A Light to the Nations

When I listened to President Trump’s State of the Union speech on the evening of February 5, 2019, I wondered if he, like many presidents before him, would bring up the idea that America is “a light to the nations.” And sure enough, right at the end, he did by stating, “We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny -- that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world! Thank you. God Bless You, God Bless America, and good night!”

I’ve long been fascinated by the endurance of this image of America, of America a shining light to the nations of the world. The image was given durable form in the Statue of Liberty with her torch, welcoming the refugees, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Many American presidents have invoked the image, Ronald Reagan famously, but also John F. Kennedy and more recently Barack Obama, though their notions of what makes (or could make) America exceptional have differed (a topic for another day, perhaps). Some uses of this phrase are boastful, a way of patting ourselves on the back.  Others are aspirational, setting out an ideal we must strive to make reality. But all suggest that America is special, with a unique God-given destiny.

The same day that Trump was going to give his Presidential speech, I’d been teaching John Milton’s “Areopagitica” to my students at Barnard College. Published in 1644 when Milton was trying to persuade England’s Parliament not to enact an ordinance restricting what books could be printed, “Areopagitica” is from a different time and a different country, but it is a foundational text in America.  Arguing for freedom of the press, liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state, Milton’s influence on America’s founding fathers was profound.  We see it in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which enshrined religious liberty and a free press. 

My students were excited by Milton’s notion of the book as a living thing (“Books are not absolutely dead things”), but also by his insistence that each of us needs to actively read and judge for ourselves. Though good and evil (truth and falsehood) may be “nearly inseparable,” Milton says, it is our duty (indeed, we are called by God) to distinguish between them, difficult though that might be. My class of smart, young women and men was struck by how powerful Milton’s words are and remarked on how what he had written more than 350 years ago is still relevant. Milton would be appalled, were he still alive, by a president who calls the media “the enemy of the people,” as well as by slogans like “Fake News” and “Alternate Facts.” These labels don’t just undermine the credibility (and thus freedom) of the press. They deny that there is such a thing as “truth,” that there is a distinction between “truth” and “lies” (intentional untruths, passed off as truths). Without that distinction, there can be no rule of law or justice.

Then we came to a passage towards the end of “Areopagitica” that I read aloud. Here, Milton suddenly praised England as a nation, chosen by God, to spread the light of the Reformation: “…The favor and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe?...Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, …God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?” 

Milton the patriot appropriated the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the restored Israel in the end times to imagine a glorious identity for England. It was England, not biblical Israel, that was God’s special nation, a light to the world. But what about those “dark” nations? For Milton, they were Catholic countries that did not yet have what he saw as the “light” of Protestantism. Suddenly, one of my students exclaimed, “That’s the Manifest Destiny ideology of nineteenth-century America!”  Suddenly, we not only saw the thread connecting past and present, seventeenth-century England and nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America, but we could begin to talk about the troubling aspects of exceptionalism, of what was originally intended as a hopeful vision.  

I went home and waited for the President’s address, and there at the end it was—America’s destiny. I thought about the dissonance between this final vision of a hopeful America, a light to the world, and the plea of at the center of the speech for a strong wall, to keep undesirable “caravans” of immigrants out, immigrants who are not “white.” I wonder if those immigrants are, especially for those who want to build the border wall, the contemporary counterpart of Milton’s darkened European continent?