The Theology of America

Most scholars of American theology would characterize my title as a history of Protestant theology from Thomas Hooker and Jonathan Edwards through William James and H. Richard Niebuhr. My intentions bear little resemblance to their collective writings.

Others, such as Lewis Brogdan, writing for The Institute for Black Studies, traced this theme back to the American Civil War, relying on historian Mark Noll’s book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. It was Noll who saw the War between the States through a theological lens which revealed a deep fracture in American Christianity.

Both sides believed that God favored their thinking. This bifurcated the religious sentiments of both the North and the South. It created a deep-seated schism that tore states, colleges, and universities away from one another, while several denominations experienced deep-rooted divisions.

My intention is to build on their foundation by tracing and explaining some of the specific ideas, which have played a significant role in the unfolding of spiritual and doctrinal thinking over the years. For guidance on this journey, I have consulted a number of wise thinkers who have helped me fathom this subject.

The most notable sage for this essay has been author Charles Murray. He is best known for his recent book, Taking Religion Seriously, (2025) which chronicled his journey from secular agnosticism to an openness on the question of God. Consequently, Murray is an expert in dismantling the Left’s secular catechism. According to Javier Garcia’s review of Murray’s book, his beliefs now rest on his deconstruction of the three general principles of materialists and agnostics. 

The first one repudiates the concept of a personal God, which is at odds with everything modern science teaches. Secondly, it is the belief that humans have an animal nature. Their last principle is the skeptical belief that the great religious traditions are just human inventions, products of the fear of death. Murray’s years of reflections on these questions eventually led him to a belief in God. 

Since the publication of his prior book, Human Accomplishments (2003), Murray has been back-peddling because his research had convinced him to recognize the crucial role that a transcendental belief had played in the history of Western Civilization, especially its art, literature and music and to his great surprise, even its science. He found that the scientific story about the nature of the universe and human consciousness was much more complicated than he had assumed.

Murray explains his conversion in an essay, published in Omnes Magazine. The Harvard graduate, highly respected for his rational analyses and polemic theses on Western culture, admits that after his decades-long religious journey, he was a convinced secularist, with a series of what he labels, nudges, or doubts, which urged him to question the truth of his materialistic certainties.

It is interesting to note that Murray never had been motivated to change his thinking or his way of life because he had a comfortable enough of an existence that he had no need to question or change his beliefs enough to worship a God who would give a deeper meaning to his thoughts and actions. 

Even more importantly, there is the fact that throughout the course of his life, Murray had never suffered anything resembling a dark night of the soul. As he wrote in an essay for Free Press, I have lived my life without ever reaching ‘the depths of despair.’

Harvard had socialized him to the extent that he had dismissed religion from his thinking as part of the academic zeitgeist of his times. As a result, his education had protected him from any deep suffering and paradoxically from the yearning for the transcendent. Before he knew it, Murray had evolved into a child of the Enlightenment, a materialist, confident the alternatives amounted to superstitions.

Now his message to intellectuals is clear: faith properly understood does not contradict science…it completes it. However, this is not to say his book is intended as a theological work. It is, in fact, a cultural and personal reflection. His confession is intimate and honest, while setting the moral tone for his book, which mixes philosophy, science, hagiography, and spirituality.

He also attributes his wife’s spiritual evolution to Quakerism as instrumental to his uncovering several insights to being and belief which he had never realized. Murray also consulted the works of Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis who had raised questions he could not answer. In addition, he scrutinized the New Testament scholarship and was much more impressed by the arguments in its favor than those which discredited it.

A strict materialist interpretation must posit capabilities of the human brain that have never been identified by scientists. Materialists and their view of human consciousness are in the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887 when the Mickelson-Morley experiment proved the speed of light does not behave as Newton said it did. 

From this and many other scientific anomalies, Murray concludes with the plight of Astrophysicist Rober Jastrow who observed that for the scientist to try to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory, ends like a bad dream. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

To illustrate this, take the cadre of intellectuals in today’s popular culture, who have no use for Jesus or His teachings. Along with materialists, agnostics and atheists, these modernists are trying to eradicate Jesus’ religious, spiritual and doctrinal teachings that have been deeply woven within the fabric of 2000 years of Western Civilization which I believe dooms them to fail miserably from the very start.

Take the idea of the human soul for example. Plato’s philosophy beautifully combines ideas of the soul, creating a dualistic framework, which has captivated philosophers for centuries. I have heard and read of intellectuals who argue that there is no material soul that survives the death of the body. Their thinking pales in comparison to religion’s idea of an immortal soul, which is destined to enjoy eternity with God in Heaven. 

The human life principle has also been anthropomorphically transferred to the idea of the American Soul. This is a delicate but broad idiom. There is a comprehensive discussion of this term in the American Heritage, written by Gunnar Mydral. He called his essay, the American Creed. It was dedicated to the principles of liberty, of self-government, and of equal opportunity for all regardless of race, gender, religion, or national origin.

There have also been many other authors who have tried to explain the American Soul in books, such as those written by Jon Meachem, Marianne Williamson, Phil Roberston and Sebastian Gorka to name but a few. 

Personally, I believe one of the best places to find allusions to this metaphor is in the Broadway play, Damn Yankees*. Just recall the lyrics from the song, Heart…You gotta have heart…When combined with Hope, its sister virtue, there’s nothin’ you can’t do. To me this is at the heart or essence of the American Soul and by inference, the American Giveness (Heritage), an idea we explored in graduate school in the seventies with History Professor, John Willson.

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*Based on the book, by Douglass Wallop, The Year the Yankees lost the Pennant, ’Damn Yankees’ is slated for a return to Broadway, sometime in 2026. The critics predict that it will be more Revisal and less Revival.