By Thomas Massaro, S.J.

Text of McGinley Lecture April 9, 2025

Let’s do a bit of theologizing together, shall we? Allow me to introduce the neuralgic topic of American Exceptionalism in this slightly provocative way.

We all know that annoying type. Surely, you have encountered in social situations that perfectly narcissistic person obsessed with his or her own specialness, a megalomaniac convinced of their utter superiority, the imagined “master of the universe,” the self-proclaimed “smartest person in the room.” Arrogant, insufferable, perhaps delusional.

Next, recall Plato’s ancient insight that the state is the individual writ large. More precisely stated, that the polis is the magnified image of the souls of its residents, reflecting their collective virtues and also their vices and pathologies. In light of that claim, we citizens of the United States of America might well wonder: Are we somehow corporately guilty of this syndrome of unbridled, self-enthralled arrogance? Should we indeed be experiencing a certain shock of recognition whenever we hear the phrase “American Exceptionalism” that is the topic of the reflections I will share over the next thirty minutes or so?

An initial caveat: it will of course be important to steer clear of the tendency toward reductionism that often accompanies attempts to pigeonhole an entire people or culture, to propose an imagined and invariant national character—whether to praise or to chastise certain traits of a given people. My claims will remain modest and provisional, but I do hope to bring to bear upon certain aspects of our national experience substantial theological insights and resources from the Catholic social tradition.

In any case, the notion of American Exceptionalism is such a loose bundle of concepts that even its very central claims are maddeningly elusive and hard to pin down. Political scientists employ it to describe the many ways in which the U.S. is an outlier among nations in numerous statistical categories. It of course has something to do with patriotic feeling, but also touches upon deeper notions of our self-understanding as a people and an affirmation of transcendent purpose and even divine mission.

Consider two parallel notions closely related to American Exceptionalism. One is Manifest Destiny, an assertion within our national creed, most prominent during the nineteenth century, that the United States is somehow destined by God to dominate the continent, to stretch its sphere of influence from Atlantic to Pacific and beyond. Appeals to a supposed divine will along these lines justified for many an ambitious program of westward expansion by all means imaginable: land purchases, negotiated annexations, territorial seizures, and the brutal suppression and murderous displacement of millions of Native American peoples, with whom treaties were repeatedly broken with tragic consequences. This aggressive ideology was putatively justified as part of God’s plan for the United States, at least in the popular imagination of the time. And recent events (think: Greenland) suggest that we may not have seen the last of this concept as a driver of our foreign policy.

A second notion is the American Dream. It is related to American Exceptionalism in that it draws upon a similar storehouse of ingrained values and indeed certain praiseworthy qualities that America is perceived as exemplifying. A short list would include: individual liberty, material prosperity, a sturdy affirmation of property rights, a frontier spirit of self-reliance, abundant economic opportunity and easy upward mobility. Each of these six elements serves as a plank of our national ethos, and operates in the first instance as a powerful cultural myth and inherited mindset. It hardly matters that the claims associated with the American Dream resist empirical verification or data-driven confirmation. Efforts at falsification or refutation are futile, and won’t persuade many who have “imbibed the Kool-Aid,” as they say. Our minds are made up. We blissfully affirm that the United States is a land of easy upward mobility, where the possibility of rapid gains in income or wealth readily follow the Horatio Alger narrative of “rags to riches.” Despite the harsh facts on the ground, the popular imagination continues to assert that hard work will regularly be rewarded with unimaginable wealth.

It was the late sociologist Robert Bellah who shed the most penetrating light on such dynamics with his study of American civil religion, almost three generations ago now. He noted the presence of certain religiously infused notions that abound in U.S. public life and political culture. American civil religion, which weaves together all the phenomena mentioned so far and many other elements of our national experience, is an ensemble of credal beliefs and practices that express what he called “the public religious dimension.” Picking up on the oft-expressed observation that “America seems to be a nation with the soul of a church,” Bellah got us all thinking about the fascinating role that faith-infused myths play in our national self-understanding and collective identity formation. Distinct from the confessional beliefs of any particular congregational or church-based religion, the tenets of American civil religion are like the cassette tapes playing over and over again in our heads, the operative myths regarding the origins of our nation, the wisdom contained in its institutions and sacred texts, the virtues of its great leaders and our memories of its resilience in times of national trial. Civil religion generates patriotism and civic loyalty because of its unique ability to bolster the legitimacy of the American way of life. It exudes a penumbra of transcendent value that attaches itself to the national experience of this particular people inhabiting this particular land mass.

For better or worse, American Exceptionalism fits neatly into this quasi-religious milieu of beliefs and commitments. While it remains forever elusive in its content, its tenets always include reference to two levels: first, the transcendent, with a sense of permanence and certain normative ethical dimensions; and second, the imminent, that is relating to the empirical and material level of power and treasure and flesh-and-blood people. It is not reducible to either of these two levels, because it includes reference to both the proper order of the universe and to a specific people in their historical existence. In the popular imagination, America is special and set apart from its neighbors, even set above its neighbors as a fore-ordained global leader, even “the last best hope of earth,” to quote Lincoln. This is perceived to be so because its people are somehow mysteriously favored by the Deity, who looks down approvingly on its activities and who actively wills that this national community continue to live out a common life around shared values and certain markers of identity.

This notion that the people of this nation enjoy divine favor and hold a distinctive status, a special role in the world, goes back indeed to before there was any such nation at all. This interpretive framework and intellectual construction may be detected in some of the earliest episodes in the history of the colonies that would eventually become the U.S. Even before the 1630 landfall of the flotilla of ships carrying a wave of Puritan settlers to the English outpost that would become the Massachusetts Bay colony, the pastor and eventual colonial governor John Winthrop delivered a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” which cited an appealing image invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Paraphrasing Matthew 5:14, he forecast that “we shall be as a city set upon a hill,” thus projecting a special destiny awaiting on shore for his party, which Winthrop understood as a community of saints in the Calvinist theological framework of predestination and the economy of grace. The implication is that, by rigorously striving and perfecting the virtues already bestowed by God, this small band of settlers would in due time serve as the light of the world, to conjure an adjacent image in the Sermon on the Mount, just as the Hebrew people, the people chosen and favored by God in the Old Testament, was destined to be a light to the nations. As the thinking went, the people of New England were pre-ordained to be the New Israel in North America.

And recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation two centuries later, quoting now: “I think we can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on these shores.” Winthrop inaugurated an influential pattern of reflection on the meaning of America, one with perduring power.

Time does not allow substantial documentation of the influential role played by this bundle of notions throughout U.S. history, but suffice it to say that the special status of America was an operative concept within the self-understanding of the Founding Fathers of the new nation in the late eighteenth century, and that just about every subsequent generation returned to this consoling and identity-affirming notion. American Exceptionalism served as a myth of origins, a marker of identity and meaning, a key motif guiding our thinking and reminding us of who we most deeply are, at home and abroad. American Exceptionalism, most often in circumlocutions but in recent decades explicitly in those two very words, pops up as a leitmotif in many presidential inaugurals and State of the Union addresses, especially in times of national crisis and challenge. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and just about every president during the Cold War era and since its close invoked this notion to describe a sense of national purpose. The eyes of the world are upon America, we have been assured over and over again.

Three recent episodes are worth noting. Ronald Reagan (or more likely the deft speechwriters for the Great Communicator) added the adjectival phrases “brightly shining” and “tall proud” to modify John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.” That raises the rhetorical bar quite a bit. And you may recall that Barack Obama was chided by some of his more aggressive Republican opponents for failing to express, at least to their satisfaction, adequate faith in this plank of the national creed. Their incessant criticisms did get our 44^th President to more frequently wear lapel buttons displaying the U.S. flag, but probably did not achieve the conversion to uncritical patriotism that John McCain and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney pressured him to adopt. And Donald Trump’s most recent inaugural address referenced American Exceptionalism, at least by way of circumlocution. You may recall that he did explicitly utter the words “Manifest Destiny,” curiously enough while describing NASA’s plans to reach Mars, and presumably to annex the red planet as U.S. territory.

Having introduced these strands of our national ethos and political culture, I will now in the second half of this presentation bring to bear upon the mind-set of American Exceptionalism certain theological resources, admittedly in summary fashion. A good place to start is by mentioning the single most perceptive and influential book on the topic. In 1996, political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset published the volume American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. The sub-title he chose introduces the main point I wish to make in the remainder of this presentation. Like so many human inventions, of the material and intellectual variety, American Exceptionalism is a tool featuring both great promise and great peril.

To wit, this mind-set we have all inherited from past generations can surely serve as an excuse for self-congratulatory bluster, arrogant bravado and exuberant chest-thumping. This version of American exceptionalism is self-serving, chauvinistic and morally objectionable, likely to poison America’s relations with potential global partners. Alternatively, a constructive construal can help us fulfill the promise that Pastor John Winthrop envisioned so long ago: to advance the wellbeing of all of humanity through a mission of service, understood as fulfilling a prompting of God. That double-edged sword can indeed cut both ways, perhaps performing both these moves, even simultaneously. Rather than hastily condemning and dismissing the doctrine out of hand, the wiser path is, with as much intellectual detachment as we can muster, to take it seriously and to seek to penetrate the key features of this notion which lies at the intersection of political thought and religious devotion. While it is wise to harbor reservations regarding the morally objectionable danger of self-aggrandizing patriotism, it is even wiser to take a closer look in search of something of potentially great value.

The constructive piece I wish to offer now, addressing a glaring lacuna even in the voluminous existing literature treating American Exceptionalism, is to appeal to certain Catholic resources, especially the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, to help us assess the possibilities and limitations of American Exceptionalism. Our popes and bishops have for over a century now produced a rich fund of authoritative church teaching documents treating many ethical aspects of social order, including principles governing political and economic justice, both within national communities and between nations in the world community. One frequent observation is that Catholic theology supplies what strictly secular social theories cannot provide: a satisfyingly deep grounding for our moral judgments in metaphysical principles and notions of human nature–indeed a commitment to an entire cosmology that undergirds the moral order of the visible world. One of the premier moral foundations of church social teachings is the affirmation of the solemn and equal dignity of every human person, regardless of nationality or citizenship status. In Catholic theology, we are all equally precious in the eyes of God; no one deserves more or less consideration by virtue of belonging to any particular national community. The conceptual challenges to American Exceptionalism are obvious from the very start.

A related central feature of Catholic social teaching is a marked universalism in our rightful collective social concerns. While post-Enlightenment secular thought assuredly features themes redolent of a certain inclusive benevolence, Catholic theology displays a much deeper and fully articulated commitment to universal love, even a cosmopolitan spirit if you will, along with an insistence on working out how the principles of universal social concern can be brought to bear on international relations. These themes are developed with considerable specificity in the pages of the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, or “Brothers and Sisters All,” a visionary 2020 document of Pope Francis that treats global solidarity, conflict resolution and social reconciliation. Francis builds here and elsewhere upon the groundbreaking encyclicals of two of his predecessors in the previous century. First, John XXIII published the 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”) with an appealing portrayal of proper order in the family of nations, a constellation that constitutes a genuine worldwide community. Second, Pope Paul VI issued a stunningly challenging 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio (“The Progress of Peoples”) that insists on an integral human development that leaves nobody out. Here, nations are understood as moral agents, charged with pursuing the common good within their borders and obligated to contribute to a universal common good in the worldwide community, so as to fulfill the duties of good global citizens.

The vision of mutuality and universality of social concern that emerges from these three encyclicals (and many other papal writings besides) provides valuable moral context for recommending and shaping a certain style of American engagement with the world. A proper stance of any great power toward other peoples is one that emphasizes the constructive aspects of exceptionalism, namely the desire to be of service to all, to enact a benevolent universalist ethic, without the potentially destructive aspects mentioned above. In line with the Catholic commitment to enacting a preferential option for the poor and marginalized, a nation that aspires to be that “city on a hill” must always be mindful of the “city under that hill,” refusing to relegate other peoples to unwitting victims of its rise to prominence and power—those who find themselves stepped over or trod upon in the course of America’s own ascendance. An America that aspires to play a constructive role on the world stage must embody the virtues of humility and self-restraint, resisting the constant temptation to subjugate others and to control the terms of global exchanges for its unilateral advantage.

Lest these appeals to moral principles be accused of being naïve, or even that they tend to grow overly homiletic in tone, allow me to circle back and acknowledge some potential sturdy objections to this portrayal of proper social order and America’s place in the world. It is not at all difficult either to anticipate those objections, or to muster further theological resources that allow us to incorporate such demurrals in a constructive way.

Close observers of Catholic Social Teaching (and its carriers among Roman Catholic leaders holding church offices and academic positions) readily recognize it as the most communitarian voice regularly heard on the U.S. political scene, appealing to the criterion of the common good even when such commitments are decidedly out of fashion. These same voices also tend to be the most outspokenly idealistic in insisting on moral standards for the conduct of foreign policy and international relations. Cynics regularly dismiss Catholic voices, including bishops and academics, accusing them of capitulating to moral perfectionism, that is, aspiring to goals that seem to them inappropriate or unrealistic in the realm of a nation’s public policies, especially in the rough-and-tumble world of foreign affairs.

In this ongoing debate between idealists and realists, we do well to consider the contributions of two prominent twentieth-century theologians, often referred to as the great architects of American public theology. Each offered sustained reflection and profound insights into the possibilities as well as the limits for faith-based moral prescriptions for public policy. On the Protestant side, Reinhold Niebuhr reflected a decidedly Augustinian pessimism in advising against altruism as an appropriate guiding principle for American policies. Widely recognized as “the father of Christian realism,” Niebuhr warned that governments are so constrained by the perils of scarcity, finitude and security concerns that well-calculated applications of power, rather than good intentions, are the appropriate coin of the realm. The operations of governments will invariably disappoint the dewy-eyed idealists among us, particularly those with pacifist leanings. But even in lifting up the criterion of practicality and emphasizing the operations of self-promoting power in politics, Niebuhr never gave up on the potentially world-transforming aspirations to realize principles and values, including the many noble virtues affirmed by Christians seeking to share the love of Christ for their neighbors in ways that feature public dimensions. Within formidable sets of constraints that he spent his long career as a public theologian describing, a nation is nevertheless capable of maintaining a principled foreign policy, even in the messy realms of politics and diplomacy. Morality is of permanent relevance, even if we must reluctantly accept approximations of justice rather than full achievements of ethics in public affairs.

On the Roman Catholic side, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray contributed his own notes of modesty and realism regarding religion’s ability to propose directions for the policies and the jurisprudence of a national community. Taking secularization and religious pluralism with the utmost seriousness, and eager to be respectful of the consciences and convictions of all, Father Murray issued valuable guidance to anyone who might be expecting to readily translate confessional value commitments into public policy in a direct and linear way. These pearls of wisdom proved especially helpful to a pre-Vatican II Catholic community still struggling to stake out its place in an American civic environment that had long displayed hostility to it, or at least suspicion of its loyalty and patriotism. But paralleling Niebuhr, Murray is issuing here a note of restraint and modesty, not of despair that principled policy positions might emerge from the rough-and-tumble of the political process, in which people of faith fully deserve and enjoy a seat at the table. Taking pains to avoid any ham-fisted imposition of religious-infused convictions and language upon anyone, Murray encouraged a process of respectful political advocacy and persuasion. The broad dialogue he advocated included a model by which religious voices would comply with appropriate limits to their efforts to influence the policy process, always fully respecting the voices of other parties in our pluralistic polity. Both Niebuhr and Murray recognized certain limits that applied to religious influence on the operations of any democratic government, but by no means did their profound reflections on these questions (which clearly relate to the fortunes of American Exceptionalism) preclude the positive directions for faith-based guidance of American policies that I sketched just above.

As we approach our conclusions now, allow me to invoke the contributions of one further theologian, another towering figure of twentieth-century theology who weighed in on several topics related to American Exceptionalism. I am thinking of the French neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, who found refuge and welcome in the U.S., before, during and even long after the time of the Second World War, which found his beloved homeland occupied by the Nazis. In 1958 he published his book “Reflections on America,” sometimes called his love letter to his adoptive country. Here, Maritain offers a highly appreciative view of the United States and its free democratic institutions, and especially of the ingenious and resilient character of the American people. At times, his praise is effusive, but Maritain also takes up several neuralgic aspects of U.S. national life, including matters of racial discrimination and injustice on these shores, one of several issues he calls “vulnerable points” and which he likens to “thorns in the flesh” of an otherwise commendable nation. Without ever using the phrase American Exceptionalism, Maritain endorses the proposition that America represents the future hope and promise of civilization. He also frames his observations in terms of the “Old World inheritance” that the United States has been fortunate to have avoided: rigid class structures and sharp social stratification that are the legacies of an antiquated feudal order and the Ancien Regime itself. In this observation, Maritain joins the ranks of other commentators for whom a central feature of American Exceptionalism is precisely what America enjoys immunity from—including the appeal of both socialism or authoritarianism, captured in the phrase “It Can’t Happen Here.” That phrase, by the way, supplied the title of a dystopian 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel that cast considerable doubt on America’s immunity from the gravitational pull of aspiring authoritarian dictators, and this just happens to be a topic receiving renewed attention, shall we say, at the present historical moment.

I imagine that Maritain’s highly positive assessment of America’s role in the world was greatly influenced by his witnessing the constructive role played by the ambitious Marshall Plan, by which the U.S. contributed to the rebuilding of his beloved Europe after the devastation of World War II. If he had written his “Reflections on America” even five years later, he would surely have included some reference to the explosion of programs inaugurated by the Kennedy administration for extending American leadership around the world and reaching out a hand of assistance, in the forms of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress (or “Alianza para el Progreso”) to Latin America, and many other partnerships besides. I also cannot help but imagining Maritain’s astonishment at the events of the past few months, as a U.S. administration inexplicably embraces an “America first” (or even “America only”) attitude and pulls back from so many laudable international commitments. These include, most egregiously, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and a wide range of vital humanitarian assistance and foreign aid programs, threatening the entire notion of global leadership and service that has been a hallmark of the best versions of American Exceptionalism. On that latter score, I for one am not prepared to concede that the American people as a whole have somehow suddenly lost their sense of solidarity and concern for our global neighbors and are suddenly callously indifferent to pressing human needs, no matter what certain government officials say or do. And if we are somehow experiencing a moral decline in this regard, I would be the first to challenge the claim that such a trend would be permanent or inevitable.

If time allowed for further assessment, I would recommend two distinct paths to follow in considering this topic. The first would be to work further to identify promising institutional arrangements to foster the most constructive possible engagement of the U.S. with the world community. Many questions arise: What combination of hard power and soft power will allow us to continue to exercise positive global leadership, and precisely what measures would advance this agenda? Given the perception that projects of nation-building have been utterly discredited after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, can we still muster the national commitment of attention and treasure to invest in humanitarian projects abroad or even in the service of democracy and human rights where they are threatened? Those are matters for ongoing debate, especially in the inflection point we find ourselves in at this particular moment of great anxiety, when the recurrent isolationistic streak is once again rearing its head and as we find the U.S. on the brink of abandoning its allies and neighbors around the world.

But I also want to highlight a second path, one that invokes the concerns of theological perspectives like the ones we glimpsed above, aspiring to direct attention beyond institutions and public policies, but rather to shed some light on the very soul of a given nation, and even the virtues ingrained in its people. Numerous questions arise. Is America living up to the democratic values it has long espoused and that are enshrined in our Constitution? Have we become that annoyingly arrogant person described at the outset of this presentation, with an inflated and narcissistic sense of self-importance? Or can we turn a corner and emphasize the sense of service to all of humanity, without distinction or discrimination, that has characterized the most noble sense of American Exceptionalism throughout our history? Can we in our moral imaginations fully assume the role of “light of the world, city on a hill, beacon to humanity,” but without hubris? I would contend that, rightly understood, these are legitimate aspirations as long as our collective intentions undergo some needed purification from all chauvinism and triumphalism, and if our national ambitions can be refocused on abiding values identified in the best of our theological and moral traditions. The present moment in our national history may just be the perfect time to conduct a “salvage operation” to dredge up the valuable elements within the troublesome notion of American Exceptionalism and bring them forward into the future.

America can still achieve great and noble things, but only if it proceeds with such virtues as humility, restraint and self-control, with that felicitous synthesis of altruism and realism which served us well in the past.

I close with a saying attributed to Winston Churchill that has encouraged me in past moments of national trial: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” That sentiment captures well the ambiguous realities surrounding both the notion of American Exceptionalism and the present, challenging historical moment in the life of our nation.

Thomas Massaro, SJ, is a member of the USA East Province of Jesuits. He is Professor of Moral Theology at Fordham University, New York. Father Massaro is a Director and Board Vice President of A Faith That Does Justice.