theoretical and theological statement about the way “all men” stand in relation to each other, to the rest of earthly reality, and to God.

The above is from The Intercollegiate Review V.40 No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2005 by Peter Augustine Lawler, “Homeless on “Paradise Drive”: Two Views of Americanization. p.22-3
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