America needs a unifying story

One of the things we’ve lost in this country is our story. It is the narrative that unites us around a common multigenerational project, that gives an overarching sense of meaning and purpose to our history.

For most of the past 400 years, Americans did have an overarching story. It was the Exodus story. The Puritans came to this continent and felt they were escaping the bondage of their Egypt and building a new Jerusalem.

The Exodus story has six acts: a life of slavery and oppression, then the revolt against tyranny, then the flight through the wilderness, then the infighting and misbehavior amid the stresses of that ordeal, then the handing down of a new covenant, and finally the arrival into a new promised land and the project of building a new Jerusalem.

The Puritans could survive hardship because they knew what kind of cosmic drama they were involved in. Being a chosen people with a sacred mission didn’t make them arrogant, it gave their task dignity and consequence. When John Winthrop used the phrase “shining city on a hill” he didn’t mean it as self-congratulation. He meant that the whole world was watching and by their selfishness and failings the colonists were screwing it up.

As Philip Gorski writes in his new book, “American Covenant,” the Puritans understood they were part of one covenant and had ferocious debates about what that meant.

During the revolution, the Founding Fathers had that fierce urgency too and drew just as heavily on the Exodus story. Some wanted to depict Moses on the Great Seal of the United States. Like Moses, America was rebinding itself with a new covenant and a new law.

Frederick Douglass embraced the Exodus, too. African-Americans, he pointed out, have been part of this journey too. “We came when it was a wilderness. … We have been with you … in adversity, and by the help of God will be with you in prosperity.”

The successive immigrant groups saw themselves performing an exodus to a promised land. The waves of mobility – from east to west, south to north – were also seen as Exodus journeys. These people could endure every hardship because they were serving in a spiritual drama and not just a financial one.

In the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders drew on Exodus more than any other source. Our 20th-century presidents made the story global. America would lead a global exodus toward democracy – God was a God of all peoples.

The Exodus story has many virtues as an organizing national myth. It welcomes in each new group and gives it a template for how it fits into the common move from oppression to dignity. The book of Exodus emphasizes that the moral and material journeys are intertwined and that for a nation to succeed materially, there has to be an invisible moral constitution and a fervent effort toward character education.

It suggests that history is in the shape of an upward spiral. People who see their lives defined by Exodus move, innovate and organize around a common destiny. As Langston Hughes put it, “America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath – / America will be!”

We have a lot of crises in this country, but maybe the foundational one is a crisis of purpose. Many people don’t know what this country is here for, and what we are here for.

It should be possible to revive the Exodus template, to see Americans as a single people trekking through a landscape of broken institutions. What’s needed is an act of imagination, somebody who can tell us what our goal is, and offer an ideal vision of what the country and the world should be.

This story was originally published March 23, 2017 at 5:16 AM with the headline "America needs a unifying story."