On the Soul of a Nation

By Stephen Maly
Founder and former Executive Director of Helena Civic Television, previous board member of World Montana Center for Diplomacy and Leadership.

During his presidential campaign, and many times since his election, Joe Biden has proclaimed that he is waging “a battle for the soul of our nation”. Republican leaders have invoked the phrase as well. Such exhortations can sound good, but do they ring true? Can a nation have a soul?

This question was addressed last October 17 by New York Times columnist Elizabeth Dias. She characterized the 2020 election as “a referendum on the soul of the nation” and, after garnering some academic opinion on the subject, she mentioned the Homeric poets, Plato’s account of Socrates’ thoughts on justice, and St. Augustine’s rendering of civic virtue in The City of God. Dias described the soul of a person and that of a society as “an ancient and theological concept, one of the deepest ways humans have understood their individual identity, and their life together.” Note the distinction between individual and community; the soul of one is related to but not equated with the soul of many. I think this matters in a way that goes beyond political rhetoric. The question remains.

Candidate and now President Biden’s evocations have spurred me to pursue a line of inquiry that starts with definitions and their philosophical context. Firstly, what is a soul? Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary holds that it is “the immaterial essence, animating principle or actuating cause of an individual life; the spiritual principle embodied in human beings.” As a starting point, this does not lead me to embrace the notion of a nation having these esoteric attributes. That same dictionary defines nation thusly: “a community of people composed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory and government.” No spiritual principle evinced here. Where is the nexus joining a person’s invisible moral essence to a territorial entity?

I’ve broadened my search, but so far as I can tell, there’s nothing published in the journals of political science or religious studies conjoining nations and souls. I’m nevertheless sympathetic to Biden et. al. In graduate school I wrote a paper entitled On the Soul of a Nation. It was about Quebec—a special physical place embedded in the heart of Canada and imbued with unique cultural values. (I recall being particularly enamored with the Quebecois’ joie de vivre, something palpable yet misty that set French Canadians apart from other citizens across the country—a distinct society.) I received a passing grade, but the professor was critical; the paper lacked a sufficiency of footnoted references. I had few sources to draw from, save a few obscure francophone clerics. Fast forward many years, and Google can’t find me a board-certified soulologist. Just what constitutes the soul of a nation is still up for grabs.

It could be that Biden makes easy and frequent reference to the soul of America because of his Catholic faith. We Catholics (lapsed, in my case, but indelibly marked by sacramental proceedings in childhood) are taught to examine one’s conscience before proceeding to confess one’s sins to a priest. But who is able or qualified to undertake a collective examination of conscience at the national level? Surely, no single individual can purport to represent or comprehend the conscience of a community. I don’t think Joe Biden is vainglorious in this regard. His soul speeches reflect a belief that his faith-based notions of economic progress and social justice are in synch with the majority of Americans.

I think the soul question goes well beyond Catholicism. Evangelical Protestants have always been keen on preaching about the sins of the community. Abortion rights, for example, exemplify the road to perdition. Some Protestant sects openly advocate a theonomic society, one where laws are based on a Biblical worldview. The trans-denominational bevy of Christian Nationalists so well described and documented in books like Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming and Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers believe that America as a nation is an indispensable instrument of God destined for a starring role in the run up to Armageddon.

Let’s presume for a moment that a country, like a person, is born with a soul. If so, how is it made manifest in the life of the people? I think the answer could be…The Constitution. Infused as they were with Christian beliefs and sensibilities (Jefferson took the miracles out of his New Testament, but revered the rest), the founders very consciously and deliberately crafted a secular republic. Madison studied Rome and Venice as models, not ancient Israel, and the unconverted Iroquois Confederation provided the best example of successfully joining independent tribal nations into a functioning union.

Reading the Constitution is not a soul-stirring experience. It’s a document, not poetry. Arguing about the meaning of certain clauses and articles is a far more emotional undertaking than reading the text. The country’s basic law may provide the bedrock for the American spirit, but there are cultural expressions of “soul” that are much more moving. The architectural wonder of the Statue of Liberty is a worthy substitute for 18th century legalese. More personal and poignant examples issue from Joe Biden’s inauguration celebration. Lady Gaga’s rendering of the national anthem, J-Lo singing America the Beautiful, Garth Brooks doing Amazing Grace, and, not least, Amanda Gorman’s amazing performance as the nation’s Youth Poet Laureate: All these were soulful endorsements of a unified community.

If the Constitution is the foundation of our republic, and if, as originalists claim, its tenets and principles are unchanging, then it must be said that the soul of America is benighted with racism. As Elisabeth Dias put it, “In the United States, the question of who could define the soul of the nation was fraught from the start, from the forced displacement of native people to the enslavement of Africans.” The spirit of Americanness has been corroded by systemic racial injustice. I know there is ongoing commotion about this application of “systemic”, but for me it is an undeniable fact, borne out in countless ways throughout our history (not least in the framing of the constitution), and laid bare, like so many other systemic faults, by the pandemic. White supremacy is a venomous ideological construct with enduring narcotic effects. People who believe that whites are superior are addicted to domination and paranoid about losing power to people they regard as lesser beings.

In recent days, President Biden has reiterated the need “to restore the soul of the nation”. Restoration implies some sort of atonement, preceded by forms of public confession regarding the ways in which this country, through its governing institutions, has succumbed to various vices, including but not limited to the Seven Deadlies: pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Can a nation confess its sins and thereby exorcise its demons? Other countries have had some success with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, but I don’t sense any appetite for that in America, and the argument for reparations payments to black families is burdened with practical as well as moral conundrums.

If indeed a nation can be said, with seriousness, to possess a common soul, implying that a collectivity of individual souls can combine to constitute a distinctly larger and broader spiritual entity, then it seems logical that smaller communities can make a similar (though not identical) claim. In the federal republic of the USA, what about the respective souls of the member states? It doesn’t work. People don’t think this way. I have never witnessed anybody reciting the pledge of allegiance to their state flag. I cannot recall hearing any politicians, pundits, or sportscasters talk about “the soul” of Michigan, Arkansas, or Arizona, just to pick a few states at random. I believe states are less spiritualized than nations.

In contrast, paradoxically, local communities can and do have “soul”. Think New York City (Sinatra land), Chicago (same voice, different tune), Los Angeles (a la Randy Newman), Seattle (Sea Hawks/Mariners Nation), Detroit (Motown), New Orleans writ large (Satchmo), Miami (Vice). More seriously, think about your hometown. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. I have not lived in that community since 1976. Nevertheless, when the mass shooting at the King Soopers in my old Table Mesa neighborhood hit the news, I cried. Every mention of Boulder in the news since that horrific event has struck a chord of affectionate memory, a feeling of allegiance. I believe it’s because Boulder has a soul of sorts, and a part of my own spirit is permanently affixed to the immaterial aspect of that place.

Let’s get back to the big picture. How can a demonstrably nonsensical proposition that nations have souls have such purchase on the minds of so many seemingly rational citizens? Can a philosophical fallacy still, in essence, be true? I think so—or rather, I feel that it can; I have a strong gut feeling that the soul of the nation is not just some bogus construct used to bolster the moral bona fides of aspiring politicians. There is something to it–an invisible, inchoate, and emotionally compelling force.

It could be that an outward reaching ray of the “inner light” of my own soul, to borrow a Quaker concept, is interlaced with filaments emanating from other Americans. The nation, and our towns, are the depositories of many pieces of individual selves.

Here’s another way of perceiving the mystery of our psycho-social political reality. In her article, Elisabeth Dias wrote that in biblical Hebrew the words translated as soul come from a root meaning “to breathe.” She further reminds readers that the Genesis story has God breathing into the nostrils of man to engender what we call humanity. Maybe it’s the exhalations of millions of Americans that give substance to the idea of a collective spirit. In other words, the soul of the nation is the cumulative manifestation of individuals sharing a part of themselves with the community at large, through their thoughts, common memories, and concrete actions as citizens. We breathe together.

The shared national experience of the covid 19 pandemic has become a part of our collective soul. Behold what the virus has revealed about the inner workings of the body politic. I think Joe Biden sees much of this; he gets it. Slavery was this country’s original sin, but we’re evolving. Inflammations of the national soul, such as racism, can be treated, if not cured. I believe that America is redeemable. I pray that other elected officials, in Congress and in City Councils, will take the president’s lead, and also that the Constitution will endure.