This past summer, I was guest-teaching in Europe. When the talk of the town wasn’t Brexit, it was the US election. It was discussed the way you’d discuss an alien invasion: bizarre.
A look at US history, however, suggests that this election is far from unusual, and that Donald Trump’s populist, anti-Washington cry to Make America Great Again emerges from the foundational belief of many early settlers: that they were the chosen ones who saw corruption and fought it, building a world cleansed of its sins.
This ethos embodies what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “civil religion” – that is, the features that undergird political, social and economic behavior. In America’s case, the sociologist Robert Bellah described the country’s civil religion through its symbols: the Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth.
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