Unipolar Dispensations: Exceptionalism, Empire, and the End of One America

S Jonathon O’Donnell

doi:10.1080/1462317x.2018.1484986

S Jonathon O’Donnell

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317x.2018.1484986

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Abstract

ABSTRACTPublic and political discourse around the 2016 US Presidential election constructed it as a time of crisis for America. Yet, while over 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, religion’s role in this crisis has been marginalized. Analyzing Trump’s support among premillennial dispensationalists, this article explores connections between dispensationalist discourses of divine providence and constructions of Trump’s election as a “turning point” for America. Charting links between conflicts over domestic cultural homogeneity and attempted impositions of US power over global “deviants” (terrorists, rogue states), it argues that the crisis of American identity figured by Trump’s election is tied to religious and secularized soteriologies emerging from notions of American exceptionalism and empire inaugurated by the end of the Cold War.

Highlights

Becoming one America “Can we become one America in the twenty-first century?” Bill Clinton asked on 14 June 1997, announcing his new Initiative to realize the promise of a nation: “One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President’s Initiative on Race.” Aimed at promoting dialogue across racial and ethnic divides, the Initiative sought to heal the “problem of race” as both the “oldest” and “newest” dilemma confronting the United States
By 2017, as the presidency passed from Barack Obama not to Hillary Rodham Clinton – as predicted by pollsters and pundits – but to Donald Trump, a candidate who campaigned on a platform of open xenophobia and white racial ressentiment and whose political career had been launched by the conspiracy that Obama was not truly American, the answer to Clinton’s question might have appeared self-evident
Unpacking the theopolitics behind some of Trump’s prominent evangelical supporters, it argues that the crisis of American identity seen as embodied in the 2016 presidential election is tied to a broader crisis, religious and political, inaugurated by the advent of geopolitical unipolarity at the end of the Cold War

Summary

Introduction

Becoming one America “Can we become one America in the twenty-first century?” Bill Clinton asked on 14 June 1997, announcing his new Initiative to realize the promise of a nation: “One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President’s Initiative on Race.” Aimed at promoting dialogue across racial and ethnic divides, the Initiative sought to heal the “problem of race” as both the “oldest” and “newest” dilemma confronting the United States.

Results

Conclusion