People will believe anything if it flatters their vanity. Think of the idea that Americans are God’s favorites and that the Almighty directs history for America’s benefit, even when that harms non-Americans, particularly non-Whites.
From the belief that divine providence guides America’s destiny came two more bad ideas. American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny were heroic-sounding euphemisms used to justify the trampling of Native Americans and Mexicans in the course of the US Empire’s mad dash across the continent.
Divine providence was such a transparently self-serving and chauvinist notion that we can be thankful that it has vanished from American thinking. Except that it hasn’t. Michael Medved, nationally syndicated conservative radio host, makes the case for heavenly intervention on behalf of the United States in his new book, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic.
Medved argues that the rise of the US cannot be explained naturalistically; there must have been a divine guiding hand. The American Miracle opens with the “extraordinary coincidence” of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying fifty years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Such a wildly improbable conjunction of events, writes Medved, could not have been mere coincidence. In another early chapter, Medved describes how unusual weather conditions saved the Continental army…