Americans do not have to believe in God, because they believe that it is a good thing simply to believe: all they need is a general belief in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in the US. The god most Americans say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny, because it is only the god that has given them a country that ensures that they have the right to choose to believe in the god of their choosing, Accordingly, the only kind of atheism that counts in the US is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.
America is the exemplification of what I call the project of modernity. That project is the attempt to produce a people that believes it should have no story except the story it chose when it had no story. That is what Americans mean by freedom.
The problem with that story is its central paradox: you did not choose the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story….
There are several things logically wrong with this argument. While I usually don’t agree with Dr. Hauerwas, I usually expect a better argument that is better enunciated than this claptrap.
What things are you referring to?
[blockquote]”In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the US, many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.”[/blockquote]
This conflates belief in God and belief in Christian orthodoxy. If the second sentence was rewritten with a proper analogue, “In the US, many who [do not believe in God] may continue to go to church”, it seems false. The comparison between Britain and the U.S. is idle. However, the comparison gets him a column in the Guardian partly because it flatters the British intelligentsia’s views about American piety. The comparison also suits Hauerwas’s schtick of being the gadfly who needs to teach his whipping boy, American Christians, again why they are inconsistent and shallow.
[blockquote]A people so constituted will ask questions such as “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” It is as if the Psalms never existed.[/blockquote]
So Augustine (On the Freedom of the Will) and Aquinas (On Evil) evidently ignored the Psalms when they addressed such doubts? The question is not modern, and even clergy who observe the holy offices should think about it because many parishioners will.
clumsy writing …but correct. What he means is that Americans have a belief that one should separate oneself from the past so that one can reinvent oneself every day. Larry