Welcome to the Tikva podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Today's conversation is about the beliefs that as Americans we hold about ourselves and the great

national story that embodies our self-understanding

as a country. If you want to look at the official doctrines of American government, you'd be

wise to study the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Federalist papers, and the

various anti-federalist essays to which they were so powerful a response. And of course,

the seminal court cases, the rulings and dissents

handed down by Supreme Court justices over the last 220-some years, these are all elements,

as I say, of America's political and legal doctrine. But to understand how Americans think about

ourselves, you need to understand the civic story that we tell about who we are as a nation.

This is the story that carries the past that we share, the memories that we educate our children

to assume as their own, and that points toward a common future.

All nations have this narrative understanding of their origins, and a great many civic rituals

come into being that help us recover

and renew the national narrative. In the case of the United States, our national story is a kind

of reenactment of the Exodus story from the Hebrew Bible, fleeing oppression, wandering in the

wilderness, arriving at a new providential land where we can live in freedom. This is the Israelite story, and it was adapted in each generation, from the Puritan settlers

to the American founders, to enslaved African Americans yearning for freedom, to the pioneers

of the American West, and perhaps nowhere more resonantly than in the civil rights leaders of the 20th century,

where Martin Luther King Jr. thundered prophetically that like Moses he too had been to the

mountaintop, and he too had seen the promised land of constitutional equality.

This narrative of self-understanding and the rituals that go along with it are together called civil religion.

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