On the American experiment

As someone born in America, I must say the patriotic Kool-aid used to be drummed into us from elementary school on.  Now I think that has been replaced by some kind of multicult relativistic Marxist nonsense that undermines not only American exceptionalism but the entire value of Western Civilization.  As a dual Canadian citizen and new Catholic, I am taking a look at my preconceptions in a new way.  That said, this is an interesting article at The Catholic Herald by Daniel Hannan:

Anti-Catholicism was not principally doctrinal: few people were much interested in whether you believed in priestly celibacy or praying for the souls of the dead. Rather, it was geopolitical.

The English-speaking peoples spent the better part of three centuries at war with Spain, France or both. The magisterial historian of the Stuarts, J P Kenyon, likened the atmosphere to that of the Cold War, at its height when he was writing. Just as western Communists, even the most patriotic among them, were seen as potential agents of a foreign power, and just as suspicion fell even upon mainstream socialists, so 17th-century Catholics were feared as fifth columnists, and even those High Church Anglicans whose rites and practices appeared too “Romish” were regarded as untrustworthy. The notion of Protestantism as a national identity, divorced from religious belief, now survives only in parts of Northern Ireland; but it was once common to the Anglosphere.

When telling the story of liberty in the Anglophone world in my new book, I found this much the hardest chapter to write. Being of Ulster Catholic extraction on one side and Scottish Presbyterian on the other, I am more alert to sectarianism than most British people, and I’ve always loathed it. But it is impossible to record the rise of the English-speaking peoples without understanding their world view. Notions of providence and destiny, of contracts and covenants, of being a chosen people, were central to the self-definition of English-speakers – especially those who settled across the oceans. Protestantism, in their minds, formed an alloy with freedom and property that could not be melted down into its component elements.

And here’s the almost miraculous thing: they ended up creating a uniquely individualist culture that endured when religious practice waned. Adams and Jefferson led the first state in the world based on true religious freedom (as opposed to toleration). From a spasm of sectarianism came, paradoxically, pluralism. And, once it had come, it held on. “I never met an English Catholic who did not value, as much as any Protestant, the free institutions of his country,” wrote an astonished Tocqueville.

Best of all, Anglosphere values proved transportable: they are why Bermuda is not Haiti, why Singapore is not Indonesia and why Hong Kong is not China. There’s a thought to cheer us, whatever our denomination, all as the orange sparks rise from the bonfires each year.

Most interesting.  But I think the seeds for the Anglosphere well precede the Reformation as do the notions of God-given rights that even the king cannot trample upon.

And I also believe there were problems when the Papacy had political power and armies and lands to defend and alliances to cultivate than its present model where the power is spiritual and in influence rather than force.

Someone was talking to me about the assassination of  John F. Kennedy the other day and the impact of his asserting that he was not under the power of the papacy.  This paved the way for the first Catholic president.  But it also made it easier for Catholic politicians to make their faith a private matter, divorcing their public lives from their faith.  Thus, pro-abortion Catholics, etc.