Seven Oaks Magazine.

In this most extraordinary of US election years, it’s worthwhile looking at what almost happened immediately following the presidential contest of 1800. The second president of the United States, John Adams, who is now in vogue thanks to David McCullough’s bestselling biography and the HBO miniseries made from it, was running for re-election. Thomas Jefferson defeated him by a margin of eight electoral votes (out of sixty-five). The two men were not only ideological opponents but bitter personal enemies as well. Adams, quite simply, thought Jefferson was an unremitting liar, traitor and general abomination who would use the position to satisfy his own ends. When it came time for him to vacate the premises so Jefferson could move in, Adams agonised about what to do. After all, he still controlled the military and the treasury and possessed the Great Seal. Would he not be in the right if, in the best interests of the nation, he refused to transfer authority? He debated with himself for days, finally deciding, of course, that a coup d’état of sorts would be even worse for the country than having a scoundrel like Jefferson as chief executive. (Much later, the two men began corresponding and came to enjoy a certain grudging respect for each other, but they were locked in a silent struggle to see who would outlive whom. Adams won, dying a few hours after Jefferson on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after they both had signed the Declaration of Independence.)

Part of me is surprised that the Bush Republications, having been re-elected as a result of the electoral shenanigans in Florida, have not, as far as we’ve had any hint, sought out some way of withholding the franchise from certain classes of voters based on national security concerns. Looking at the US often encourages such proto-paranoia suppositions and scenarios. And no wonder, reading some of recent books on the American way.

For example, David Gelernter’s book Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (Random House of Canada, $32) could, based on the title alone, come from either the left or the right. To be certain of the author’s absolute earnestness and equally absolute absence of irony, one need only open a page at random or even look at one of the great number of reviews the book continues to generate. “The American Religion [note the capital letter] is a biblical faith”, Gelernter writes in a typical moment. “In effect, it is an extension or expression of Judaism or Christianity. It is also separate from those faiths; you don’t have to believe in the Bible or Judaism or Christianity and agnostics have been ardent believers. A few have believed in Americanism the way Jews or Christians believe in God. Muslims and Hindus, Marxists and pagans have all been devout believers in Americanism.” But few perhaps more devout than the author himself, who is Jewish, a computer science professor at Yale and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a far-right think tank. He is also (this is really scary) a member of the National Council on the Arts.

Polls consistently show that overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that the Bible is literally “true” and that Heaven and Hell actually exist. In fact, it is credulity that is America’s national religion. Scores of millions of people disbelieve in evolution and, in a way, prove their point by failing to evolve, intellectually and socially at least, from one generation to the next. Many of them insist that mankind and dinosaurs were coevals and, further, that the Earth is only five thousand years old (when, for instance, the Chinese language is five thousand years old). I apologise of I sound like a smart alec. For those seeking a true non-smart alec who’s honest in his enquiry and non-judgemental in his judgements, I recommend Jeffery L. Sheler, a serious religious journalist (and fully recovered evangelical) who brings considerable level-headedness to the religious right and its small-c culture in his new book Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America (Penguin Canada, $18.50 paper).

Sixty-five million Americans call themselves evangelical Christians. That is a given. But virtually all the other two hundred and sixty million or so avoid the label by being nonetheless and ipso facto believers in Americanism, whether Gelernter’s variety on the right or the various shades to the left of that. The origin of this tall column of belief is the fact that the earlier English colonies in what’s now the United States were settled by those who were, for their times at least, radical Protestant crackpots of one variety or another: the same fact that resulted in their being ungovernable from the beginning and thus self-governing within a few generations. A number of recent books try to address such statements seriously, scouring the past in a systematic historiographic way to lengthen the depth of field as we look at the present that surrounds us. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd (Yale University Press, US$35) focuses on a number of eighteenth-century figures to show how the distant fire-breathing cousin of what we would now call evangelical fundamentalism was spiritually somewhat inclusive before it became a matter of politics rather than of religion alone. The actual process of this shift is examined in Frank Lambert’s Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton University Press, US $24.95). Among other things, Lambert shows how the American sons of the Enlightenment were drawn to secularism, at least politically but, in the case of Jefferson and some others, in terms of personal belief as well. The representatives who met in 1787 to write the Constitution (replacing the Articles of Confederation, the looser document that sprang directly from the revolution) ensured that Christianity was not the nation’s official state religion. We learn that Adams was hardly alone in his reaction to Jefferson’s victory over him. Religious leaders connected to Adams’ party, the Federalists, called Jefferson unfit to lead “a Christian nation”, even one that was unofficially so. Then there is George McKenna’s book The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale, US$35). Certainly it fulfils what it promises, but it goes on to show how this relationship between religious belief and Americanism has grown and mutated, sometimes unexpectedly, down through the century. The book has had almost unanimous praise, and deservedly so.

Putting religion to one side for a moment, here, far too quickly and briefly, are some other new books on the general subject of America and its –ism.

Many people reading this, I suspect, are familiar with Howard Zinn’s abidingly relevant People’s History of the United States, which has sold 1.7 million copies since 1980 and has now led to Zinn’s People’s History of the American Empire (H.B. Fenn, $21 paper), a primer in the form of a graphic—well, not a novel but a graphic historical argument, I suppose (and in that way not dissimilar to Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton—Douglas & McIntyre, $21 paper). Both of the Zinns have appeared as part of a publishing initiative called the American Empire Project, whose most recent title is Ain’t My America by Bill Kaufmann (H.B. Fenn, $28), a serious and refreshing study of natural conservatives who have opposed American wars and imperialist crusades simply because they are conservatives: tax-cutting, Constitution-believing, culture-upholding ones. The range in time is from the earliest pangs of the republic to present-day Libertarianism. I’m astonished that this is the first time I’ve ever become aware of a book on this particular topic, though of course there are bright hints of such thinking in familiar figures such as the Transcendentalists. Also new to the American Empire Project is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson (H.B. Fenn, $18 paper), the last in a trilogy whose other two volumes were Blowback (about CIA missteps and abuses) and The Sorrows of Empire (about the country’s nearly universal military presence). Nemesis shows how overextensions and militant meddling have drastically weakened the US economy and thus the social fabric. Hardly a new idea and indeed one that becomes more obvious month by month, but the book is solid piece of work. The same praise might be given Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay by Robert Rapley (McGill-Queen’s University Press, $34.95). In fact, Rapley makes the subject fresh: again, quite an achievement for something so constantly in the news these days.

There are also quite a few new books addressing the fact that American diplomacy, as diplomacy used to be defined, has become an oxymoron. Anti-Americanisms in World Politics edited by Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane (Cornell University Press, US$24.95 paper) turns on the use of the plural in the title. The editors orchestrate a variety of scholars in such fields as statistics and sociology. They try, among other things, to distinguish between the anti-Americanism that arises from specific US policies or actions and that which is more permanent, as though promoting the unspoken suggestion that the best thing to be said about America is that it is a prank gone tragically wrong. The focus of What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States since 9/11 edited by David Farber (Princeton University Press, US24.95) is different. Farber solicits essays by historians and political scientists from China, Russia, Europe and, tellingly, Iraq. The cumulative result is hardly good news for those hoping for a fresh dawn. Similarly, Walter L. Hixson’s book The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (Yale, US$35) seems to announce, a bit hopefully, just such a new age: the emergence of an American diplomacy not based on supposed moral leadership and the cult of the cop. In America against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (H.B. Fenn, $20 paper), Andrew Kohut, who heads a think tank, and Bruce Stokes, an economics columnist, approach anti-Americanism using sophisticated polling techniques in their attempt to show how quickly and with how near-unanimity “the most pressing challenge facing us” has got the way it is. We could have told them in a phone call.

Canadians keep returning to this general subject again and agaian, for who knows the Americans better? Consider James Laxer’s study The Perils of Empire: America and Its Imperial Predecessors (Penguin Canada, $34) or Ronald Wright’s bestseller What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf Canada, $25). The one who digs and analyses most deeply, however, is Erna Paris, whose new book The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial Justice (Knopf Canada, $35) opens up an entire worldview in her explanation of US resistance to the International Criminal Court. I’ve said it before: Erna Paris is the conscience of Canada the way we wish it to be.

*George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books). His “Books This Week” column appears in Seven Oaks exclusively.