Horsley explains how this works in his book, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. In a section on “Jesus and American Empire,” Horsley suggests that many “colonists and rebels” understood they had a biblical mandate to seek a “new democratic covenant,” based on “liberation from political and religious tyranny.” This idea of a new covenant was shaped by biblical belief, but realized in the shape of a democratic society where government was a secular institution.

“In the new covenant of the U.S. Constitution,” says Horsley, the “church was explicitly, institutionally separated from state.” But others among the colonists had a different biblical vision, and it has led us to where we are today: exporting “democracy” with guns. According to Horsley: “The intensely religious dimension of American imperialism owes much to the other early strand in the American identity. In the early Puritan settlements in New England there was very little separation between the community as covenant and the church as covenant.”

And this meant that over time, the nation itself, “more than the churches, emerged as the new Israel. The United States more than its churches, was the people chosen by God to redeem the world.” Sadly, admits Horsley, “the United States itself, having co-opted God to bless it, became an object of devotion in the American civil religion,” and now has assumed the messianic mission of saving the world.”

Michael Northcott, author of An Angel Directs The Storm: Apocalyptic Religion & American Empire, calls the Bush foreign policy a merger of “apocalyptic religion and American empire.”

Back in 2003 Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, coined the phrase “messianic militarism,” to describe “Bush’s Messiah Complex,” and macho calls for war as the solution to our fears and desires as a nation.

Rothschild quotes Lee Quinby, a professor who writes about apocalypticism: "What I hear is a holy trinity of militarism, masculinism, and messianic zeal…It does follow the logic of apocalyptic thought, which has a religious base but is now secularized in the militaristic mode.”

Sources:

Richard A Horsley. 2003. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Quotes from pp. 147-148.

Michael Northcott. 2004. An Angel Directs The Storm: Apocalyptic Religion & American Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.

Lee Quinby. 1994. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Matthew Rothschild. 2003. “Bush’s Messiah Complex,” the Progressive, February, http://progressive.org/node/1344.

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Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates
The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates
Chip's Blog

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