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How Do We Americans Work Out Our American Identity? (Review)

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Thomas Farrell
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In one speech, King repudiates both white supremacy and Christian supersessionism.

 

In a speech composed of numerous liberal Protestant commonplaces, it is radical stuff to repudiate not only white supremacy but also Christian supersessionism.

 

Earlier, American Protestants in New England, who were not exactly what we today would call liberal, started the American tradition of drawing on biblical and other sources in Western culture to compose the American epic, as Sacvan Bercovitch styles it in THE PURITAN ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN SELF (Yale University Press, 1975; revised edition with a new preface by the author, 2011).

 

In light of all the other antecedents that Miller mentions, I don't know why he didn't mention Bercovitch's classic study in American studies.

 

In any event, what Miller styles as King's biblical epic stands in the American epic tradition started by New England Protestants.

 

In connection with King's repudiation of Christian supersessionism, I should point out that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church issued a formal declaration titled in Latin as NOSTRA AETATE ("In Our Time"). In his book CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS: A HISTORY (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), James Carroll comments on this formal declaration as follows:

 

"Against nearly two thousand years of common Church teaching, NOSTRA AETATE affirms that the covenant God made with the Jewish people has not been broken and that the ongoing vitality of the Jewish religion is part of God's plan. The council declared, "Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God, as if such views followed from the Holy Scriptures'" (page 38).

 

As Carroll notes, such a view of repudiation "does indeed seem to follow from Christian Scripture" (page 38).

 

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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