I Didn’t Come to the New Israel

People often ask why I came to America if I criticize it so fiercely. The question assumes that love of a nation means obedience to its mythology. But I did not come to worship a mythology. I came to live in a republic built on reason, not revelation.

America itself was discovered by mistake. Europeans sailing west were looking for India to trade and to conquer. They found another continent, misnamed its people “Indians,” and began their long experiment in moral confusion.¹ From the very beginning, America carried the illusion of India in its mind — an imagined land of wealth and wisdom, which it replaced with colonies and missions. It was not the spirit of exploration that built the new world, but the spirit of exploitation baptized as discovery.

I did not come here because of that America — the America of conquest, conversion, and Christian self-delusion. I came to the America imagined by the Founding Fathers who broke from kings and churches alike. I came to the republic of Jefferson and Paine, not the kingdom of Yahweh and Revelation. The America I admired was the only nation in history founded on a secular premise — that government belongs to reason, not to God.²

The Founders were deists. They believed in a God of nature, not the God of vengeance. They trusted the laws of reason, not the laws of Sinai.³ Franklin experimented with electricity, not with angels. Jefferson rewrote the Bible to remove the miracles. Paine wrote The Age of Reason to free men from theological slavery. And Madison drafted the First Amendment to ensure that no priest would ever rule over a citizen’s conscience. These were not apostles of faith; they were architects of freedom.

I came to that America — the secular republic that dared to separate Church from State. I did not come to the “New Israel” later manufactured by preachers and presidents who could not distinguish between prophecy and politics. When I arrived, I expected to find a laboratory of democracy. Instead, I found a nation slowly mutating into a moral theocracy — a global missionary project disguised as freedom.

I have no quarrel with Native Americans. They were the first victims of this continent’s theology of conquest. They lost their land to men who prayed before killing and killed before praying. I have no quarrel with the Deist founders who tried to prevent such madness by building a secular constitution. I defend both — the Native who was erased and the Founder who tried to prevent the erasure.

The quarrel is with those who betrayed both — those who transformed the republic into a crusade. America today lives in the shadow of its own religious schizophrenia: it preaches equality while practicing chosenness, invokes liberty while waging holy wars, and calls itself “exceptional” while repeating the moral logic of every empire it once condemned.

When I oppose slavery, I do it not as an outsider but as someone whose ancestors lived under foreign theocracies. For 1,300 years, Hindus were enslaved, converted, and colonized under Islamic and European powers.⁴ I know what it means when theology masquerades as morality. I know what happens when revelation replaces reason. Slavery begins when one civilization declares itself chosen and others damned. America’s original sin was not slavery alone — it was theological arrogance.

So when I criticize America, it is not because I hate it, but because I remember what it once promised. The Deist founders gave the world a constitution without scripture, a state without a church, and a government without divine right. That was a miracle far greater than any claimed in the Bible. America’s greatness was its secularism. Its decline began when it forgot that truth.

The modern America I see is not the republic of Jefferson but the synagogue of Yahweh. Every political cause has become a moral crusade; every opponent, an infidel. The language of democracy has been baptized by the language of theology. The “free world” now resembles the Old Testament — a world divided between the chosen and the condemned. The immigrant, the atheist, the socialist, the foreigner — all play the role of the biblical Other.

America’s wars abroad mirror its psychoses at home. The same nation that preaches peace builds the largest military empire in history. The same people who claim to love freedom lock themselves behind gates and guns. A country that worships “In God We Trust” has produced a civilization of fear. Its homes are alarmed, its neighborhoods armed, and its minds disarmed.

I did not come to that America. I came to the America of Enlightenment. I believed in the promise of a secular republic — that no man’s dignity depends on his deity. But the republic I entered has been conquered by its own prophets. America now calls itself a nation under God but behaves like a nation under hallucination. The theology that once justified slavery now justifies empire. The faith that once sanctified segregation now sanctifies sanctions. And the moral vocabulary that once defended liberty now demands submission.

If that sounds harsh, it is only because the truth is harsher. America must decide whether it wants to be a republic or a religion. It cannot be both. You cannot have freedom of thought in a nation that worships certainty. You cannot have diversity in a civilization that divides mankind into saved and unsaved. You cannot have peace when you define the Other as evil by birth.

America’s greatest revolution will not be political or economic. It will be theological. To redeem its soul, it must finally separate itself from its god. The republic must overthrow Yahweh if it wishes to live again. It must reject the biblical psychology that divides humanity into us and them, believer and heretic, citizen and alien.

The irony is cosmic. America was discovered while looking for India, the land of many gods. It could have learned pluralism from that accident. Instead, it built a civilization of one God, one truth, and one exceptional nation. That monotheistic fantasy has now become its destiny and its disease.

When I criticize America, I am not rejecting its promise. I am defending its founding principle — that no revelation is above reason, and no faith is above freedom. I came here to live among free thinkers, not among new prophets. I came to a secular republic, not to a chosen tribe. The tragedy is that the America I admired has been crucified by its own believers.

But I still hope for its resurrection — not by prayer, but by thought. America can still save itself, not by invoking God, but by returning to the courage of its Deist founders — who dared to build a nation without miracles, a morality without priests, and a freedom without divine permission. That America still lives, buried under the noise of sermons. It is waiting to rise again — the Republic of Reason.

Citations

1. Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage (1492).
2. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII.
3. Franklin, Autobiography; Paine, The Age of Reason (1794).
4. Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India; Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Age of Faith.