Re-Americanizing America: The Bond of Creed and Covenant

Part I of a Two-Part Essay

Before the “polarization” and the “fractured republic” reality made it impossible to ignore our present condition, Jean Bethke Elshtain was sounding the alarm in the 1990s. In one of her books, Augustine and the Limits of Politics , she writes:

As these overlapping associations of social life disappear or are stripped of legitimacy, a political and ethical wilderness spreads. People roam the prairie fixing on objects or policies or persons to excoriate or to celebrate, at least for a time, until some other enthusiasm or scandal sweeps over them. If we have lost the sturdiness and patience to sustain our society over the long haul, then our democracy, as a social world and a culture, is in trouble.

She was prescient. Today we are all familiar with this behavior she describes, as for many, America has become “de-Americanized” in recent generations, but I want to believe there is a remnant that is ready to renew and rebuild.

Re-Americanizing America will not happen only by purging and clearing. Enforcing our borders, deporting illegal aliens, reforming the current broken immigration system, prosecuting the people who have defrauded the American polis , protecting the American family from the machinations of those who want to harm it—foreign and domestic—are all necessary but not sufficient for the revivification of America.

Our actions have to be toward building something good. That is, we can’t only work against , we must simultaneously work toward something. If we are to renew ourselves as a republic, our enterprise must be to re-Americanize America , taking it back to its “first reputation” and its “first increase,” to use Machiavelli’s words.

Machiavelli, unfairly maligned and dismissed today as a totem of selfish power, speaks with clarity and insight when it comes to the health of a republic. In Discourses on Livy , he writes that renewal is necessary for longevity; a republic must be led back to its beginning. This renewal can happen either through an “extrinsic accident” or an intentional and ordered “intrinsic prudence.” We can hear echoes of these words in Alexander Hamilton’s assertion in Federalist No. 1 that America is destined to be the proving ground for whether man can “establish good government from reflection and choice ,” or be at the mercy of “ accident and force.”

A republic cannot last forever, Machiavelli says. It will be corrupted over time; it can, however, renew itself—but it has to be led back to the mark. What are those things that the republic had at the beginning which might be regained by renewal? Goodness, civic virtue, observance of religion, and justice.

The longer one waits, the more men corrupt themselves; they behave dangerously and become tumultuous. Transgression against the laws becomes so egregious, and “soon so many delinquents join together that they can no longer be punished without danger.” One need not stray far from our headlines to see the truth in this observation. One of the unpleasant but necessary tools of renewal is to punish those who work for ill in the life of the republic. Without punishing the delinquents, the lawbreakers, the evildoers, there can be no renewal. When the laws are not enforced for a long time, the delinquency grows, and it will take a strong arm and greater resolve to bring the law breakers back to justice. Even words like these are seen as harsh, punitive, and mean-spirited today, but they ought to be—and truly are—born from love of our fellow man and a desire to create a society free to live and prosper.

On any given day we see a lot of chaos in the public square, but I see American renewal happening through both modes Machiavelli describes: extrinsic accident, and intrinsic prudence. President Trump was the “extrinsic accident” (yes, domestically produced but historically a wildcard), the shock to the system that broke up the status quo, that opened us to the second mode, “intrinsic prudence”—that is, people from many walks of life committing themselves to working toward renewing the republic.

We are operating in both modes concurrently, and sometimes this renewal feels “violent.” The laws of our order have been so transgressed—either deliberately or through complacency—that when one attempts to restore law and order it cannot be done “without danger,” as Machiavelli writes.

Putting it colloquially, people have become so accustomed to the lawbreaking that a return to law and order seems like a form of aggression.

The Bond of Creed and Covenant

The foremost order of business in re-Americanizing America is covenant renewal. How many times has a dispute broken out about what it means to be an American? Often we see the claim that an American is anyone who assents to certain ideas or values, no matter where they are in the world. Others claim that only Americans who have been here for a certain number of generations can truly be considered Americans.

Because of modernity and post-modernity, we have lost Biblical language in the public square; we have lost the language of transcendence, and religious memory. Both sides miss the truly Biblical structure of America: Creed and Covenant.

The essence of America is not an idea, but a covenantal bond , and that makes all the difference.

It is not assenting to ideas, although that is part of it: it is entering into covenant by vow. It is both creed and covenant, but it is the keeping of the covenant that makes America America.

The event of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 sets the precedent of what came after throughout the American colonies:

Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick , for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. [Emphasis mine.]

This promise and binding of the Puritans, they undertook in the light of the Biblical concept of covenant. Other colonies followed with their own versions.

With a hundred and fifty-six years of covenant making in townships across the colonies, this bond in which citizens “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick” was part and parcel of the culture in which the Founding Fathers were reared. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “the men who out of the uninterrupted strength of this tradition ‘bid a final adieu to Britain’ knew their chances from the beginning; they knew of the enormous power potential that arises when men ‘mutually pledge to each other [their] lives, [their] Fortunes and their sacred Honour.’”

The Declaration of Independence is grounded in the tradition and language of covenant. In a recent address, “Remarks on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said,

Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence. Without that sentence, the rest of the Declaration is but mere words on parchment paper. Nice words, but, nonetheless, just words. What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives—what Lincoln at Gettysburg called “the last full measure of devotion”—for the Declaration’s principles.

That devotion is the covenantal promise of the people. The other side of the covenant, the nation’s promise, follows the pattern as “I will be your country, and you will be my people.” Properly understood, this does not compete with or supplant God, but merely echoes His covenant within the civic sphere.

This is not the same argument one often hears that America is, or was founded as, “a Christian Nation;” rather it is that America was built on the Biblical model of covenant. I am also not saying that America is “anointed,” or that it inherits the singular weight and authority of God’s Biblical covenants, only that its architects had a particular structure in mind.

This is why, in theory, anyone can become an American, by entering into the covenant. The structure is what allows for things like plurality, expansiveness, toleration, and unity, within the covenant. The structure could support a large republic. It is what makes it possible for people from “every tribe and nation” to “become” American.

One can say that the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance that immigrants take during the naturalization ceremony is their binding promise—that they are indeed entering the covenant while reciting the oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

The degradation of spiritual aspects in our public life have gotten to the point where covenant hardly means more than a contract, and often no more than mere words. Something is seriously broken in our society, in the America of today, if immigrants walk out and do not treat this covenant-making and oath-taking with the solemnity it requires, when it does not change their thinking and acting, when they do not renounce allegiance and fidelity to their land of origin, when they in fact live in a way that reproduces the culture, social rules, and conditions of those lands—this breaks their oath. In which case they become covenant breakers.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening: a general sense of transience and impermanence; lack of civic education; lack of language and cultural understanding; disconnection from American people; disconnection from or rejection of American history; holding on to the worldview of country of origin; captivation by a mercantile mindset; espousal of a creed or culture that is antithetical to America’s. All these can put immigrants—even when they juridically become citizens—outside of American society and peoplehood.

To re-Americanize America, one of the first things that must be done is to inculcate the language and understanding of covenant into American education and society at large. Helping people understand that the bonds they feel toward this country are real, natural and good. There is no reason to be ashamed of patriotic feelings, they are evidence of the solemn nature of the American covenant. The language of promise and covenant should be used so that people have a framework for a healthy patriotism.

America is not just a set of ideas and propositions which can then be exchanged for another set of ideas at some later date when the first set falls out of fashion.

America is a covenantal nation that “our fathers brought forth on this continent,” and its principles are bound up within it. This is why our Constitution is not “living” in the common legal sense that its meaning and enforcement changes with the times according to updated mores. Yet it is a living covenant, in the way the marriage vow is always alive between husband and wife, that bond that continues to give life to the marriage.