Do American Values Stem from Judaism?

Henry Srebrnik, Calgary Jewish Free Press

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debating, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few countries examine their ideological “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

Yale University professor David Gelernter goes further, stating that the American world-view emerged not just from the Bible, but especially from the Hebrew Bible, via those English Protestant Calvinists known as the Puritans, who looked to the “Old Testament” for their values.

Puritanism would turn into “Americanism.” In a sense, Gelernter asserted in “A Religious Idea Called ‘America’,” a lecture he gave at the American Enterprise Institute in 2006, “the molten bronze of Puritanism became the solid metal of the American Religion.”

As such, the “American creed” is derived from biblical Zionism, “which is based on two ideas: a chosen people and a promised land,” he maintained. “Both elements were understood by the biblical prophets to imply privileges and duties. The chosen people is closer to God than any other and is held to higher standards. The promised land flows with milk and honey and must be made by its inhabitants into a beacon of sanctity for the whole world.”

The community as a whole conceived itself as having a covenant with God, or a vow agreed to by both sides. The Puritans who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, known as the Pilgrims, signed such as compact before landing at Plymouth. Many consider it the seed of American democracy. American Puritans often described their settlements as covenant communities. “We are the children of Abraham; and therefore we are under Abraham’s covenant,” declared one early settler.

The Puritans had fled a “house of bondage” in Europe, as it seemed to them, and made a dangerous journey to a pagan land where they struggled to establish themselves. They were forming a “new Zion” in the Americas. “American Puritans thought of themselves as ancient Israel reborn, and said so often,” stated Gelernter. And liberty, equality, and democracy all had Biblical roots, so far as the Puritans understood them. “Biblical passages dealing with man and the state and the organization of a state -- such as they are -- are mainly located in the Hebrew Bible,” he said.

It was these “founding ideas,” as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that made people into Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.