Every American Needs to See This...

A Catholic challenge to American exceptionalism

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Thomas J. Massaro

July 07, 2025

Editor's note: This essay is adapted from the McGinley Lecture delivered at Fordham University on April 9, 2025.

While being a U.S. citizen includes many wonderful features and certainly accords many advantages, it also brings along some stigma and cringeworthy aspects. For example, as a people, we tend to be hopelessly monolingual and (perhaps relatedly) do not travel well at all. We all know the stereotype of the “ugly American” traveling abroad with no clue about appropriate behavior regarding local standards of etiquette or respect for cultural differences.

A more consequential aspect of behaviors and attitudes prevalent among the people of the United States is the phenomenon of American exceptionalism—a loose bundle of concepts that have fascinated observers of our national life for generations, despite being notoriously hard to define with any precision.

In the literature of the social sciences, that term has been employed to document how the United States is a statistical outlier among other nations on many scales, from material prosperity and productivity (we are fortunate to be way up on those scales) to the prevalence of gun violence and incarceration (sadly, we are also a world leader in many such measures).

But if we wish to conduct a theologically grounded evaluation of American exceptionalism, we have more work to do than just counting up instances of nation-specific phenomena. Any theological assessment of the phenomenon will engage the inherited claim that the United States possesses a special mission in the world. Such a project aspires to dig considerably deeper into the culture, history and collective value commitments of the American people than sociologists typically attempt.

This essay seeks to identify both constructive and potentially regrettable aspects of these prevalent attitudes regarding the supposedly unique status of the United States. Key questions will include these two: When Americans affirm that our nation is special and somehow set apart from other countries, are we betraying a delusional arrogance? Is it possible to embrace the idea of a special, evenly divinely ordained mission for America without violating Christian ethical principles and dismissing key religious virtues like mercy and humility?

Civil Religion

Any study of the collective values and virtues of a given people builds upon the seminal insights of Plato. In his treatment of justice in the Republic, Plato contended that the state is the individual writ large, or more precisely that the polis is somehow the magnified image of the souls of its residents, reflecting their collective virtues as well as their vices and pathologies. Many subsequent commentators have proposed a supposed invariant national character as an explanation for why countries behave in certain ways and not others. Wandering too far down this path risks adopting a determinism that pigeonholes entire peoples based on rank generalizations and arbitrarily ascribed traits, and of course this type of reductionism quickly becomes objectionable.