Ted Cruz and the American "civil religion." This guy is even scarier than we thought.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Cruz’s White House run is disturbing, and not just because it involves Ted Cruz. Rather, he embodies the modern conservative propensity toward a fundamentalist American civil religion and its attendant, overly simplistic myths. As the English political activist George Monbiot observed during the dawn of the second President Bush’s Iraq War, to America’s conservative subculture “the United States is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion… It is not just that the Americans are God’s chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project.” American civil religion hinges on what Ted Cruz defined in his Liberty University speech as “the promise of America,” embodied in “the American exceptionalism that has made this nation a clarion voice for freedom in the world, a shining city on a hill.” The religion of America is a civil religion that casts the United States as a divine world power shaped by a series of comforting myths that, in the eyes of fervent believers like Cruz, make it the ultimate political Promised Land. 

The term “civil religion” goes back to the writings of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who ruminated on the tensions that arise when church and state become separate entities. In American discourse, the term is most closely associated with sociologist Robert Bellah. In 1967, Bellah characterized civil religion as “a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that was “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian” but nonetheless constituted a shared experience of being American that was inspired by Christian notions of redemption and spiritual fulfillment. Civil religion casts America as a beacon of secular and sacred hope in a fallen modern world. In this context, Bellah wrote, “Europe is Egypt” and America was the Promised Land to which ”God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all the nations.” And if this concept seems open-ended and ripe for abuse, that’s because it is. 

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Cruz had the myth of the Chosen Nation down pat when he claimed that America is “an indispensable nation, a unique nation in the history of the world.” As for the myth of Nature’s Nation, he evoked America as the cultivated political garden of God Himself that, “from the dawn of this country, at every stage… has enjoyed God’s providential blessing.” The myth of the Christian Nation? Cruz parroted the now standard (but historically bogus) right-wing claim that the U.S. “was founded upon” the idea that rights come from a very specific “God Almighty.” Cruz’s reference to the myth of Manifest Destiny was more veiled, but he name-dropped key historical figures such as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (no doubt for good bipartisan measure) and, of course, Ronald Reagan to reiterate his point that God has blessed every step in America’s development. The myth of the Capitalist Nation came via his railing against standard conservative government bogeymen like “regulators,” “tax collectors” and Obamacare that despoil the purity of the Free Market. Finally, Cruz touted the myth of the Innocent Nation when he claimed that political change will only come from “lovers of liberty” who realize that “God isn’t done with America yet.” Bless their liberty-loving souls. 

Cruz’s speech was a prime example of how the right wing promotes a deeply fundamentalist American civil religion that relies on time-honored myths to characterize the United States as a nation guided by providential destiny. Cruz and other conservatives don’t see America as one nation that is a part of world history; they see it as one nation apart from world history, one that exists free of the flawed human agency and historical contingency that — contrary to Cruz’s claims — has shaped all of the human experience. 

An America as defined by a future President Cruz is an America that sees itself as blindingly perfect, naively innocent, incapable of critical reflection over both its strengths and weaknesses and utterly convinced of its capacity to shape the world in its own image. Cruz’s version of civil religion is the ultimate example of how conservatives “absolutize the righteousness of the United States.” When you believe that God has blessed America from the beginning, you ignore the times that Americans have invoked God to justify the evils of Indian removal, slavery, racism, sexism and environmental destruction. More importantly, you undervalue the times when Americans have overcome those sins to demonstrate what Abraham Lincoln called ”the better angels of our nature.” When you worship capitalism and tout the United States as the world’s only hope, you ignore the false idols that led to the Great Recession and the bloody folly of the Iraq War that’s left the Middle East in tatters. When you develop a false sense of American innocence, you view national self-reflection as a weakness.

This of course is the same kind of thinking that allowed an arrogant pseudo Texan from a famous political family take this country to war with the idea that all the poor savages needed was a little American exceptionalism in their lives to make all of their problems simply disappear.

It's also the same mindset shared by a Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and of course Sarah Palin.

In fact when Palin suggests that President Obama is trying to "fundamentally change America" this is what she is talking about. The idea that the President would try to convince Americans to climb off their high horse and recognize that we are part of a global community that can all work together toward progress rather than an oligarchy that is working to proselytize their message of political religiosity to the unsaved, frightens people of limited intellect such as Palin.

However the most dangerous thing imaginable for this country would be to return to leadership that sees this country as not only without flaws, but incapable of mistakes due to the fact that the Constitution, much like the Bible, was inspired by God and is therefore infallible. (Amendments Shamendments.)

Now if you will excuse me I have to go lie down in the fetal position for a few minutes.