Christopher Aceto, Wesleyan University

download this essay: what did Chesterton really see

“the only nation in the world founded on a creed”

“America is a nation guided by faith.  Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’  Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them” (George W. Bush, Tsinghua speech).  To peel back the layers of the onion which compose a culture, it sometimes takes a foreigner to travel and experience that land first hand.  Likewise sometimes a man must travel to a foreign land to be at liberty to speak of his own homeland in a way that he would not otherwise.

G.K. Chesterton, the 20th century’s Alexander de Tocqueville, was that foreigner looking to peel that onion while President Bush was the hombre that did not feel free enough to let it all out here, in “the home of the brave.”  President Bush’s only speech that quotes Chesterton’s “soul of a church” assertion (according to a search of the White House’s website) is the one he made to Tsinghua University in China during February of 2002.  In that speech, he referred to Chesterton as “someone” and not by name when he quoted him.  Could it be that people in the United States do not want to see or hear that “soul of a church” rhetoric?  Chesterton’s assertion is still fitting today but not for the reasons I originally thought.

“a nation with the soul of a church”

President Bush told students at Tsinghua University in 2002, “Yet there is a reason our nation shines as a beacon of hope and opportunity, a reason many throughout the world dream of coming to America” (Bush).

In March of 1904, my great-grandfather Antonio Aceto stepped off the S.S. Palatia at Ellis Island in New York City Harbor and was asked the same questions that Mr. Chesterton was asked.  According to the ship’s manifest completed by the immigration officer, Antonio and twenty-eight (out of the original 30) other southern Italian immigrants all answered the questions in the same way as noted by the same ditto marks all the way down each column.  He was only fifteen years old with about $9 in his pocket and the name and address of a cousin in New Haven.  Did my great-grandfather stop to ask the official the purpose behind the questions?  I very much doubt that he said anything other than “No” and “Yes” where appropriate for all he cared about was starting a new life.  If he had caused any commotion, I am quite sure that I would not be here right now with the privilege of writing this essay.  Antonio used his masonry skills to good effect: he raised a family, bought land in Branford on a street which bears the “Aceto” name – hence the typical “American Dream” as “Success Story”; he was someone our current President would likely hire for some job because he had a “good” ol’ American” story.

Less than twenty years later, G.K. Chesterton, a world traveler, traveled to the United States on a passport from England, and he took the time and energy to write about an experience he had completing his visa application at the U.S. Embassy in London.  In a section of his book What I Saw in America? titled “What is America?” Chesterton mined this application and its inquisitorial-type questions for the essence of America.  He was dumbfounded by the fact that in other travels, Arabs, “slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion to judge me by my actions, they did not inquire into my thought … they did not forbid me to hold a theory” (Chesterton, America).

The test here is really a job application to determine whether you are going to fit here in the U.S. or cause trouble within the company.  If you weed out all of the “anarchists” and “polygamists,” then no one in the U.S. will be infected with the sinful diseases from around the world; again, hopefully the “us” will be saved from “them” that seek to destroy the “City on a Hill.”

Chesterton proceeded to make an even bolder statement:

“The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed.  America is the only nation in the world founded on a creed.  That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature” (Chesterton).

Only an outsider could get away with making an assertion that the mother of all political documents is really akin to the ideas of the Spanish Inquisition, which sought to root out all Protestant heresy from Catholic Spain.  Those churchmen used torture and cruel and unusual punishments to remove the enemies of the “universal” (Catholic) church headquartered in the Vatican in Rome.  How could the two be even mentioned in the same breath?  I am sure that some of Chesterton’s American readers in the 1920’s very quickly tossed him into the “them” box and paid him no mind.  The “creed” that he referred to is a famous line from that dramatic shot heard round the world in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The part of Chesterton’s essay that people like President George W. Bush, his speech writers, and fellow evangelicals may not take the time to read or quote because it detracts from their insistence on GOD is: “The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things” (Chesterton).  The message he is making here is that if you are willing to drink the Kool-Aid, meaning if you believe in our creeds and principles, you can join the club, you can be a citizen.  The power of this creed, which is belief in something bigger than you, has been adhered to by other Revivalists in Chief.

In responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case in 1857, Lincoln spoke about equality and the founders of our country: “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all … even though never perfectly attained … constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere” (Ladd, Great).  When Chesterton said, “Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial selection,” he explained why the Supreme Court ruled the way it did and why Lincoln, as Puritan, spoke about our imperfection as part of the mission to redeem and save the “union.”

In a later book about his observations about America, ­Generally Speaking, Chesterton’s essay “On American Morals,” analyzed how Americans determine what is right and wrong, good and bad/evil.  He tossed a massive bucket of freezing cold water smack into our national face by asserting “the quarrel in question does not arise from the Yankee Puritans having too much morality, but from their having too little …They go by associations and not by abstractions.  Therefore they classify smoking with vamping or a flask in the pocket with sin in the soul” (Chesterton, Morals).  The Puritans were supposed to be pure, follow the Good Book, and form communities to await the Second Coming of Jesus.  How could Chesterton say that they lacked morals?

I believe what Chesterton is saying is that Puritans and the “Fundamentalists,” those in the 20th Century that followed their take on morality, were only willing to proverbially read the table of contents of that book and not look any deeper than what they thought they saw on the outside.  A man could not be “good” if he drank because drinking meant you had a weakness; whether he gave to the poor and helped little old ladies across the street, he still drank, which meant he had sinfulness in his soul.  Since the 18th Amendment made drinking illegal, those who still drank were breaking with the sacrosanct code of the Constitution, that guiding document, which meant they disregarded the “creed.”  Americans determine quality by beliefs and not by actions; they use “good” as an adjective and not as a noun, which is something that Robert Persig posits in his book Lila.

Chesterton is still relevant today and his assertions still hold water because it is all about belief, and not necessarily the religious belief that many want it to literally mean.  Here is the true power of his statements for this idea of a “nation with the soul of a church” can be applied to intellectual secularists as well as fundamentalists; they both hold this same belief as true even if they use different language to describe it.  In Lila, Persig discusses how President Roosevelt’s “New Deal was many things, but at the center of it all was the belief that intellectual planning by the government was necessary for society to regain its health” (Persig, 274).  “What they say is absolute.  This is because intellectuals follow science, which is objective” (Persig, 277).  This is why Pat Robertson gets so irate, throws off his paper-thin cloak of godliness, and rants about a small town’s school board taking Intelligent Design out of the Science curriculum; it is a clash of the “absolutes” and both cannot be right or good.  Scientists believe that the “scientific method” is the only way to test the validity of thinking and Fundamentalists hold that faith and the Bible are true ways of knowing that which cannot be physically touched, God and spirit.

Yet that desire to have our government be able to touch the inner workings of a person is plainly seen in the way in which oaths function in our society.  The Constitution mandates that the President take the following Oath of Office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”; the President’s job is not to defend the people, their property, or even happiness.  The Revivalist in Chief is only supposed to ensure that the Constitution survives (Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution).  As with Chesterton’s passport application, Americans believe that they can see into a President’s soul by getting him to utter a bunch of words – mumbo jumbo – religio that ties him back to the founding of the country.  The same holds true for the Pledge of Allegiance and why an atheist father in California did not want his child to recite it in school and why the other side saw him as some sort of traitor.

Even more telling is the current page in the evolution of the Citizenship Oath/Oath of Allegiance administered to immigrants who want to be naturalized.  In 2003, Senator Lamar Alexander said, “The oath of allegiance is a fundamental statement on the commitment of becoming a United States citizen. It should not be altered by a government agency, no matter how well intentioned” (Hopkins, Citizenship).  The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been working on updating the antiquated language to ensure that those taking it actually understand what they are affirming as newly minted U.S. citizens (Taylor, Congress).  Representative Ryun of Kansas voiced his objections because “the proposed changes intended to make the language more modern, but instead would transform an absolute commitment to the Constitution into a conditional statement and thereby weaken our citizenship” (Taylor). My great-grandfather’s story is still relevant today – who cares if they mean it?  They said it and we will hold them to it: that is what we believe.

President Bush’s suitcase of beliefs seems to be the perfect culmination of a long history of conflict and parallel lives within this “soul of a church.”  His Faith Based Initiatives program can be described as an intellectual arborist grafting faith onto the ever-expanding fruit tree of government with the hope that “bigger government” will now be able to solve the problems of poverty, crime, and other social ills.  F.D.R.’s “New Deal” intellectualism approach to fixing the Great Depression has been given a booster vaccine shot of “compassionate conservatism” to catapult religion over Jefferson’s imaginative wall back into a place that many Fundamentalists and Evangelicals have long been awaiting.  But two absolutes cannot exist in the same space as equals without the inevitable calls for a showdown.  Yet there is a difference here: the intellectual secular government invited faith into the White House; the White House did not invite itself into the houses of worship.  This important distinction can easily be missed and it relates back to Chesterton’s concept of the founding “creed” and the Constitution dictating the rules.  Entering from stage right (multiple puns intended), is the court of last resort, the Supreme Court.

Why else would both sides of the abortion debate work so hard reading between the lines and winking at each other that this is “our guy” or “our gal” during this recent spate of Supreme Court nominations.  President Bush tried to sway his own party on his choice of Harriet Myers by saying “trust me” and sending coded messages to the (once) party faithful.  Judge Alito’s nomination has been quite a drama with his own words on a job application taking center stage about how he was trying to impress the Reagan White House that he was on their side of the abortion battle.  Add these new test questions to the inquisition: “Do you, sir, believe abortion is ethical?  Moral?  Legal?  Do you plan to overturn Roe v. Wade?  Do you plan to ever change your mind?”  This is the current incarnation of Chesterton’s inquisition/passport application; it is the “true” test that will determine if one is fit to be a judge on the court that gets the last word as to the meaning and application of that Constitution of ours.  These judges are the ministers, the rabbis, the holy men that we all wait for to send down their judgments from the mountain top as if they are Moses himself carrying the Ten Commandments.

Is this creed only for in-house domestic consumption or is it part of the face and fingers that the U.S. presents to the rest of the world?  No.  This creed has been quite vigorously exported (at least) since The Spanish-American War, and hints of it go back to the Puritans who believed they were “The City on a Hill” shining light to jolly old England.  Chesterton expressed his own displeasure with Americans exporting their half-baked righteousness in his essay “On American Morals” when he wrote: “… the idealism of America is to set a ‘standard’ by which England must transform herself” (Chesterton, Morals).

According to John Langmore, the result of this exported creed is that:

The distinctive elements in American exceptionalism have led to two quite different approaches to foreign policy: the sense of redeeming mission to the rest of the world; and to isolationism, because the rest of the world is corrupt and the US is best to keep itself free of other countries’ quarrels. (Langmore, The Bush Foreign)

Prior to September 11, 2001, President Bush’s priorities and rhetoric seemed to pay little more than lip service to the ills – poverty, terrorism, war, disease – of the world.  His often quoted response to Al-Qaeda’s multi-pronged attack – ”Freedom has been attacked but freedom will be defended” – fits the template for Chesterton’s “nation founded on a creed” assertion, and it is the touchstone for all of the President’s rhetoric and actions around the world, even where terrorism is not the issue at hand (Kranish, Bush).    Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta made a similar statement, but the context of his speech had to do with freedom of movement (Mineta Statement).  Was Bush referring to the fact that the government shut down the skies and that the traveling public would be inconvenienced?  No.  President Bush was rallying Americans around what we stand for so that we would look to something bigger than ourselves.  People do not sacrifice their lives for inconveniences; they sacrifice for something intangible and superior to them.  Our Armed Forces would be tasked with destroying this veiled uber-enemy, sacrifices would be expected, and they are required to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;” not to their buddy (U.S. Military).  Interestingly, our mission in Afghanistan was not to eradicate all trace of poppy production to eliminate the heroin supply in the U.S.: it was to remove the Taliban and install a democracy in that country racked by civil war and instability.

Although Bush’s speech in China does not topically connect to America’s response to terrorism, it does on another level.  On February 22, 2002, President Bush delivered a speech to the students of Tsinghua University in Beijing and answered a number of questions from students.  He stated that he was concerned that “our movies and television shows often do not portray the values of the real America I know” and that “Some of the erroneous pictures of America are painted by others” (Bush, Tsinghua speech).  So he began to outline a “truer” picture of the America he knew by using Lincoln’s approach (“even though never perfectly attained”) by stating “… we have our faults.  Like most nations we’re on a long journey toward achieving our own ideal of equality and justice” (Bush).  Then he went right into the benefits of liberty, the rule of law, and the beauty of our limited government, but the kicker, the line that I could not find in any other Bush speech was “Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’  This may interest you – 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them” (Bush Tsinghua speech, White House version) [Note: the section in italics was not in China’s official version].  Was Chesterton relegated to the status of a “someone” because he converted to Catholicism or he has a bad reputation in China?  The more salient point here is that President Bush felt free enough to use this quote and the statistic abroad, but not at home.  In the den of the atheistic communists, he felt he had to boast of our religiosity.

When you are in doubt or behind the eight-ball, like the President has been in Iraq, blanket the landscape with the creed of equality and freedom, our American religion.  President Wilson sought to make the world “safe for democracy” and President Roosevelt carved out the “Four Freedoms” out of Plymouth Rock to temper the darkening clouds of war.  Therefore, President Bush needed to convert the Middle East, starting with Iraq, because he could not say that a majority Christian country was going to take over a proud Muslim nation for its oil or the vanishing weapons of mass destruction.  Soldiers are dying every day in Iraq because (many of them) they too believe in the creed that others should have the blessings that we enjoy in the United States.  Again Lincoln’s quote “constantly spreading and deepening its influence” has now been put at the core of our mission in Iraq against the evil terrorist insurgents; Lincoln saved the “union”; therefore, his values and morality must carry some water for us today.

No matter how politicos and pundits cut it for the average American to consume it, observers of all stripes and persuasions around the world are not buying it.  Americans are prodded to raise the “Rebel Yell” every time the President of Iran mentions that he wants to wipe Israel off the map or whenever a mullah somewhere in the world speaks of the United States as the “Great Satan,” but when our President is unwilling to muzzle his Vice President about exempting the C.I.A. from any ban on state-sponsored torture of terrorists, our “righteousness” turns acidic and erodes the very porous foundations of our “City on a Hill.”  When Senator McCain, who himself was tortured as a prisoner of war for years in North Vietnam, has to plead with the President (who says basically “Jesus Christ is my co-pilot”), America-haters do not need higher order mathematics to connect the dots to spell “hypocrisy.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, one of the definitions for “church” is “chiefly British: of or relating to the established church.”  I do not know if Chesterton intended for the word “church” to imply “established church,” but in my opinion, it should have and it does.  By any stretch of thinking, the adjective “established” surely applies to the way that this cult of the Constitution has taken hold and has thrived as our national religion.  It has co-opted both fundamentalists and intellectuals to believe that it speaks for them only.  Only faith or beliefs have the capacity to locate it.  To assert and write that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” was vital to our nation, and maybe it is true to state that Congress and the other branches never installed one.  But maybe that religion existed long before Congress was ever convened, thereby, technically, everyone wins.

WORKS CITED

Bush, George W. “President Bush Speaks at Tsinghua University.” Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 22 February 2002. <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02print/20020222.html>.

and China’s People’s Daily version. <www.edu.cn/20020222/3020965.shtml>.

Chesterton, G.K.  Generally Speaking, Dodd & Mead: On American Morals. 1929. <www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/american-morals.html>.

Chesterton, G.K.  What I Saw in America?: What is America? 1922. <www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/america.html>.

Hopkins, Jennifer. “Citizenship Oath May Soon Be Revised.” US Visa News. 18 September 2003.<www.usvisanews.com/articles/memo2142.shtml>.

Kranish, Michael. “Bush Vows a Ruthless Manhunt.” The Boston Globe. 09 September 2001.<www.boston.com/news/packages/underattack/globe_stories/0912/Bush_vows_a_ruthless_manhunt+.sh

Ladd, Everett Carl. “Great Presidents and the National Idea.” The Christian Science Monitor. 15 February 1991. <http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/getasciiarchive?tape/91/feb/week07/eladd15.>

Langmore, John. “The Bush Foreign Policy Revolution, Its Origins, and Alternatives.” Global Policy Forum. August 2004. <www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2004/08revolution.pdf>.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Deluxe Ed. 1998.

Mineta, Norman Y. “Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta.” Department of Transportation. 11 September 2001. <www.dot.gov/affairs/dot9301.htm>.

Persig, Robert M. Lila. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Taylor, Guy. “Congress Eyes Citizenship Oath.” The Washington Times. 02 April 2004. <www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040401-115437-9359r>.

United States Military. <usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/l/blenlistoath.htm>