American Difficulty in Differentiating Nationalism from Theology

America has morphed ever more each day into a nation with a deeper and deeper sense of nationalism that is expunging previous views of the sacred (i.e. Puritan theology, hinduism, Islam) and exploiting these tradiional sacralized tenets to further contribute to the evolving national religion conceived for the sake of a "unifying liberty..." It think we can safely trace these roots back before the civil war, but definitely afterward. What is it about the Civil War that contributed to a syncretism of nationalism and theology? Venturing an educated guess, I propose a few different contributing factors that led to the merger: Realized violence, Abraham Lincoln, and slavery. Before the Civil War such atrocities were few and far between, far-removed from the Americas. The violence that ensued in the Civil War stretched the rules of war into an almost total war, where civilian and soldier ceased to be distinguished and God was seen as being present to the South and North -- both sides on a crusade for some reason. This brings me to the second contributing factor. Slavery was not the viable reason to go to war since very few opposed the institution of slavery to begin with, in fact noting a biblical warrant for its presence. But as the war became more and more horrific the more the people needed a reason and motivation to fight. The war was thought to be the result of sin on the part of both sides and it wouldn't stop until that sin had been relinquished and paid for...slavery was among these. And this brings me to my third contributing factor. Abraham Lincoln took office at a time when tempers and dissension was high among the southern and northern states. He did not want to be the instigator of war and so merely waited for the south to fire first. The north as the defender of unity was born from this strategic move and the unity of the nation became the first and foremost cause worth fighting for in the Civil War. But when the violence kept coming, something else had to be blamed for the atrocity -- sin -- perhaps slavery. Lincoln, being attuned to the people's opinion of the day decided to announce his intent to abolish slavery. If this announcement had come before the war, he would have lost all of his support and would have definitely lost the election...but he did not. He won the election by a land-slide (though the percentages of support for him drastically decreased at the same time). Anyway, the point is that the church during this period was split on the issue of slavery -- the southern churches preaching for the institution of slavery, and the northern churches preaching against. Each church cited biblical support for their argument. Biblically, the issue of slavery could not be reconciled. In fact it has been suggested that the South actually had a stronger biblically backed argument than did the north as they accused the north of merely secumming to an adopted value alien to Scripture.

Since the Civil War and the deeply rooted religious crusader mindset, the fusion of nationalism with Christianity has led to an American theocracy that perhaps violates traditional Christian tenets for the sake of democracy. And democracy justifies itself in terms somewhat familiar to Christianity and yet is fundamentally and teleologically different from it. And this is the world American Christians are born into and enculturated to support.