From Jeff Jacoby, “Philosophy, Faith and the Fourth of July,” on America as (in President Coolidge’s words) a “theory of democracy” for which “whole congregations with their pastors’’ pulled up stakes and migrated to America:
Steeped in the imagery of the Hebrew Bible, the colonists believed that God had led them, as he had led ancient Israel, from a land of bondage to a blessed Promised Land. Thomas Jefferson suggested in 1776 that the seal of the United States should depict the “Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by Day, and a Pillar of Fire by night.’’
In that wilderness, Americans knew, God did not simply impose his rule on Israel. First the Hebrews had to give their consent: “And all the people answered together, and said, All that the Lord has spoken we will do.’’ Only then was there the revelation at Sinai, the Ten Commandments, and the Law. If God himself would not govern without the consent of the governed, surely King George had no right to do so!
July 4 marks more than American independence. It commemorates the great political ideals, rooted in faith and philosophy, that vindicated that independence — and that thereby transformed the world.
From David Gelernter, “Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion,” arguing that after Lincoln and the Civil War “America emerged as something to believe in” – an “American Zionism” of freedom:
America was maturing as a theological concept. The distinguished liberal rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said so clearly. Four years after Lincoln’s death he gave a speech in which he summarized Americanism as he saw it and as Lincoln had shaped it.
He had been asked, Wise said, to address “a subject dear and precious to all of us, our country, our promised land, the home and fortress of freedom, the blessed spot which flows with milk and honey, upon which we invoke God’s gracious blessing.”
President Truman wrote that as a young man he was fascinated by history – which “revealed to me that what came about in Philadelphia in 1776 really had its beginning in Hebrew times.” The Jewish Spring led to the American one.