Over the past 40 years, revisionist scholars have challenged the notion of American exceptionalism: the idea that America is a white, Christian nation with a special destiny as a beacon to the world. Their deconstruction of American mythology has reshaped academia and found comfortable acceptance in the secular left, but it has also created a significant void. We have not replaced this mythology with one that reflects the stories we have uncovered.
This failure brings peril. Humans have always resorted to myths — narrative stories — to understand collective identity, and if academics are not writing them, then Fox News will.
Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement, women’s movement, American Indian Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement divided Americans politically and culturally over questions of racial and gender equality. These movements also galvanized a new generation of scholars to rewrite history in order to right its wrongs. They did this in two ways: by proclaiming that non-white, non-male, non-Christian peoples matter and by seeking the roots of beliefs that they didn’t. They were successful in dismantling that narrative of exceptionalism, showing that freedom and democracy were always restricted by race and gender.
This scholarship has fundamentally reshaped university life. Campuses are now dotted with departments for gender studies, Asian American studies, African American studies and the like, providing a kaleidoscopic vision of the American social landscape. But these scholars (and activists aligned with them) have paid too little attention to what comes after the dismantling and have failed to capitalize on the opportunity to craft a new national myth, one that combined America’s soaring principles with its painful and routine failure to live up to them. Part of this failure stemmed from uncertainty: Just how do we give meaning to the deeply painful currents of our social fabric as we construct our narratives about who or what America was, is and might become?
Christian theologian Sallie McFague, a scholar from the Vietnam generation, provides a model for such a reworking. Like her contemporaries in American history departments, she too was exploring the damaging legacy of an entrenched mythology. Rather than abandoning Christianity as hopelessly and intrinsically patriarchal, McFague fought for a more expansive vision of God.
She did so by turning to models and metaphors. Talking about God the Father constrained Christians’ understanding of God by forcing it to conform to the logic and language of patriarchy. It was time, McFague argued, for Christians to employ other models and metaphors that would expand their imagination and experience of previously hidden qualities of the divine. For example, McFague urged Christians to view the earth as the body — the incarnation — of God, a shift that could transform human relationships to the environment.