Almost since its inception, the USA (or, at least, its governing elites) has laboured under the misconception of ‘American exceptionalism’. The Puritan founding fathers regarded the 13 original colonies/states as the ‘New Israel’. Its people were a covenant community bearing a divine commission to model and export righteousness to the world. Its more recent, secular incarnation restated this in the language of ‘the indispensable nation’ and ‘the last best hope of earth’. But the theological freight was only displaced, not removed. The nation was still regarded as the ‘divine’ agent in the drama of history.
On 3 July at Mount Rushmore, Trump once again restated this view in his own uniquely crude way. adds its own inflections. He proclaimed America ‘the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history’, giving it a status rooted not merely in constitutional ideals but in a specific cultural and civilizational heritage. For him, it is the fruit of a particular people (a ‘new breed of citizen’) and their tradition. His vision is simultaneously triumphalist, culturally ascriptive, and shot through with the grammar of chosenness.
Looked at from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity, this is no harmless patriotism, but rather a structure of thought that is profoundly dangerous.
In 1872, the Council of Constantinople formally condemned what it called phyletism or ethnophyletism, by which it meant ‘racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ’, as ‘contrary to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy canons of our blessed fathers’. The specific occasion was the Bulgarian Exarchate’s attempt to organize the Church along ethnic rather than territorial and universal lines. But the theological principle at stake was far broader.
At root, phyletism is the confusion of the universal Body of Christ with a particular nation, ethnicity, or race (as the founding fathers did when they conflated America with the new Israel). It is the ‘tribalization’ of the faith, the subordination of the Church’s eschatological, transnational identity to goals of a people. What makes it a heresy, and not merely an administrative error, is that it places the nation in the position that belongs properly to the Church: as the bearer of chosenness, commission, and covenantal significance before God.
American exceptionalism – particularly in its closed, culturally specific form – is structurally identical to this error, transposed into a civil-religious register. When a nation claims that God has elected it, entrusted it with a unique mission, and is guiding its history towards a redemptive end, it is doing theologically what the 1872 Council condemned ecclesiologically: mistaking the particular for the universal, the contingent for the sacred, the ethnic for the eschatological.
Orthodoxy has recently had to confront this same temptation in an agonizingly direct way. The Russian Orthodox Church’s ideology of Russkii Mir (the ‘Russian World’ or ‘Russian peace’) claims that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus form a sacred civilizational unity under God’s special protection and that the Russian state’s geopolitical expansion can therefore be theologically justified. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more than 1,300 Orthodox scholars and theologians around the world signed a declaration condemning this ideology as a heresy because it ‘confuses the Church with a political-civilizational project’, because it provides religious sanction for state violence, and because it violates the universal catholicity of Orthodoxy.
The declaration explicitly extended its condemnation to ‘all Orthodox ethno-phyletist ideologies akin to the false teaching of the “Russian World” in every age, nation and culture’. ‘[I]n every age, nation and culture’ is the critical phrase. The principle does not apply only to Russia. Sacred national exceptionalism is an equal-opportunity heresy: it is no more acceptable when it is American than when it is Russian, no less idolatrous when it is dressed in the Stars and Stripes than when it wears the double-headed eagle.
The deeper problem with American exceptionalism appropriates theological categories (chosenness, covenant, divine commission, redemptive mission) that have a specific and exclusive referent in the New Testament and the Patristic tradition: the Church, the Body of Christ.
St Paul writes in Galatians: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ This is not merely an ethical aspiration. It is an ontological claim about the new community constituted by baptism and Eucharist, a community in which the ethnic, national, and civilizational distinctions of the old age are relativized – not abolished, but subordinated to a new, deeper identity. When an earthly nation annexes this language of election and mission, it commits a form of ecclesial usurpation: it claims for itself what belongs to the Body of Christ.
Fr Georges Florovsky, the great Russian émigré theologian, insisted throughout his work that no earthly culture or civilization, however distinguished, can bear ultimate meaning. Christianity does not endorse any particular civilization’s claim to finality or divine privilege. The Church is in every culture, but it is captive to none. To confuse the Christian mission with a specific civilizational expansion – whether Byzantine, Russian, or American – is to confuse the vessel with the wine it contains.
Orthodox eschatology adds a further dimension. The Kingdom of God, in Orthodox teaching, is not the political triumph of any earthly power. It is the transfiguration of all creation in union with the Holy Trinity, of which the Eucharist is the foretaste and the Church the provisional anticipation. History is not the progressive realization of any nation’s values. It is the synaxis of the world being drawn, through suffering and glory alike, towards its eternal end in God. This means that the eschatological pretensions embedded in American exceptionalism – the nation as history’s ‘decisive actor’, as the force bending the arc of history towards freedom – are, from an Orthodox perspective, a form of self-idolatry. Fr Alexander Schmemann called the Eucharist ‘the sacrament of the Kingdom’. No earthly empire, however powerful, however genuinely committed to genuine goods, can be more than a faint and passing sign of the Kingdom that is coming. To claim more is not patriotism: it is, in the precise theological sense of the word, presumption.
None of this means that love of country is sinful. The Orthodox tradition consistently distinguishes genuine love for one’s homeland, its people, its culture, and its history from the idolatrous inflation of national particularity into cosmic significance. An American Christian can properly grieve for America’s failures, celebrate its genuine goods, work for its justice, and pray for its people. What the tradition forbids is the theological move that transforms this legitimate love into a claim that God has uniquely elected this nation, that its enemies are therefore God’s enemies, and that its power and prosperity are signs of God’s favour.
As the USA celebrates 250 years of independence, an American Christian can certainly celebrate its greatness. The problem is that American exceptionalism, and particularly Trump’s take on it, implies not that ‘America is great’ but that ‘America is god’. The difference between those two statements is the difference between patriotism and idolatry; the Church, at its most faithful, has always known which side of that line is which.
