America: The New Israel

Every civilization builds itself upon a myth, and America’s is theological. It was not born from the land but from a belief. The Puritans who landed in the New World saw themselves as a chosen people building a New Jerusalem. Their god did not live in temples but in covenants, contracts, and constitutions. America is the New Israel — a nation held together not by ancestry or soil, but by the shared conviction that there is only one correct faith: belief in America itself. The heretic is not the pagan but the dissenter. The infidel is not the unbeliever but the unassimilated.

Like ancient Israel, America survives by defining its Others. The chosen must always have the unchosen to measure themselves against. The Israelites needed the Gentiles, just as America needs its foreigners, its immigrants, its poor. The Puritans had their “heathens,” the frontier its “savages,” the South its “slaves,” and modern America its “illegals.” The labels change, but the structure remains the same. Without the outsider, America would lose the mirror that reflects its imagined virtue.

America believes it is exceptional, but its exceptionalism depends on exploitation. Its industries, its agriculture, its health care, its housing, and even its domestic labor survive on the backs of those who do not belong. The stranger cleans the hospital, harvests the fruit, cares for the elderly, and mows the lawn of the suburban believer. The immigrant is both indispensable and disposable. The machine runs on gratitude extracted from fear. The outsider must love the nation that refuses to love him back.

In this theology of the market, free trade replaces revelation. The sacred text is the balance sheet; the holy trinity is Free Market, Free Trade, and Free Movement of Capital. Yet this freedom is not universal. The movement of goods is celebrated; the movement of people is criminalized. The same ideology that preaches open markets fears open borders. America worships freedom but builds walls to protect it. It is a nation that preaches inclusion through exclusion.

Its faith in the market carries a paradox. Free trade promises global wealth, but its first consequence is migration. When American corporations flood foreign economies with cheap goods, they destroy local industries, forcing the displaced to cross borders in search of work. Thus, immigration is not a problem of intrusion but a return of consequence. The immigrant is the boomerang of global capitalism, thrown by America’s own hand. The free market exports instability and imports labor — then blames the victims for arriving.

The theology of trade creates its own priesthood: landlords, investors, and real estate magnates. Empty buildings become temples of speculation, filled not by faith but by rent. The immigrant becomes the holy tenant, paying astronomical sums to conservative landlords who preach self-reliance but profit from dependency. The economy feeds on contradiction: the capitalist needs the poor but despises them, needs immigrants but campaigns against them, needs inequality but calls it liberty. America made theology into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into science.

To sustain its expansion, America must continuously generate crisis. War creates debt; debt creates industry; industry creates jobs. Peace, like isolation, is bad for business. The foreign enemy abroad and the immigrant at home are two sides of the same theological coin. Without an adversary, the national narrative collapses. Israel needed its Amalek; America needs its cartel, its terrorist, its illegal. The Other is oxygen — without it, the republic cannot breathe.

Crime itself becomes part of the growth economy. The rhetoric of “law and order” hides a vast ecosystem of employment: police, prisons, lawyers, judges, media pundits, surveillance firms. Without crime, millions would be jobless. The system does not want justice; it wants motion — the endless circulation of accusation, punishment, and profit. The criminal is the new heretic, the necessary sinner who keeps the moral economy alive. America does not abolish evil; it industrializes it.

Every theological empire eventually converts its sin into virtue. In America, greed became productivity, conquest became democracy, and propaganda became news. It is a civilization that calls consumption “choice” and addiction “freedom.” Its wars are baptized as liberation; its markets as mercy. Like a church with its collection plate, it takes from the poor and calls it donation. Its economists write the new gospels, and its media priests translate statistics into salvation.

The contradiction at the heart of America is that it both needs and fears its Others. Its economy cannot function without the people it politically despises. The nation survives by moralizing what it monetizes. It preaches self-sufficiency but lives on interdependence; it praises competition but subsidizes monopoly; it claims equality but feeds hierarchy. Its national prayer is the Pledge of Allegiance, its god the dollar, its sacrament the visa, its apocalypse the tax audit.

What makes America the New Israel is not its religion but its structure of belief. Like Israel of old, it identifies virtue with prosperity and poverty with sin. The poor are not seen as victims but as moral failures. The immigrant is not a worker but a threat. Yet the nation’s survival depends on those it condemns. The unbeliever builds the cathedral; the heathen keeps the altar clean. America’s greatness, such as it is, is built on those it refuses to canonize.

But the deeper irony is this: the very logic that sustains the empire also ensures its decline. Every civilization that treats hypocrisy as science eventually exhausts itself. A nation that lives by exclusion cannot survive inclusion. The global economy it created is its own undoing, for every product it exports returns as consequence — every gun, every drug, every refugee, every debt. The walls will not hold because the walls are built of mirrors.

America was founded on faith in a destiny; it now survives on faith in a market. It conquered nature, mechanized morality, and patented hypocrisy. But in that process, it turned its theology into trade, its belief into balance, its freedom into formula. Like all theologies, it cannot tolerate doubt — and yet, doubt is the only cure for belief. America the New Israel will endure until it realizes that the true promised land is not a place or a profit, but a mind freed from its own myth.

Citations

1. John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630.
2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 25 (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”).
5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
6. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (2007).
7. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (1974).
8. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012).
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
10. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952).