Americanism is that peculiar form of patriotism that transcends all other forms. It could almost be heretical in its rabidity. It almost requires a worship of the ideal that America believes itself to have achieved simply through its existing. The frequent refrain of “God bless America” seems harmless on the surface, but the request for God to bless a blasphemous country (the innocent slaughtered through abortion are done so under the cry of “This is my body!”, which can hardly be described as a mere coincidence) founded by heretics would be laughable if it didn’t sucker in so many well-intentioned folk (as my confessor recently reminded me: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions(!)), who believe it to be “One Nation, Indivisible, Under God” or however that goes, ridiculous claim that it is!
What makes this patriotism so peculiar is the patronising way it views the rest of the world. It is strange to think that a person can look at another person and say “Why are you not like me, why can you not be sane and smart as I am?”, and yet this is very much how America seems to view the world. It is so self-absorbed that it hasn’t realised that each country in the world is unique and founded on anything but arbitrary grounds. Most of the world is divided into countries which were founded based on the local dialect, which was founded based on a language that evolved only as much as it needed to, which evolved based on its geographical position and economic development.
America, however, began because a Protestant sect (the Quakers) was condemned by the Church of England. The Quakers, needing to escape death, sailed to America and became known as the Pilgrim Fathers. These people are at the foundation of modern America. This is important because Protestants do not understand the Bible or Man the way the Catholics and Orthodox do (and if those two are united on anything (other than the Jews), it’s laughing at Protestants!) The Protestant understanding of Man allows them to dismiss various lower-classed folk (especially the blacks) as less-than-human solely because they are different. The Protestant understanding of the Bible is that because St. Paul said you could beat your slave that you must be allowed to have a slave, but slavery in the Bible is not so limited as the modern world needs you to think. If you allowed that slavery might refer to some other type of indebtedness, then you’d have to allow that treating a man as lesser because he didn’t have the same skin colour as you might actually be wrong.
Herein, then lies the problem of Americanism: it treats as lesser those that are different and cannot understand that “unity” and “sameness” are in fact not the same thing. The unity of Christ’s Church does not mean that it has to mirror itself everywhere (although it should unite itself under one language during its official rites since God gave us the gift of language as a punishment for over-reaching ourselves, so it is only just that we unite in language when we reenact in an unbloody manner the sacrifice of God’s Son).
A country can and should be proud of its unique heritage without moving out of unity with any of its fellows. What America fails to realise is that a country can be vastly different in its societal setup without infringing on any unity with the rest of the world. It is through this failure that America has earned such a poor reputation for itself in the Middle-East and Europe, and also why it is viewed so negatively by many of the African countries. America views the majority of Africa and the Middle-East as unstable because they are not America and work very differently. Whilst this is half-true, the instability cannot be solved by Americanising the countries. Syria, indeed, had almost achieved some level of stability under the more iron-rule of Assad and Putin than under the false democracy of America, which is not an effective system, nor will it ever work in any other country.
Further, Protestantism loves Judaism with a Florentine 14th century frenzy, which shows through in America’s choice of allies (Israel, founded by the Dispossessed).
There is a lot more that I could say, but I’m getting distracted now, so I’ll wait for your thoughts on this.