A regular feature of American religious and political discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century was the identification of the United States with ancient, Old Testament Israel. This comparison was sometimes literal and other times allegorical. In either case, this frequent comparison between the United States and ancient Israel reveals the extent to which many people of the period thought of themselves as being part of an almost divine political project. This “chosen nation” was believed by many to have had a special relationship with God, as well as special responsibilities and special privileges, just as was true of Old Testament Israel. Belief that the United States was a New Israel served to give divine sanction to otherwise controversial actions or political decisions. Although this concept was most popular during the American founding period of the late eighteenth century, it had been part of English Protestant thinking since at least the sixteenth century, and it continued to have an impact upon American thinking well beyond the founding period.
The earliest references to the idea of a “chosen nation” in English history occurred in two famous literary works in the sixteenth century. First, William Tyndale, translator of the first Bible into English (1526), adorned that translation with notes that suggested that, just as with Israel, if England failed to serve God, there would be punishments brought upon the country. Second, John Foxe, author of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1571), which catalogued the Protestant martyrs who died under the reign of Queen Mary I in the 1550s, also propagated the view that the English were a chosen people of God.
The first English emigrants to the New World were Protestants, many of whom were carriers of the chosen nation idea to American shores. In seventeenth-century America, many people believed that the American colonies were in a special relationship with God. This special relationship provided them with great blessings, but such blessings were contingent upon the holiness and virtue of the people since God would certainly punish them if they fell into great error. Many extant sermons and speeches from the period therefore present warnings of the consequences of sin to the listeners.
Although many people during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries merely believed that the actions of their communities would be met with blessings from God if they were holy—or punishments from God if they were sinful—many during the American founding period of the late eighteenth century made the remarkable claim that America was literally, or at least in some symbolic sense, a New Israel. By this they obtained a divine sanction for otherwise controversial ideas, actions, or public policies. Two prominent examples will illustrate this point.
First, many people believed that the civil government established directly by God in the Old Testament was a republic that rested on the consent of the governed. Therefore, the reasoning went, to the extent that the U.S. Constitution as well as state constitutions imitated the government of the Old Testament, it could properly be said to be given to the United States by the hand of God. This was the belief of Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard University, who was influential in securing support for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in New Hampshire. In 1788, Langdon delivered an address titled “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States” in which he argued that American constitutions should imitate the government of Old Testament Israel and that since social happiness is a gift from God, if the proposed federal Constitution were to be ratified by the states, it could properly be said that the Constitution was from God (Sandoz 1998, 946–958). On another occasion, he argued that the “Jewish government” of the Old Testament was “a perfect republic” (Thornton 1860, 239).
Constitutions of eighteenth-century America, then, received divine sanction, something that was expedient during a period marked by political instability. The argument that the Old Testament civil polity was a republic did not originate in early America and instead has precedents in the arguments of political thinkers of seventeenth-century England and elsewhere. However, it took on great importance in the religious atmosphere of revolutionary American colonies and appeared in the writings of President John Adams and in the sermons of many Christian ministers. It continued to influence the thought of some theologians of antebellum America.
Although a number of theologians and philosophers from different periods and cultures confidently interpreted the Old Testament in this manner, some scholars regard the interpretation to be flawed. Even Thomas Paine, who espoused this comparison between the American colonies and Israel in the second chapter of Common Sense (1776), thought the idea that the Old Testament supported popular government was laughable. However, he disingenuously argued for the analogy as a ploy by which to arouse American antimonarchic sentiment. In his later book The Age of Reason (1794), he also attacked the Old Testament as an immoral book.
A second example that illustrates how comparing America to Israel granted divine sanction to political discourse or policy comes from a famous 1783 sermon titled “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor” by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College (now Yale University). Stiles predicted that the new country would see “glory and honor” as a result of being God’s second chosen people and therefore would fulfill Old Testament prophecies about the future glory of Israel. Stiles believed that just as the land of Canaan had been promised by God to the people of Israel, America was to be the new Promised Land of the English colonists. However, God’s second chosen people, the Americans, would have to drive out the indigenous inhabitants of that land, the American Indians, just as the Israelites had driven the Canaanites from the land when they came out of Egypt (Thornton 1860, 403, 407–411). Some historians believe that such reasoning continued, but without frequent references to Israel, into the late nineteenth century with the idea of Manifest Destiny and the era of American imperialism.
“I Have a Dream”
Perhaps no speech in modern memory both interrogates the mythos and extends the ideals of the American Dream like that given on the Mall in Washington, DC, by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963, before a quarter million people at the culmination of the March on Washington. Taking as his starting point the rhetoric of Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, Dr. King revitalizes the American experiment as one with the potential to transcend its shortcomings and to reinvent itself into a land where all Americans might finally be “free at last.”
C. Fee
Other eighteenth-century Americans used historical examples from the Old Testament as tools of instruction for the United States and were less explicit in asserting the connection between the United States and Israel than were people like Stiles and Paine. This, of course, still assumed that there was a substantial parallel to be drawn between the United States and biblical Israel, but they did not necessarily believe that Old Testament prophecies had their fulfillment in the new nation. For example, the Rev. William Smith compared the Americans to the ancient Israelite tribes of Reuben and Gad, who instead of wanting to remain with the rest of Israel in the Promised Land wished to settle the land on the original side of the Jordan River from which they came, since that land would be good for their cattle. Preaching in 1775, Smith still hoped for reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, and so he advised that like ancient Israel, which had accepted the pleas of Reuben and Gad to live peaceably at a distance from the main country, so should modern Britain acknowledge the independence of America (Moore 1862, 93–98, 110). Similarly, in 1775, the minister William Gordon warned that the vices of Americans were unusually provoking to God because of the unique godliness of the first generation of inhabitants of New England. With this in mind, Gordon quoted Amos 3:2, with full confidence that it applied to the United States: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for your iniquities” (Thornton 1860, 206–209). It was common for ministers to appeal in this manner to the history of Old Testament Israel, with its cycles of decline and renewal, as evidence of the importance that Americans maintain virtue.
Bill Reddinger
See also Founding Myths; Mormon Mythology
Further Reading
Byrd, James P. 2013. Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dreisbach, Daniel L. 2013. “A Peculiar People in ‘God’s American Israel’: Religion and American National Identity.” In American Exceptionalism: The Origins, History, and Future of the Nation’s Greatest Strength, edited by Charles W. Dunn, 55–76. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Moore, Frank. 1862. The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution: With Biographical Sketches. New York: Charles T. Evans.
Murphy, Andrew. 2009. “New Israel in New England: The American Jeremiad and the Hebrew Scriptures.” Hebraic Political Studies 4 (2): 128–156.
Paine, Thomas. 1995. Common Sense. New York: Fall River Press.
Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan R. 2009. “The ‘Divine Right of Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America.” William and Mary Quarterly LXVI (3): 535–564.
Sandoz, Ellis. 1998. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805. 2nd ed. Vols. I and II. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press.
Shalev, Eran. 2009. “A Perfect Republic: The Mosaic Constitution in Revolutionary New England, 1775–1788.” New England Quarterly 82 (2): 235–263.
Thornton, John Wingate. 1860. The Pulpit of the American Revolution: Or, the Political Sermons of the Period of 1776. Boston: Gould and Lincoln.
America as the New Israel—Primary Document
Uriah Smith, The Marvel of Nations (1887)
In the nineteenth century, American Protestants produced a vibrant culture that blended together three distinct strands of belief: that the Bible is the highest intellectual authority for humankind, that Christians are commissioned to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that God blessed the United States and set it apart from other nations to achieve a special divine mission. Nowhere is this more clear than in Cyrus Foss’s sermon from 1867, quoted at length some twenty years later in Uriah Smith’s book Marvel of Nations. Foss’s indebtedness to biblical notions of Israel—and by analogy the United States—as a chosen nation is easy to detect in this selection.
This country has now come to be looked upon as the model, after which other governments may profitably pattern. Under the title of “The Model Republic,” Cyrus D. Foss, pastor of St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church, New York, preached a sermon, which appeared in the Methodist, in December 1867, from which the reader will be pleased to read the following extracts, which may fitly close the present chapter:
“Let every thoughtful American bless God that he lives in this age of the world, and in this country on the globe; not in the dark past, where greatness and even goodness could accomplish so little; not in the oriental world, where everything is stiffened and is hard as cast-iron; but now where such mighty forces are at work for the uplifting of humanity, and just here at this focal point of power.
“In no vainglorious spirit, but with a sincere desire to awaken your gratitude to Almighty God for his astonishing mercies to us as a people, I propose this inquiry: What is the place of America in history? God gives each nation a work to do. For that work he bestows adequate and appropriate endowments, and to it he summons the nation by a thousand trumpet calls of providence. If those calls are unheeded, if the nation is hopelessly recreant, he dashes it in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Witness Assyria; witness the Jewish people; nation after nation—a long procession—has faded away at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.
“I maintain to-day that God has signalized this great American nation, this democratic republican nation, this Protestant Christian nation, above all the nations that are or ever have been upon the face of the globe, by the place and the work he has assigned it. Look at its place on the globe, and its place among the centuries. What a magnificent arena for a young nation to step forth upon and begin its march to a destiny inconceivably glorious: Suppose an angel flying over all the earth two hundred years ago, looking down upon the crowded populations of Europe and Asia, and the weak and wretched tribes of Africa, perceiving that humanity never rises to its noblest development, save in the north temperate zone—turning his flight westward across the Atlantic, there dawns upon him the vision of a new world—a world unpopulated save by a few scattered and wandering tribes of aboriginal savages, and by thirteen sparse colonies of the hardiest and best of immigrants along the Atlantic coast. He beholds a continent marvelously beautiful with unlimited resources to be developed; its rivers open all parts of the country, and bring all into communication with two great oceans and with the tropic gulf. He sees a soil inexhaustibly fertile; he sees the mountains (for an angel’s eye can search their treasures) full of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal. He sees a country insulated by three thousand miles of ocean from all the nations, needing contiguity with none—a Cosmos in itself. Would not this angel-gazer say, ‘My God has assuredly made and endowed this peerless continent for some glorious end. The rest of the world is occupied, and the most of it cursed by occupation. Here is virgin soil; here is an arena for a new nation, which, perchance, profiting by the mistakes of the long, dark past, may, by the blessing of God, work out for itself and for humanity a better destiny?
“Note again the place of America in the scale of the centuries. Why was this continent hid from the eye of Europe so long? And why, after its discovery, was it kept unsettled for a century and a quarter longer, the thought of it all that time being only a disturbing leaven in the mind of Europe? Ah! God would not suffer it that tyrannical ideas of government or religion should take root here. He veiled the New World from the vision of the Old, until the Old had cultivated a seed worthy to plant the New. No crowned despots, no hooded monks, were to flourish here. No hoary superstitions, no ancient usurpations, were to take root here. Why was the era of this nation’s birth coeval with that of the development of inventive genius? Why was it that this land was comparatively unsettled until the iron horse was ready to career across its plains, leap its rivers, dive through its mountains, and bring its most distant cities into vicinage?—until Leviathan stood waiting to plough the ocean and bring the nations into brotherhood?—until the fiery steeds of heaven were being harnessed to fly with tidings in a single instant across the continent or under the ocean? Why was the beginning of our national history delayed until the doctrines of civil and religious liberty—a thousand times strenuously asserted and bravely defended—had emerged into prominence and power, so that the American freeman of to-day stands upon the shoulders of thirty generations of heroic battles for the right? Why—most remarkable coincidence of all—why does it occur that just at the time of the vigorous infancy of this favored nation, the church of God should awake from the slumber of ages, acknowledge the universal bond of brotherhood, and begin in this age, within the lifetime of men here present, those sublime evangelizing agencies which are the chief glory of the century, and which are to bring this world to the feet of Jesus? No candid man can ponder these thoughts without wondering what God designs for this young giant which he has so located on the surface of this globe, and on the scale of the centuries.”
Source: Smith, Uriah. The Marvel of Nations. Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald Publishing Company, 1887. Available online at Ellen G. White Estate website. http://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/1621/info.