God is not an American
Here's bits and pieces of a fascinating online article by Michael J. Baxter entitled God is not an American:

"I know you're all going to think this is crazy, but I always thought Jesus was an American." This statement was uttered by a young woman in a seminar on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era at the University of California at San Diego....

What makes Americans so resilient in their denial of death? This is where [Mark] Slouka's article is most insightful. It is, in a phrase, American exceptionalism, the myth of "America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation." It is this myth that the young woman articulated in the seminar that day. And this same myth, Slouka points out, has been articulated by a host of better-known articulators. It was initially articulated by John Winthrop, who in 1630 sermonized that the people sailing aboard the Arbella had been chosen for a special covenant with God to be "as a City upon a hill." Then there was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century best-selling author, who in 1854 wrote that "the whole world has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by God to advance a cause of liberty and justice." And later, there were the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, who envisioned an America "bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium." And more recently, there was Ronald Reagan, who drew on Winthrop's city-on-a-hill image for his first inaugural address in 1981....

The fact that Neuhaus and the neo-conservative crowd at First Things came out strongly in support of the invasion of Afghanistan is not very startling....What is interesting, however, is Neuhaus's portrayal of the role of God in this war....

Neuhaus offers a defense of...part of Bush's speech in the next section of his editorial, with the subheading "A Nation Under God." He notes that some critics find in the president's words "not humility but hubris, an uncritical identification of our purposes with the purposes of God." To these critics, he delivers a blunt challenge:

"...In a time of grave testing, America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are "one nation under God"—meaning that we are under both His protection and His judgment. This is not national hubris. Confidence that we are under his protection is faith; awareness that we are under His judgment is humility. This relationship with God is not established by virtue of our being Americans, but by the fact that He is the Father of the common humanity of which we are part. Most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ...."

Neuhaus's argument...fails to acknowledge the possibility that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear....while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God's purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political entity or body or by the church itself.

And then, beyond these two problems, there is the more far-reaching problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection," which falls far short of a more traditional definition of faith as the virtue or habit whereby the person gives intellectual assent to revealed truths regarding the identity and nature of God, including, for example, the truths about the Trinity. This vagueness is also evident in his truncated definition of humility as "awareness that we are under His judgment," which is true, but which must also be defined as the virtue whereby the person is restrained in his pursuit of great goods by subjecting himself to God, for whose sake he also humbles himself to others. Now both faith and humility are understood in Christian tradition to be theological or infused virtues—that is, virtues given by grace—and as such they cannot be realized apart from life in Christ and in the church. Therefore any definition of faith and humility must include an account of the concrete practices, specific virtues, and forms of life entailed in being Christian....

How accurate is Neuhaus's post-9/11 claim that America is "rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition"? The statement's subordinate clause—"albeit sometimes tenuously"—acknowledges that the nation's Judeo-Christian tradition at times has been obscured or attacked. But this caveat is clearly outweighed by the overriding claim that America is "overwhelmingly Christian."...

The claims Neuhaus makes here are again problematic on several scores. First, he cites the national prayer service and prayers being said in schools as evidence that the United States is a Christian nation. But the national prayer service, although it was held in a cathedral, included prayers recited by a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam. Would they agree that they live in a Christian nation? And would this be the view of Irving Berlin, the Jewish composer of "God Bless America"?...

To be fair, we should note that Neuhaus reminds us that Christians place their ultimate loyalty in no earthly city but in the city that is their final destination, the heavenly Jerusalem—an eschatological proviso, so to speak, meant to safeguard against an idolatrous allegiance to country. But no safeguard is effective without an accompanying ecclesiological proviso, without a positive and substantive account of the church.

Interestingly, there is no such account in Neuhaus's editorial. There are plenty of references to God, to Christians, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to America as a Christian nation, but no clear references to the church....