Is 'Americanism' a religion?

[TexasLawyer]

An interesting article in the Asia Times:



Is 'Americanism' a religion?
By Spengler , Jan 4, 2005

Islamists and neo-conservatives concur in calling "Americanism" a religion, the "worst-ever theology" in the view of the former, but according to the latter, "the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others - morally superior, closer to God". The quotations come respectively from Abid Ullah Jan at the Tanzeem-e-Islami website, and from Professor David Gelernter in the January 2005 Commentary magazine.

America stems from a religious movement and displays a marked religious character, but its actual religious life is splintered among scores of major denominations. Gelernter wants to lump it all into a generic American religion. He is just as wrong as the Islamists. Both confound American religion with the Bush administration's strategic agenda. American Christianity at once is more personal and strategically more powerful than either the Islamists or the neo-conservatives imagine.

The neo-conservatives are ideologues, not God-fearers, and they habitually confuse their political agenda with the kind of religious conviction that transforms the world. In an August 10, 2004, essay I attacked the idea that Islam was a political ideology rather than a religion. More than a billion people embrace Islam with a passion because it is indeed a religion, promising continuity to fragile societies beset by global pressures. Islam's genius, I contended, is to promise to remake the world in the image of traditional society through jihad (Islam: Religion or political ideology?). What America offers Muslims by way of social progress - shopping malls, broadband Internet, and voter registration drives - represents a deadly threat to traditional society.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GA04Aa01.html

[GOPFighter]

1. Yes

It's what the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in 1944 from his cell in Adolf Hitler's prison, called "religionless Christianity".

From your link I followed another link to an earlier article by Spengler, "What makes the US a Christian nation?" www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK30Aa04.html. At the end he refers to Bonhoffer's wonderful quote above. As someone who was raised in a Fundamentalist Baptist church, that's a perfect description of them. I've always felt that their religion was based on the worship of conservative politics, not the worship of Jesus.