(Above: Penns Creek in our region)
I have been teaching classes on “America at 250” this academic year at Bucknell University, and one of the framing questions for the classes is this: Is America a propositional nation, based on an idea, or is it a country with a particular culture tied with a land?
Those derogating the latter side of the question often refer to such a notion as a “blood and soil” view.
However, that phrase, coming as it does from German nationalism in the 19th century, seems a straw man in the debate — except that living near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (the site of the bloodiest battle in Western Hemispheric history) it is hard not to think of “blood and soil” in a specifically American way.
Looking at the Declaration of Independence as a basic document, as we do in the classes, and also as an Orthodox Christian in the Russian Orthodox tradition, I cannot escape a view that America is a cultural country related to a particular land. A national idea country is an uncomfortable one in my tradition. It calls to mind the Soviet Union, which sought to replace Russia with an idea, and awful results.
No, ideology should not, I think, be the basis for a country, and is not in America’s case.
Even the word “country” has a meaningful variety of definitions that works against that notion.
For a country can be a nation, but the word country itself has ties to land and culture, as in being “in the country” or “country music.”
The Church I pastor in Northern Appalachia is a country Church, no doubt, as one can see from its location amid fields, its rural area, modest building and small if growing size, and the backgrounds of people in our community. And we have a cemetery there, where my family has a plot. Country also implies cultivating, and thus a culture. The parish is a country, too. Holy Scripture and Orthodox Christian tradition touch on the nations as the peoples or races (not in the pseudo-science racialist sense of the Enlightenment though–the Church is termed in old language a race, the race of all nations or peoples), through which salvation comes communally; hence the existence of “local Churches” in Orthodoxy.
But let us look at the basic idea that is advanced as the reason for America being a propositional country, from the Declaration’s preamble, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“
It reveals a country of culture in the land, not propositional, starting with “Creator” and going back to the opening “we” referencing us as a people. Then go on to the ending where the Declaration pledges the signers’ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, with faith in the firm protection of Divine Providence (another mention of God in the Declaration). The conclusion particularly focused on each of their histories together in America, sustained by the biblical God. Providence as a term in the Declaration does not offer a vague disembodied Deism, but a biblical sensibility.
The dignity the first statement summons for each human life is the ultimate basis of the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” also referenced in the Declaration. When St. Basil the Great of Cappadocia, an early Church Father, referenced the spark of God’s love in each human heart, he was describing the fully embodied and experiential sense of natural law that undergirds the Christian faith. Faith involves grounded culture more than proposition.
My students agree that the most-remembered idea of the Declaration that “all men are created equal” is foundational to America, but not necessarily propositional. They point to the “pursuit of happiness” as related to the “American dream” evidenced in place. They seemed more likely this fall semester to recognize the Declaration’s preposition as cultural in some sense. Some in discussion liked the idea advanced by Vice President J.D. Vance in his speech at the 2024 Republican convention that America is for him his family cemetery plot on a mountain in West Virginia.
The two notions of America –propositional and “deep country”– are not completely exclusive, though. In my classes, students as we discuss the above definitional phrase in the Declaration generally conclude that it does not argue that all people are equal, as in cultural Marxist notions of global equity in recent years in higher education, or commodified notions of people in a global marketplace–but that it says what it states, that all are created equal by God, at birth. And birth is in a place even if that dignity is spiritual.
The Declaration’s statement grounds people in Creation and comes from the Christian biblical spirituality of America’s founding generations. It embeds itself in Christian incarnational terms in the land through people’s lives, in neighborhoods, in a parish. It involves treating others with the dignity expressed in the New Commandment of Jesus Christ, to love one another as He loves us, and thus to love our neighbor more than ourselves.
Rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not rights of self-assertion as we understand them secularly today, but gifts from God, that carry with them obligations. The virtues involved in those gifts must be lived in a certain place and embodied in our lives. That too is cultural, not propositional, as much so as, say, George Washington’s character, even if he straddled being both Anglican vestryman and Mason, courageous lover of virtuous liberty and slaveowner.
Happiness to be pursued must involve, as is clear from the cultural context of the Founders’ views, virtue. Virtue also is a gift from God, a portal bridging divine grace and human struggle and aspiration, to be lived in community in a region that is to be cultivated, in our case in a parish in the country, with all its human faults and limitations, too.
This is a Christian cultural understanding, not a philosophical ideology of secularism. It requires a continuing Christian culture to tend properly. It relates to the faith that God became a man, so that man could become a god, to use the terminology of the early Christian leader Saint Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, who was describing our potential oneness in humility with God’s uncreated grace, although not with God’s mysterious and all-powerful essence. This happens by God’s grace in the neighborhood of our lives, working out from our hearts in an embodied way, starting locally.
This was perhaps understood and practiced more in the reform zeal of the many local Protestant communities established in America foundationally, the main formative Christian tradition of America, than in the arguably more Scholastic Catholicism of the day. Yet it is a common heritage for both, and completely familiar in the Orthodox Christian faith.
University of Chicago historian Anthony Kaldellis has written of “the Byzantine republic,” the sense of Christian commonwealth that infused the Christian Roman Empire of Byzantine for a thousand years, and helped inspire both Europe and Russia with hopes for a Christian commonwealth. In varying forms of monarchy, the underlying sensibility was of the responsibility and limitations of human governments under God, that rulers did not have divine right but by in effect a contract of the heart to God. The symphonia of Orthodox tradition involved both a conciliar (council-governed) sense of hierarchy in the Church and the double-headed eagle as a symbol of of an ideal harmony with distinction between the State and the Church, as checks and balances upon each other. In modern parlance, this approach was pre-Enlightenment and non-Western. But it became rooted, too, here, in American forms, primarily through the context of Christian traditions.
Many cultures of historical and Incarnational Christian perspectives contributed to this sensibility in America, and built on it, in the vast majority of “we the people”– what we Orthodox might term a somewhat religiously confused but decidedly Christian-identifying mix: English Anglicans and Congregationalists, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, African-American Protestants, Irish and other varieties of Catholics, among others. With them came Slavic and Greek and Arab and Syrian and Native American Orthodox Christians, and now a growing number of American Orthodox Christian converts like myself.
Still, the Christian culture of the Constitution lingers. Neo-Stuartist in the implied Christian monarchism of the U.S. Presidency, as Harvard historian Eric Nelson has argued, that element was shaped by Jacobite (not Jacobin!) sensibilities of the Appalachian Scots-Irish among others, including Orthodox Christian immigrant culture no doubt. If an empty frame spiritually often today in a legalistic sense, the Constitution in its spirit reflects Christian culture overall: Awaiting the “Return of the King” in an eschatological if not Tolkienian sense. The Constitution as a document functions somewhat akin in the modern world to the symbolism of a monarchy itself in holding the country together, and is the oldest text of its kind, reflecting the biblical sense of textuality of the founders. The First Amendment, after all, guaranteed free expression of religion under our national government, just prohibiting national establishment of a particular denomination, which would have been a stumbling block for us Orthodox Christians in our mission work in a legacy Protestant country, anyway.
Indeed, at our modest country Orthodox Church in Union Township we worship Jesus Christ as God, the Creator of our world and at the same time a man who lived more than two millennia ago on earth in the Holy Land, but Who, following the unedited Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed familiar to most Christian denominations in the region. Christ also sits in human form at the right hand of God the Father, and Who shall return again to judge the living and the dead, His kingdom to have no end. That was written in now-vanished Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean many centuries ago in the Greek language. At the same time, we also at our little Church celebrate the American Orthodox saints who labored with Native Americans in Alaska and Slavic immigrants to the coal region of Pennsylvania, and our patron, Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, alongside holy people of many lands going back to ancient times, up to the 20th-century Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia and the martyrs to Communism. They latter fell prey to the modern atheistic revolutionary spirit of what the Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine, which marks these latter days.
The Machine of a global technocracy, which would reduce us all to materialistic products of a system weirdly reflect aspects of both communism and consumer capitalism, stalks us in America, too. But while worshipping according to living Orthodox Christian tradition, we can remember the Christian culture of America’s founding, and do. At every Liturgy (using an ancient framework of worship) we say prayers for “this land,” America. At the start and at Eucharistic prayers we ring our Church bell, which is purposely inscribed with the biblical words from the American Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” For a reason, the Constitution was signed with the date “in the year of our Lord,” while including reference to Sunday, the Christian day of Resurrection and of sabbath rest for worship of our Creator.
All of this doesn’t exclude other religious faiths and philosophical views. But they are culturally foundational to America no more than Christian culture would be considered foundational to the modern states of Saudi Arabia, China, India, or Israel. Each of those important countries, representative also of a world civilization, has their own foundational culture and faith tied to their regions (in the case of China today, albeit, Communist-atheist, but with a history too of Chinese philosophical and religious traditions as cultural background arguably still today).
If we look to renew America, we must look to a renewal of American Christian culture, in its Orthodox roots, originally from the Byzantine civilizational zone in the Holy Land, and now rooted in many lands, and made native in them by local saints and martyrs and parishes and the struggles of the people. In a thirst for traditional Christianity, we see more Americans becoming Orthodox Christians today, even in our small parish, and the growing roots of American Orthodoxy.
In America’s federal Constitution as a country, checks and balances, states’ rights, localism, the division of powers, the Bill of Rights–these all express a Christian culture that both knew the evil tendencies of sinful human nature alongside the essential goodness of man made in the image of God, however fallen yet redeemable upon earth. In earliest days under the U.S. Constitution, some states even had official Christian denominations. Many of the elements of the Constitution were adapted from the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee Confederacy) based in upstate New York, but are meant to be adapted to Christian spirituality of the American people as a whole nonetheless, however imperfectly.
Logos in Christian culture, a Greek word used for Christ, carries the meaning of both reason and harmony. In a Christian view, both meanings were designed to be in place in man’s self-government and in civil authorities. Neither cold individual logic nor unthinking homogeneous harmony would suffice alone, but both melded. Christ Himself is fully God and fully man, unconfused and undivided, and traditional Christians believe we find ourselves in Him, in self-emptying, not self-assertion. That last point is the greatest difference between a propositional idea and a cultural basis for America at 250. In today’s global-Western nihilism, the propositional has become a cloak for self-assertiveness. There are no Humility Parades. But the foundational culture of America is that in which the person is realized in sobornost, the Slavic Christian term for mystical solidarity, multi-faceted but self-emptying in Christ.
Like the historical Church, both transcendent and immanent, an indirect type for the two natures in one Person of Christ, our country (however unworthily at times) has a place and history for its big ideas. In its foundation it may be a fractal of different cultural manifestations of Christianity in history and worldwide. But it has a name and a land and a genealogy and a grounding of its own, in these past 250 years, for good and for ill as with all manifestations of human history, but still to be patriotically loved as our native land. You can find this by a visit to the countryside in which our Church lies, as well as on a big scale at the Gettysburg National History Battlefield a morning’s drive away from us.
If the propositional is the more globally transcendent and “oceanic” view of American civilization, to borrow concepts from geopolitical philosophers, the cultural view is the more “terrestrial” or homeland sense of country. That’s the perspective of us in Appalachia for sure, and in the Middle West of my birth. America as homeland is woven large throughout all the regions of our continental republic and into our Constitution and cultures as well.
I am unworthily an Orthodox Christian Priest, and a longtime literature professor at a secular university in central Pennsylvania, a former big-city Urban Affairs Writer at a Chicago newspaper. A descendant of a participant in the Battle of Lexington with deep Yankee New England Protestant backgrounds, I am also a scion of Irish Catholic and Scandinavian immigrants, bear a surname most common in Estonia, and live in a blended Russian-American family. My country is America, but also this Appalachian region, the central Susquehanna River Valley of Pennsylvania, and ultimately the country parish that is my Church home and the roots of our family.
In the 250th year of the founding of our country, in what in our Orthodox Church biblically is the Year 7534, in what the West calculates as the 2026th Year of our Lord, may God bless our land and her people, and grant America many years!