At our best, Americans, are intensely awake to the contradictions we live and [are] redemptively troubled by them.  Norman Mailer has suggested that to be a mainstream American is to live the life of a walking oxymoron, to be a heart in conflict with itself, with a psyche featuring Evel Knievel on one shoulder and Jesus of Nazareth on the other.  Or consider Flannery O’Connor’s characterization of a God-blessed, Christ-haunted American South.  Many Americans seem reasonably certain that God is blessing them, one way or another, most of the time, but we’re often honest enough to stop short of dragging Jesus into our rationalizations.  We do what we do, for better or worse, giving thanks to God and praying for God’s guidance.  But I can’t imagine an American politician, celebrity or radio personality getting away saying directly that Jesus is as America does.  “Light to the Nations,” “City on a Hill,” and even “Freedom Itself,” but push the matter too far in claiming Christ-likeness or “Operation: Infinite Justice” and somebody (hopefully not just some Muslim clerics) will complain.  A folk wisdom that is inextricably a part of American culture maintains that, in Jesus, something greater than America is here.

Whatever the mythologies we use to explain ourselves to ourselves–in business decisions, ethical lapses, legal wranglings, or military interventions–there is still the WWJD-haunting, demythologizing gospel that recognizes the corruption that comes with the illusion of self-sufficiency, total power, and the suggestion (rarely spoken aloud, but often implied) that one culture might own the copyright on righteousness.  Whenever the Jewish Christian tradition begins to take root in any meaningful way, interpenetrating the imagination of the people who often speak their country’s name as if they were praying to it, the psychological power of patriotism is lessened or at least checked by an ancient wisdom reminding us that a nation might gain a strong economy, everyday low prices, and all the homeland security in the world and still forfeit its soul.

From David Dark’s The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea