{"id":131,"date":"2010-12-09T12:59:37","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T12:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/divine-exceptionalism.html"},"modified":"2010-12-09T12:59:37","modified_gmt":"2010-12-09T12:59:37","slug":"divine-exceptionalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/divine-exceptionalism.html","title":{"rendered":"Divine Exceptionalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m basically down with Dan Schultz’s suggestion that God takes sides<\/a>,
\nand that the side God takes is the side of the poor. Of course, being
\nme, I’d probably get all professorial and say that the Judeo-Christian
\ntradition, or maybe the Abrahamic one, suggests a preferential option
\nfor the poor (as the Catholics say) on the Deity’s part. To make the
\ncase, I’d point to certain, ah, normative <\/i>pronouncements in Scripture, whether by Isaiah or Jesus or as related to Moses from on high.<\/p>\n

Of course, if this is true, one is entitled to wonder whether God takes
\nsides at the level of the nation. The old Judeo-answer was yes, if you
\nhappened to be Israel. The latter-day answer, around since Christianity
\nreared its head, has been yes, since we’re<\/i> now Israel. Currently, in these parts, that concept is embraced most fervently<\/a> in Republican circles, in the form of the Doctrine of American Exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

Woe to him who departeth from this doctrine. Him would be President Obama, who last year got all Lincoln Second Inauguralish<\/a> when he claimed<\/a>
\nboth to believe in American Exceptionalism and to suggest that in doing
\nso he was being more or less like the Brits who believe in British
\nExceptionalism and the Greeks who believe in Greek Exceptionism. Sheesh,
\nyou’d almost think that the Almighty had His own purposes.<\/p>\n

Of course, the normal question to ask about a religious belief is on
\nwhat basis it is held. So far as I know, the only American religious
\ntradition that has scriptural warrant for American Exceptionalism is the
\nLDS Church, whose Book of Mormon describes a visit by Jesus to these
\nshores and whose Doctrine and Covenants<\/a> proclaims the Constitution to be divinely inspired. The closest the rest of us can come these days is the Gospel According to Sarah<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m basically down with Dan Schultz’s suggestion that God takes sides, and that the side God takes is the side of the poor. Of course, being me, I’d probably get all professorial and say that the Judeo-Christian tradition, or maybe the Abrahamic one, suggests a preferential option for the poor (as the Catholics say) on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nDivine Exceptionalism - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/divine-exceptionalism.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Divine Exceptionalism - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m basically down with Dan Schultz’s suggestion that God takes sides, and that the side God takes is the side of the poor. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}