In a 2013 New York Times op-ed, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of the dangers of a people seeing themselves as exceptional. “It is extremely dangerous”, he wrote, “to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation”. He hinted at what that motivation could be. “We are all different”, he wrote, “but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal”.
Putin’s comments were not warmly received in the United States, though his comments are widely shared throughout the world. Putin’s comments suggest that American exceptionalism is rooted in the belief of divine right, a union between church and state. The idea can be traced back to the Pilgrim Fathers. Governor John Winthrop, for example, famously remarked that “We shall be as a city upon a hill”, a theme later echoed throughout United States history. The theme of American exceptionalism appears to rest in Christian thought and Christian theology; however, upon closer examination, the idea of American exceptionalism is actually quite old, predating Christianity by at least a millennium.
American exceptionalism is actually rooted in the occult beliefs of ancient Mystery Schools. This is not difficult to believe, when one considers that knowledge of the Americas was well-known by initiates of the ancient schools. “For more than three thousand years”, esoteric scholar Manly Palmer Hall has observed, “secret societies have labored to create the background of knowledge necessary to the establishment of an enlightened democracy among the nations of the world”. The establishment of an enlightened democracy among the nations of the world found its fullest expression in America. “Men bound by a secret oath to labor in the cause of world democracy”, Hall argued, “decided that in the American colonies they would plant the roots of a new way of life. Brotherhoods were established to meet secretly and they quietly and industriously conditioned America to its destiny for leadership in a free world”.