American religion

If nothing else, it's been a clarifying week.

To take only one egregious point from many, the suggestion by people who know better that a person needs to be a Christian to genuinely love America or the American project is a pernicious slander that has been rejected on the right and left for more than two centuries. From Washington's letter to Newport and Adams's letters to Jewish diplomats to Lincoln's speeches about unity and Union to Reagan's support for religious freedom and tolerance in the judicial landscape to Bush's (43) push for religious liberty in public policy to Trump's unprecedented appointment and promotion of Jews and Hindus, conservative American statesmen throughout the Republic's history have acknowledged the importance of religious liberty to the American project.

Nobody denies the centrality of Christianity to the American founding or the continuation of the American story. Most conservatives of any religious stripe reject the strident secularism that progressives impose anachronistically upon the ideology of the Founders.But when senior members of the government and erstwhile institutions of intellectual merit determine that belief in a single creed is a prerequisite for identification with the American project, they have either grossly misunderstood that project or, worse, are bastardizing it to curry favor with those who would reject it.

And as an aside, while I can only speak to the Jewish experience in America, you will hardly find a group of people more deeply grateful to this country than American Jews. From Isaac Leeser in the nineteenth century who wrote volumes in praise of this land, its Constitution, and its people, to Midge Decter, an intellectual steward of the Heritage Foundation (which abhorrently betrayed her memory yesterday), to Meir Soloveitchik writing about the promise of America today in the pages of Commentary Magazine, to R Moshe Feinstein and the Lubavitcher Rebbe who speak and write at length about the unique spiritual gifts of America, to the poet Joseph Glatsteyn who escaped the graveyard of Europe and wrote later in life that he regretted not falling to his knees and kissing the ground when he arrived at Ellis Island, whatever story you think you are telling about the United States, it is an absurd falsehood if your story assumes the Jews have played and should play no role in the unfolding of that story.

Paranoia, intolerance, and a decaying civil society are the inevitable fruits of populism whether propagated by Bernie Sanders and AOC or JD Vance and Tucker Carlson. From the perspective of Jewish history, it's a question of whether America is essentially different from the locales of "golden ages" past. Is it truly unique, or will it share the same fate of so many other places which promised relative liberty and belonging—Baghdad, Spain, the Kingdom of Poland, the Dutch Republic—only to collapse into turmoil and disarray, indulging at last in the world's oldest hatred?

Personally, I still believe America has the antibodies to fight the poison. But only time will tell, and it is later in the day than I thought.