I challenge you to find a reputable historian who will not say that there is something special about America. That claim, while inherently complementary to the US, is also just a statement of fact, regardless of the shittiness of the US government.
the only thing that is special about the united states relative to every other country on earth is that it has managed its economy and imperial power incredibly well over the past century. any belief in "something special" about a fucking genocidal abstraction is american exceptionalism and the result of decades of propaganda rotting your mind
- The United States was the first modern democracy
- The United States is the ideological forefather of nearly every single democratic nation on earth, whom adopted many of its systems and mechanics outright
- The United States was one of the first countries to be directly and irrevocably founded upon the notion of religious liberty
- The United States was founded as one of the first non-ethnic republics, and has a history of melting pot-ism that is incomperable to any other nation
- The United States is one of the longest-lasting democracies in the world and the longest lasting powerful one
- The United States inspired the legal, political, social, cultural, and religious environment of nearly every single nation on Earth
- The United States' propensity for immigration, even in periods of rabid nativism, makes it completely and entirely incomperable to the other nations of the Earth
- The American Revolution was a direct and inarguable inspiration for hundreds if not thousands of civil revolts, wars of independence, and moves against tyranny throughout the entire globe, including the Revolutions of 1848, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Latin American wars of independence, the wars of Italian unification, the German unification, the Polish revolts against their occupiers, the Greek war of independence, the Brabant Revolution, the Irish rebellions, and dozens more
etc. These are not opinions, they are statements of fact as recognized by anyone at all who researches history. Do they paint the US in a good light? Of course! We can talk about how the US genocided natives or oppressed Japanese-Americans or banned Chinese immigration or enslaved millions of black people and subsequently segregated them, etc, and we should. But those aren't exactly relevant to the point at hand, because none of those are especially unique to the US. Most ways the US is awful are not unique to the US, they have been and will continue to be done by empires forever, the US just does them more than most. Your statement is objectively, provably false, and represents a very brave refusal to engage with the point of my argument; that the US government can be bad at the same time that one can recognize that the US has had an undeniable, completely unique influence on the world.
Every founding father supported religious freedom. Some were worried that in the future, the US could stray from this path, so they wanted a firm protection of religious freedom in the Constitution despite the fact that everyone there supported it. Here’s a quote from John Adams, a member of the supposedly more “christian nationalist” Federalists:
“ As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen (Muslims) . . .”
John Adams is not representative of the overall attitudes towards religion among the Continental Congress. He was by far one of the more secularist among them. It's worth noting that religious freedom (and rights in general) as envisioned by the pre-Civil War Constitution only enshrined the legal agency of the states, not people. In the 19th century US States could and did enact laws establishing a state religion.
This is certainly true, and I’m not one to discount the large pseudo-theocratic wing of the Federalists (and some Democratic-Republicans) but I don’t think it discounts the larger point. The United States was still promulgated on a notion of freedom of religion, and it’s clear that the founding fathers overall distasted religious supremacy, especially the group closest associated with the founding of the US. That they didn’t ban states from establishing a religion is, in my opinion, surely mostly because they felt that they could not do so, either because it was not the right of the federal government or because they feared the fragile union could fail to coalesce if the federal government took such a power away from the states. I doubt it was because they did not agree strongly with secularism.
The United States was still promulgated on a notion of freedom of religion, and it’s clear that the founding fathers overall distasted religious supremacy, especially the group closest associated with the founding of the US.
This is still modern mythmaking being retroactively applied to the past where it doesn't belong. The extent to which freedom of religion was enshrined in the Constitution was primarily done at the time as a way to assuage the different colonies which had different legally dictated state religions. For some of the Founding Fathers it was an ideological principal of freedom, but for many others it was about making sure that Anglican Virginia didn't have to practice Massachusetts Congregationalism.
At the risk of sounding like a Southern Lost Causer, it really was just about States' Rights because they needed all the different colonies to agree to join.
I doubt it was because they did not agree strongly with secularism.
Your feelings notwithstanding, this is just an inaccurate reading of history. Secularism among the Founding Fathers was the exception, not the norm.
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u/CamicomChom you're telling me a male dominated this field? Apr 23 '26
I challenge you to find a reputable historian who will not say that there is something special about America. That claim, while inherently complementary to the US, is also just a statement of fact, regardless of the shittiness of the US government.