One of the questions from the Reader’s Group Discussion Questions for my novel Altamont Augie asks this: Do you think the partisanship of contemporary Red and Blue America is in part a continuation of the political conflict of the Sixties between student activists of the New Left and New Right?

Uh, yah.

As we all twist in the wind thanks to the absurd Washington political theater known as “The Debt Ceiling Crisis,” it is useful to understand the impasse as being rooted in a decade long ago: the 1960s.

The usual narrative of the 1960s has as its cornerstone the Generation Gap. But this was a passing, adolescent thing. Of more lasting consequence was a conflict within the Baby Boom generation itself, the seldom-told story of campus showdowns between student activists of the New Left and New Right. The great untold story of the Sixties—at least untold in the cannon of American literary fiction—is of the ideological civil war that took place amongst the new youth culture of the day, the Port Huron Statement of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) squaring off against the Sharon Statement of YAF (Young Americans for Freedom), the New Left and New Right vying for a generation’s political soul—a battle that rages still.

Activists of the New Left would go on to dominate academia, the arts, and media, while activists of the New Right would give rise to the Reagan Revolution, talk radio, and the Tea Party. The primary combatants of our current debt crisis, President Obama and Republicans in the House of Representatives, are direct political descendants of, in the words of David Horowitz in his testimonial for Altamont Augie, “the decade that divides us all.” Barrack Obama is a child of the New Left, neighbor and pal of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—Mr. and Ms. SDS. Opposing him are dozens of congressional Republicans who came to power surfing the wave of the conservative counter-revolution: a revolt wrought by the Tea Party, modern-day YAFers in relaxed-waist jeans and Don’t Tread On Me tees.

In eighteen months an entire nation will be asked to pick one and only one. The battle joined all those years ago will finally be decided.

One of the things that moved me to write my novel Altamont Augie is the enduring relevance of the 1960s. And not least on the 60s relevancy list is a matter addressed in a fascinating editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times by Erin Aubrey Kaplan entitled “Obama: Pursuing a white agenda?”

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-aubrykaplan-obama-blacks-20110619,0,3970072.story

Kaplan’s article spotlights a recent kerfuffle between two black academics, Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry. The gist of their disagreement is the tension inherent between two competing principles of black advocacy: black assimilation and black nationalism. Kaplan explains them as follows: “Assimilation holds that blacks must claim their place in the mainstream to be successful; nationalism maintains that black success starts…with building and sustaining group unity.”

I find this spat evidence of a crucial and necessary dialogue amongst today’s black intelligentsia, but I was disappointed that Ms. Kaplan did not trace the argument to its roots: the Progressive Era, when the towering black intellectuals W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington went at each other tooth-and-nail over this same issue, pitting two nearly irreconcilable philosophies, black nationalism and black assimilation, against each other.

This very conflict that Kaplan wrestles with in her editorial is dealt with in my novel in the form of a classroom lecture the main character attends. Here’s a sample of it from Chapter 17.

Of the many things David had vowed to do if he survived Khe Sanh, taking another class from Thomas Devlin was high on the list. He kept his promise by enrolling in a course titled “America after the Civil War: The Reconstruction and Progressive Eras,” taught in the same third-floor Blegen Hall classroom as the Manifest Destiny course he took in 1966. He found Devlin little changed, his kinky silver hair no thinner, his stocky frame no less substantial. Though other professors had begun dressing more casual, in obeisance to the times, Devlin still came to class in a jacket and tie and freshly shined wing tips. After taking the entire month of January to cover Reconstruction, he began his series of lectures on the Progressive Era by writing “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” on the blackboard.

He set his piece of chalk on the aluminum rail and pointed at the board. “Who knows what this is?” He fussed with the sleeve of his tweed jacket while scanning the room for a response.

David had no clue. He twisted around in his seat and saw that no one else did either—save for a rumpled looking black guy in the last row. His arm hung lazily in the air, as if attached to invisible strings. He had a kind face and an unkempt Afro that listed to one side.

“It’s a chapter in The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois,” he said when Devlin called on him. He pronounced it “do-boys,” rather than the French rendering David was accustomed to.

The corners of Devlin’s mouth turned up ever so slightly. “That’s absolutely right. It speaks to one of the great controversies of the time: how to best address the plight of blacks in the Jim Crow South after the collapse of Reconstruction.” He slid behind the lectern and explained that W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were the leading black intellectuals of the Progressive Era, men of breathtaking accomplishments, with Washington best known for helping establish Tuskegee University in Alabama, and Du Bois for his role in founding the NAACP. “In 1895,” he continued, “Washington gave a speech on race relations to a mostly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. It became known as the Atlanta Compromise, and advocated blue-collar bootstrapping as the surest way for blacks to secure a toehold amongst the nation’s white majority.” Rather than give a scholarly exegesis of the speech, Devlin instead read excerpts from it, so that students could form their own opinions of it before hearing his.

 

“Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from

slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the

masses of us are to live by the productions of our

. . . No race can prosper till it learns that there is

as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at

the top . . .

The wisest among my race understand that the

of questions of social equality is the extremest

folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the

privileges that will come to us must be the result of

and constant struggle rather than of artificial

forcing . . . The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory

just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity

to spend a dollar in an opera house . . .

pledge that in your effort to work out the great

and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors

the South, you shall have at all times the patient,

sympathetic help of my race . . . This coupled with our

prosperity, will bring into our beloved South

a new heaven and a new earth.”

 

He swept the room with his blue-eyed gaze to gauge how effective a fillip his reading had been. Quite effective, David was guessing, what with images of taut-faced National Guardsmen patrolling smoldering cities still fresh in everyone’s mind. “It was an argument for gradualism that saw black upward mobility as a long, painstaking climb,” Devlin said, “similar to what an immigrant population might expect.”

He dealt next with Du Bois’s repudiation of the Atlanta Compromise, a gravamen that became fully formed, he told them, in 1903, when Du Bois used an entire chapter in The Souls of Black Folks to make his case. He proceeded to read several passages.

 

“This ‘Atlanta Compromise’ is by all odds the

most notable thing in Mr.Washington’s career . . . and

today its author is certainly the most distinguished

South-erner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with

the largest personal following . . .

But aside from this, there is among educated and

thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling

of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the

currency and ascendancy which some of Mr.

Washington’s theories have gained . . .

Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people

give up, at least for the present, three things—First,

political power, Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth . . .

 

But so far as Mr.Washington apologizes for injustice

. . . does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting,

belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions,

and opposes the higher training and ambition of

our brighter minds—so far as he, the South, or the

Nation, does this—we must unceasingly and firmly

oppose them . . . clinging unwaveringly to those great

words which the sons of the Fathers would gain forget:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men

are created equal . . .’”

 

Devlin stepped away from the podium, his hands empty of all notes. “Du Bois favored a more confrontational approach to civil rights, believing that blacks should challenge whites, culturally and politically. He took to calling Washington ‘The Great Accommodator,’ and blamed the separate but equal ruling of Plessy versus Ferguson on Washington’s acquiescent stance toward segregation. Du Bois in later years, however, would concede that his approach of ‘educate and agitate’ failed to end segregation, and that full integration was a goal for the distant future—which is precisely what Washington argued in his Atlanta Compromise speech.”

As was his custom, he saved time for a discussion question at the end. “With all of this in mind, then, whose philosophy should today’s African Americans rely on to overcome the lingering damage of segregation—that of Du Bois or that of Washington?”

Ms. Kaplan questions in the final paragraph of her op-ed piece whether the principles of assimilation and black unity can coexist at all? Ultimately, black Americans will have to decide which approach, that of Du Bois or that of Washington, can best move them the rest of the way down the field toward the goal we all have—black, white, brown, yellow and all hues in between: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 

What does a report on cancer survival rates in the United States have in common with civil unrest in Syria? The withering of fear.

Fear of cancer in the national psyche began to wither in July of 1985, with an essay entitled “Seasons of Survival: Reflections of a Physician with Cancer.” [Mullan, Fitzhugh, M.D. New England Journal of Medicine 313, No. 4 (July 25, 1985): 270-273.] Fear of tyranny in the Middle East—in Syria no less than in occupied Iraq—began to wither on April 9, 2003, when a U. S. Marine armored vehicle toppled the imposing statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square.

From each of these seemingly unrelated historical inflection points have come a flowering of human potential.

The CDC reported in the March 11 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reporthttp://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6009a1.htm?s_cid=mm6009a1_w—that the five year cancer survival rate in America is now up to 66%, the highest in the world, confirming empirically what Dr. Mullan passionately asserted two decades before: that it was time to begin speaking of cancer survivors rather than cancer victims. By believing it could be so, the tenacious striving of medical science eventually made it so.

The eidetic image of Saddam Hussein’s massive totem falling in central Baghdad is an equally powerful symbol of the dynamism of human belief, indelibly burning into the brains of millions of oppressed people throughout the Middle East the notion that if Iraq could be free of Saddam, they could all be free. In Tunisia and Egypt and maybe Libya and even in the police state of Syria—and yes, one day Iran, too. Like cancer survival rates—climbing slowly but inexorably, decade by decade—so will the number of countries in the Middle East no longer under the yoke of authoritarian regimes rise too, painfully but relentlessly.

Yet neither of these vital struggles—the quest to overcome cancer and the quest to overcome tyranny—would ever have been joined without the necessary withering of fear. For fear suffocates hope, and it is hope that gives rise to noble deed. Only when fear withers can hope and nobility of deed germinate and take root, to finally grow into the stout trees of human health and liberty.

Remarkably, a single work of literature anticipated—as great art often does anticipate—each of these still-chrysalid human triumphs, the (partial) cure of cancer and the incipient bloom of liberty amongst the darkest of tyrannies: The Cancer Ward, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First published in 1967, the book was banned in the former Soviet Union for its symbolic contumely of Soviet totalitarianism. Though famous as a metaphor for the ravages of tyranny, it is also—all 616 pages of it—a poignant and courageous narrative on the ravages of cancer in the mid-twentieth century.

The action occurs in a hospital ward—Ward 13— dedicated to the care of cancer victims in Central Asia in 1955. The patients, who come from all strata of Soviet society, have one thing in common: cancer.

The main character is Oleg Kostoglotov, a political exile who is transferred to Ward 13 from a gulag for treatment of a nebulous tumor. (The author had a similar real-life experience: Solzhenitsyn was transferred to a hospital in Tashkent for treatment of testicular cancer after having spent eight years in exile as a political prisoner.) Kostoglotov’s foil in the story is Pavel Rusanov, a Communist Party minion who has an enlarging neck mass and boundless contempt for the other patients—whom Solzhenitsyn democratically introduces chapter-by-chapter—of Ward 13.

But Pavel Nikolayevich was tormented, no less than by the disease itself, by having to enter the clinic as an ordinary patient, just like everyone else.

Rusanov is as much in denial of his neck cancer as he is of the “cancer” of Soviet tyranny.

“We mustn’t talk about death! We mustn’t even remind anyone of it.”

To which Kostoglotov responds, “If we can’t talk about death HERE, where on earth can we?”

Prominent in the story, too, are Zoya, a nurse/medical student to whom Kostoglotov is attracted—“The strongest memory he had…was of her neatly supported breasts which formed, as it were, a little shelf, almost horizontal”—and Vera Gangart, a female physician (all the physicians at Ward 13 are female) whose romance with Kostoglotov is never consummated.

…he began thinking about Vera Gangart…Her smile was kind, not so much her smile as the lips themselves. They were vital, separate lips…made, as all lips are, for kissing, yet they had other more important work to do: to sing of brightness and beauty.

But mostly the patients of Ward 13 think about their cancers. It is everywhere, all around them, in plain sight day after day, week after week, moment after excruciating moment.

There was a stabbing pain under his neck—his tumor, deaf and indifferent, had moved in to shut off the whole world.

But the real cancer in the novel is tyranny. Again, it is Kostoglotov who frames the matter.

“A man dies from a tumor, so how can a country survive with growths like labor camps and exiles?”

The corrosive effect of totalitarianism oozes from the pores of every patient of Ward 13 like the shameful ichor it is. The librarian Shulubin (afflicted with rectal cancer), one of the “good Russians” who cooperated with Stalin’s purges, gives voice to it while speaking to Kostoglotov.

“At least you haven’t had to stoop so low…You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to ‘expose’ you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts…they made us demand the firing squad, demand it!”

A 1968 New York Times book review of The Cancer Ward, entitled “A Diseased Body Politic,” correctly identified the true subject matter of Solzhenitsyn’s story.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-cancer.html

But the review couldn’t have been more mistaken in its opinion of the impact the novel would have.

“Clearly Solzhenitsyn believes in the power of literature to exorcise Stalinism. Vain as this hope may be, it has inextricably bound a great writer to his great, and perhaps his only subject.”

Pace New York Times, it was precisely the power of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literature—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; The First Circle; The Gulag Archipelago; and The Cancer Ward—that began the decades-long exorcism of Leninism and Stalinism from Russia. The Cancer Ward challenged tyranny in the same way Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan challenged cancer and in the same way that America challenged the brutal authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: by replacing fear with hope.

May hope thrive, and may health and liberty follow.

 

Let us hope the zephyr of democratic change blowing across Cairo this week caresses the cheek of Beijing as well. In hopes it will, this post is dedicated to my fellow physicians in China, who may or may not ever have read Fathers & Sons by Ivan Turgenev, but who all know the story of Tian Xi.

Fathers & Sons may at first glance seem an unlikely book to include in the narrative medicine discourse begun on my former blog, The Literary Doctor, and continued here. There are no “meaning of human illness” themes in Turgenev’s story, nor poignant end of life scenes to discuss; rather, it speaks to a role doctors have long played in western society—that of social and political activists, both in real life and, in the case of Fathers & Sons, as literary characters.

Turgenev uses the character Bazarov, who has just completed his medical studies—and whom critics have sometimes dubbed the “first Bolshevik”—to explore the world of young Russian radicals of the 1860s, placing Bazarov and the nihilist sons of his generation in conflict with their liberal aristocrat fathers of the preceding one. The publication of Fathers & Sons (in 1862) caused such controversy that Turgenev was forced to live outside of Russia until his death in 1883, at a French manor in Bougival.

It is in the tradition of Turgenev’s Bazarov that I call my Chinese colleagues to action on behalf of Tian Xi, a 24-year-old recently sentenced to one year in prison for “damaging property” at a hospital where he was infected with AIDs. Tian was charged with storming into the offices of the director of the hospital and breaking a fax machine, computer, and water cooler on Aug 2, 2010.

In 1996, at the age of 9, Tian was given four units of blood at Xincai People’s Hospital No. 1, in Henan province, to treat a mild concussion suffered from bumping his head on a desk in his third-grade classroom. An article in the L.A. Times#mce_temp_url# last November gives a full account of the incident:

…Tian Xi is one of perhaps 1 million Chinese infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a result of blood transfusions at government-run hospitals. About 1 million more people were infected through the process of donating blood. Although the cases date back to the 1990s, the Chinese government has yet to offer an apology or investigate a massive cover-up that allowed the disease to spread exponentially after it was well known that the blood supply was tainted…

The roots of the scandal go back to the mid-1980s, even before there was a term in Chinese for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Trying to protect its blood supply against what was considered a decadent Western disease, the Chinese government banned the import of blood products and, in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalization, decided to go into the blood business itself.

By 1992, blood collection stations sprouted throughout the countryside. Poor farmers were encouraged to sell their blood to get rich quick. “Extend your arm. Expose a vein. Make a fist. And it’s 50 yuan [$7.50]” was a popular slogan.

The blood stations often extracted the valuable plasma — which could be sold abroad for medication — and then re-injected the donors with leftover blood so they’d be able to give blood again without becoming anemic. Before re-injection, the staff often mixed the blood of various donors without screening for disease…

At the same time, hospitals were encouraging patients to get blood transfusions whether they needed them or not, offering doctors who sold blood commissions of $1 or $2 per bag.

“So many people were selling blood, you needed somebody to buy it,” said Tian Xi’s mother, Chen Minggui, 48. “We think that’s what happened with my son. When he bumped his head, he didn’t lose one drop of blood, but in the hospital they gave him a transfusion of four bags…”

Tian got his [HIV] results July 19, 2004. By a strange coincidence, it was the same day the results were released from the gaokao, the all-important test Chinese high schoolers take to apply to university. He’d done well enough to go to a decent, if not top tier, university in Beijing — and he had one of the most dreaded diseases…

Unable to get a job with his poor health, and unable to afford expensive medications for hepatitis C, which he also contracted with the transfusion, he remained in Beijing, bringing his petitions to the Health Ministry, the Supreme Court and any government offices he could approach without being arrested.

Tian’s petitions were an irritant to Henan officials, who pressed him to stop his campaign and return home. Finally, on July 23 of this year, Tian received a text message from Xincai county’s Communist Party secretary, Gu Gouyin, asking him to come home from Beijing to negotiate a settlement.

“I will help you find a solution to your problems,” the message read.

When Tian arrived for an appointment in Xincai, Gu had been called out of town for business. They rescheduled, and again Gu failed to show up.

“He realized it was a trap. Tian Xi had been lured down here because he was embarrassing people by petitioning in Beijing,” said his father, who added that his son had only brought a month’s supply of his retroviral drugs from Beijing and had initially gone to People’s Hospital No. 1 to request medication, which the facility refused to supply.

The family doesn’t deny that Tian Xi behaved badly, not only knocking equipment off the director’s desk but also showing up repeatedly at the hospital, trying to visit the director at home and vandalizing an office door.

Even today, many transfusion recipients who might be HIV positive have not been tested and have not been notified that they are at risk.

Tian Xi should not be sent to prison. He should be given an apology, monetary compensation, and have a non-profit charity established in his name by the Chinese government to track down, notify, and treat all other transfusion recipients who have not yet been tested or even informed they may be at risk for AIDS as a result of its disgraceful blood donation program. Chinese physicians should be in the vanguard of this restitution movement, bringing the condemnation of tyranny—and the voice of liberty—from Cairo’s lips to Beijing’s ears.

There is a scene in my novel Altamont Augie wherein the story’s main character and his adversary debate the concept of Manifest Destiny, which can be thought of as a special case of the more fundamental concept of American exceptionalism, a topic much in the news of late.

I think it is fair to say that religious skeptics tend to dislike the idea of American exceptionalism, while citizens of faith tend to embrace it. Some have even speculated that virtually no atheists believe in American exceptionalism. If true, I find this a troubling state of affairs, both for America and for her atheists.

Though the United States is, unlike much of Europe, still a predominantly religious nation, the demographics of atheism are trending up, at least according to a study done in 2007 by the Barna Group #mce_temp_url# and discussed in a Washington Post article#mce_temp_url# that same year.

“A study released in June by the Barna Group, a religious polling firm, found that about 5 million adults in the United States call themselves atheists. The number rises to about 20 million—about one in every 11 Americans—if people who say they have no religious faith or are agnostic (they doubt the existence of a God or a supreme deity) are included. They tend to be more educated, more affluent and more likely to be male and unmarried than those with active faith, according to the Barna study. Only 6 percent of people over 60 have no faith in God, and one in four adults ages 18 to 22 describe themselves as having no faith.”

These numbers suggest that in the future, America will need to reconcile the religious skepticism of its growing ranks of unbelievers with the vital national concept of American exceptionalism. Either atheism is compatible with American exceptionalism or it is not. I would argue that it is, and that it must be. For if it is not, given the above polling data, an inevitable dilution of our national identity—and vigor—will occur. It is unnecessary for this to take place. Atheists should be given permission to openly embrace American exceptionalism in a way that is philosophically and intellectually palatable to them.

But is it possible to believe in the core set of American values known as American exceptionalism without believing in God? Does such a thing as American exceptionalism actually exist? And if so, what tangible proof is there of it?

American exceptionalism does exist, and the most compelling proof of it is the current number#mce_temp_url# of first generation immigrants living in the United States: 38.5 million people. It is a staggering number, by far the most in the world. No other country even comes close; Russia is next, with 12.5 million. That immigrants from all over the world choose overwhelmingly to come—often while enduring great personal hardship—to a single country makes that country, by definition, exceptional.

And it has always been so, from the time the phrase was first coined—by a Frenchman, no less.

“ The situation of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional, and it is to be believed that no [other] democratic people will ever be placed in it. Their wholly Puritan origin; their uniquely commercial habits; the very country they inhabit…”—Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Page 430.

So what is this immigration magnet we call American exceptionalism? It is sometimes easier to say what it is not than what it is—it is not permission to ignore international standards, nor grounds for claiming all American wars are just, nor a Divine right to do as we please—but here are three well-respected definitions that have tried to do the job.

1. “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.”—G.K. Chesterton. What I Saw in America. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922. Page 4.

The creed he is referring to is The Declaration of Independence, specifically the first sentence of the second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” For Chesterton and many others, this is the essence of American exceptionalism.

Next is a more secular definition of American exceptionalism, from an entire book about it.

2. “Born out of revolution, the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society…the nation’s ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.”—Seymour Martin Lipset. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Political commentator Dennis Prager has distilled the creed of American exceptionalism onto the face of a coin. He calls his insightful thesis the American Trinity. Here is a summary of his transcript#mce_temp_url# on it.

3. “…There it was in front of me my entire life, the American values system on a coin: E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, Liberty…

“E Pluribus Unum: from many, one; meaning that we don’t care where you are from. We don’t care about your blood origins, your ethnic origins, your racial origins, your religious origins…you work with us to make America, you are one of us…

“In God We Trust: America is founded on the notion that God is the source of values. That’s why the Declaration of Independence says that we have inalienable rights, but they’re not from humanism, and they’re not from great thinkers; they are from God…

“And third, the third of our American Trinity, is Liberty…Notice equality is not part of the American Trinity…We are all born equal…Where you end up, that’s your business…

“That’s the American Trinity…E Pluribis Unum: from many, one; Liberty, not necessarily equality; and In God We Trust: God is the essence and basis of our values.”

So is American exceptionalism a set of God-given values inextricable from a belief in God, or a man-made ideology suitable for skeptics and believers alike? The answer depends on one’s belief or disbelief in God, but practically speaking, it may not matter.

The way to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable tenets is for atheists to concede that American exceptionalism exists and that it is of value. Much as with the planet they live on, atheists do not have to believe that God is American exceptionalism’s source, as long as they believe it is real, precious, and deserving of their loving and loyal stewardship.