Nature’s Nation

Americans have often justified American order and American exceptionalism by invoking “the myth of nature,” write Robert Hughes and C. Leonard Allen in Illusions of Innocence (205). They “first employed this myth to justify freedom from tyranny. But they soon began equating nature with particular dimensions of national life that seemed right or normal from their limited perspective. In this way they naturalized their particular culture and then heralded that culture as both universal and absolute (205).

The ironies were “inevitable”:

On the one hand, American exalted as natural and universal the freedom of all peoples to shape their own cultures and to determine their own destinies. On the other hand, however, they judged one particular culture to be natural above all others and therefore claimed the right to enforce this culture as the destiny of the world. In the process, they often redefined freedom to mean the right to conform to this most natural way of life. The tension between these two ideals – a natural and universal freedom and a natural and universal culture – has stood at the very heart of U.S. foreign policy dilemmas ever since. (205)

Hughes and Allen see one way of escaping the tension: “by relinquishing the claim that freedom is a natural right or by abandoning the implicit assumption that conforming to American cultural norms is a natural obligations befitting all peoples. Seldom have Americans been prepared to do either” (205).

Behind this naturalization of American order is the naturalization of the biblical God. “By the dawn of the nineteenth century,” they write, “popular imagination in America had thoroughly synthesized the notions of ‘Jehovah’ and ‘Nature’s God’ to form the bedrock of America’s civil theology” (188). The result was that “‘Nature’s God’ became biblical and Jehovah became both natural and rational.” It was a “contrived and somewhat awkward” synthesis, “since ‘Nature’s God’ presided over a kingdom of supposed universal values while Jehovah ruled in a realm of explicitly Christian particularities.” But this American theology supported “the near universal conviction that the new nation was a virtual recovery of an ancient primordium, pristine and pure, standing at the fountainhead of time. Christ’s particularities and Nature’s universalities blended together to facilitate the conviction that both expressed the fist age. From this perspective, there was little different between proclaiming liberty and egalitarianism, on the one hand, and Christ, the Bible, and the church, on the other” (189).