Chosen ones

Non-fiction

America's unshakeable faith in its ability to remould the world is a dastardly inheritance from puritanism, argues John Gray

The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

by George McKenna

Yale University Press £25, 448 pages

FT bookshop price: £20

The intense religiosity of American life has bemused Europeans at least since Alexis de Tocqueville commented on it in the early 19th century. It is not just that America is more religious than practically any other advanced country. More, religion seems to inform American national identity in ways that have few parallels in other countries. Being British does not entail subscribing to any creed - it is simply an accident of birth - and the same is true in other European nations. By contrast, being American seems to inv-olve accepting that the US has been assigned a special role in history - an idea echoing religious belief in providence.

How America's sense of national identity was formed is a fascinating question, and George McKenna goes a long way towards answering it. In this wide-ranging, deeply re-search-ed and at times revelatory book, he shows how Puritan ideas and values spread across the country from New England in the 1630s and came to define a distinctly American patriotism.

Nowadays puritanism means any kind of extreme moralism, but McKenna shows how Puritans shaped America in a wider way. America's puritan patriotism is ''a social ideology... a way of looking at the world, that sees America as having a divinely ordained mission''.

This sense of being divinely chosen to save or redeem humanity, which was an integral part of Puritan thinking more than three centuries ago, is still at the heart of American identity today. A particular type of reformed Protestantism has moulded America - for both good and ill. The Puritan inheritance inspired many 19th-century social reformers and had a vital role in the movement to abolish slavery. However, as McKenna makes clear, less admirable movements also invoked Puritan ideas, using them to attack religious minorities such as Roman Catholics. Puritan ideology has always had an ambivalent impact on American life. This ambiguity was evident after 9/11, when - McKenna argues - a Puritan narrative was revived by George Bush and by many of his critics. Whether they thought this mission required overseas military intervention or believed it could best be discharged by setting an example to the rest of the world, most Americans subscribed to a Puritan story in which their country has a unique responsibility to shape history.

What does this imply for the future? From the start, beliefs about America's providential role have shaped how Americans see their place in the world. Scholars who have tried to undermine these beliefs - as Arthur Schlesinger Jr did after the second world war in books such as The Vital Center (1949) - have had only limited influence. The belief that America embodies ''the final form of human government'' - as Francis Fukuyama put it in his celebrated announcement of the end of history - resurfaced after the close of the cold war and remains a strong strand in American thinking.

Despite being framed in secular terms the provenance of this idea is unmistakably religious, and there is no reason to think it will be any less influential or problematic in the future than it has been in the past.

John Gray is author of ''Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia'' (Allen Lane).