WHO ARE WE AS A PEOPLE? - 2 of 2

Who are we as a People? - 2 of 2

The website – cinops be gone – Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

Final excerpts from the article in “Intercollegiate Review” Fall/Winter, /05, p. 24-27 Peter Augustine Lawler, "Homeless on "Paradise Drive": 2 Views of Americanization

To be Americanized, for Chesterton, doesn’t mean to be uprooted from history, tradition, culture, and faith, but to be newly rooted as a free and equal citizen. THAT MEANS THAT AMERICAN CITIZENS ARE PERFECTLY FREE TO KEEP THEIR PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS FAITHS AND ALIEN CULTURAL TRADITIONS; THE ONLY ASSIMILATION REQUIRED OF THEM IS POLITICAL.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE A CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN IN A WAY THAT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE CATHOLIC AND ENGLISH (BECAUSE OF THEIR ESTABLISHED CHURCH) OR CATHOLIC AND FRENCH (BECAUSE OF THEIR REVOLUTIONARY, ANTI-CLERICAL TRADITION).

Americans, unlike the British or French – are perfectly free to keep their religious faith and to be fully at home as citizens, but finally both anarchism (which includes socialist and libertarian promises of a post-political world) and atheism are un-American.

The American idea is not wholly detached from religion. Our “romance of the citizen” depends upon the pre-existing dogma about the equality of all men under God. America is a home for the homeless because both our religious founding – with the Puritans – and our constitutional founding – with the Lockeans – are in agreement that God is not dead and all men are created equal.

The dogma that unites our two foundings, Chesterton explains, is that “there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a center of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”

The American dogma is that nihilism isn’t true; our dogma is that our technology is subordinate to our real souls and our real God. The American dogma does not so much transform as it stands in judgment over all American life, and it is more a doctrine about the whole of reality than it is dogma merely about citizenship.

Chesterton’s view of our identity differs from those who understand American citizenship to have a wholly secular and wholly cultural foundation.

Chesterton’s measured judgment is that the “nation with the soul of a church” is caught between modern or technological homelessness and the Catholic’s or Aristotelian being at home. But even that judgment must be qualified, for no Christian can experience himself as complete at home in the world. Chesterton seems to present the American mixture of homelessness and being at home as mirroring the truth about our middle class existence under God.

Our European critics today often criticize us for not being Americanized enough in Heidegger’s sense. In the election of 2004, they called our “moral values” voters stupid for not voting on merely technical grounds – for the party that would do best in delivering health care, social security, more secure alliances, etc.

They couldn’t believe that American voters regarded religion and morality as the real foundation of issues such as abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage. But our voters might respond that, because of our faith or dogma, our lives are more real than those of Europeans in the thrall of post-familial, post-religious, and post-political fantasy. And the result is that our country has more of a real future. (With this kind of foundation, we can be optimistic in the New Year.)
George H. Kubeck
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