History & Hope

The American Third Testament

Source: Andrew J. Bacevich, "America: With God on Our Side," Los Angeles Times, 16 Oct. 2011

Bacevich writes that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney nailed "the essence of our present-day civic religion" in a recent speech at the Citadel when he said, "I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world."  Bacevich observes:

The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God's instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land.

Liberia's Firebrand for Peace

Liza Griswold comments on Leymah Gbowee and her memoir Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation, in Newsweek, 26 Sept. 2011:

Griswold writes that in 1999, Gbowee "was introduced to a fledgling network of women working to bring peace and social justice to West Africa. She quickly discovered a focus for her talents—and a way to fight against the war that threatened to destroy her. In a dream, almost a religious vision, she heard a voice telling her quite clearly to 'gather the women to pray for peace.' The result was the creation of the country’s first Christian-Muslim alliance, which eventually grew into the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a nonviolent women’s protest movement that helped end the dictatorship of Charles Taylor and the war...."

Gbowee is a 2007 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacemaking.

God's Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902

By Susan K. Harris (Oxford Univ. Press), review by Harold K. Bush, Jr., in Christian Century, 4 Oct. 2011:

God's Arbiters reopens the closet concealing...dusty skeletons of our national past: it is an elaboration of the ideologies at work in the United States from roughly 1898 to 1902 that provided the means and motivation for imperial adventures undertaken under the banner of the Lord, as [President William] McKinley and many others asserted.  Central beliefs and values called for an overlapping of religious and racial identities that has been a source of great confusion throughout U.S. history -- and still is.  One might think that Christian intellectuals would clarify this confusion and reject outright the idea that the United States is the site of the kingdom of God on earth.  Instead Christian leaders have often been the most vocal supporters of Christian-nation ideology.  This despite the sheer heft of historical atrocities, not the least of which occurred in the Philippines, where promises were broken and treaties ignored and where women and children were murdered in the name of God and country....