The Spiritual Mission of America

Below is a summary of our conversation that I have heavily edited but that was originally generated by ChatGPT:

I proposed the idea of discussing “The Spiritual Mission of America.” I liked the word “mission” because it evokes both a guiding purpose and, implicitly, something that might carry religious or spiritual weight. We agreed that “mission” felt more active than alternatives like “dream” or “vision,” which struck me as passive or too ephemeral. “Mission” suggests something we must collectively strive toward. Before moving deeper, I thanked Edward for engaging with me. We’d first connected over a contentious Facebook post I had made, suggesting (in short) that no reasonable person would vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Edward’s thoughtful pushback opened a space for genuine conversation rather than shutting it down, and I wanted to publicly acknowledge and appreciate that.

Both Edward and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a well-known center of progressive politics. Kamala Harris’s career and figures like Gavin Newsom have roots here, so it’s fertile ground for thinking about the current state of American political life. We planned to start personally, with our political autobiographies, and then move to grander questions about the nation’s deeper purpose.

Edward explained his background. His parents were academics who started off in California but ended up in Nebraska. He grew up amid a mixture of progressive family ideals and a community deeply influenced by intense forms of evangelical Christianity. His family leaned strongly left, valuing progressive causes and working-class democratic traditions—his grandfather was even involved in union organizing efforts against Reagan. Edward’s education and interest in religion, philosophy, Kingian nonviolence, and Buddhism made him a committed progressive. He admired Cornel West, Chris Hedges, and Howard Zinn, and he’d voted Green more than once. Over time, though, he became disillusioned with the Democratic Party as he recognized that administrations like Obama’s continued many of Bush’s worst policies—foreign wars, surveillance, and the persecution of whistleblowers. He also noted the heartbreak of supporting Bernie Sanders, only to see the Democratic establishment squash his movements. Edward came to see justified resentment toward the American “establishment,” and he began to challenge simplistic party loyalties and liberal assumptions.

I reflected on his story and recognized many parallels. For me, the Bush years and the Iraq War were also a political awakening. Having read Chomsky and Zinn in high school, I learned America wasn’t simply “the good guy” internationally. We were involved in deep moral complicities, and our media was too often theatrical, feeding fear and propaganda. What puzzled and troubled me recently was how figures like George W. Bush, once rightly condemned for torture, preemptive war, and lies about weapons of mass destruction, were being rehabilitated by some Democrats simply because Trump seemed worse. Similarly, I noted the odd shift in attitudes toward the FBI and CIA—from the left seeing them as villains up to and including the Bush and early Obama years to embracing them when they appeared to oppose Trump. This struck me as a stunning reversal.

We shifted to the 2024 election. I showed demographic data revealing significant shifts in voting patterns: younger Black and Latino men—and working-class people in general—moved more toward Trump. The expected identity-politics logic, which might have predicted stronger support for Harris, didn’t hold. Instead, there seemed to be a growing perception that Democrats were ignoring the struggles of ordinary working people, focusing too narrowly on cultural issues or niche academic language that alienated many. We both understood that cultural struggles matter, but turning them into litmus tests and injecting them into national politics seemed counterproductive.

From there, we contemplated the deeper question of America’s purpose. I proposed that the nation’s psycho-spiritual conditions of possibility involve a balance between two core ideals: individual freedom and social justice. Both the right and the left champion freedom and justice in their own ways, but the forms differ. On one side, freedom might mean gun rights; on the other, freedom might mean the right to self-determine one’s gender identity. Likewise, conceptions of social justice differ—some see it in Christian moral values underpinning individual dignity and community responsibilities, others in historical redress of oppression. Holding these tensions in a single national project requires a kind of spiritual maturity that we have yet to fully develop.

Edward pointed to America’s tragic and complex origins—slavery, genocide, and the uprooting of peoples—while also recognizing that our ideals involve striving for something greater. We saw literature and mythology as guiding lights. Edward quoted Martin Shaw’s distinction between “vision” (conscious intention) and “dream” (the unconscious mythic reality). He cited Moby-Dick as the first major American work to plumb the deep mythic psyche of America—chaotic, multi-ethnic, uprooted, and forever journeying. I mentioned Walt Whitman, who insisted that democracy’s history remains unwritten and must still be enacted. Both of us believe that America, as a project, is not finished.

Edward mentioned Heidegger’s idea of homecoming and the need for a central mystery around which a culture can gather. In America, perhaps because we are so plural and so young, we haven’t found a single organizing myth. We have symbols like the flag, but many find patriotism awkward or suspect. Yet, we still share a currency, laws, and a peculiar sense of possibility. Could our shared spiritual mission be located in art, in beauty, in the way tragedy and comedy combine? Could jazz, with its blend of improvisation and diversity, be a model for democracy itself?

At one point we contrasted the aesthetics of democracy with the aesthetics of fascism. I emphasized their differing approaches relating the whole and its parts. Democracy thrives on a dynamic balance where individual parts maintain their independence yet harmonize in tension with the whole, creating a form of beauty akin to jazz—an improvisational art form that celebrates individuality while integrating it into a collective composition. This process highlights the democratic ideal of dialogue and integration of values, which preserves the social fabric and nurtures unity without erasing difference.

In contrast, fascism (and any kind of totalitarianism) embodies a reactionary and reductive aesthetic, seeking safety and uniformity by collapsing individuality into an undifferentiated whole. This approach, driven by fear of dissonance, results in a rigid and simplistic form of order that stifles creativity and complexity, rendering it intellectually and aesthetically impoverished.

We both hope that America can become what it aspires to be: a pluralistic democracy that honors individual dignity while pursuing social uplift. This aspiration is not just for our own sake. If we fail, the human species will lose a crucial experiment in managing the political tension between the values of individual freedom and social justice. As climate change accelerates and global migrations swell, the ability to hold different peoples together under shared values becomes ever more critical. If the US can’t manage to pull this off, who else can?

As our conversation wound down, we both felt more prepared to think about the future. I appreciated Edward’s thoughtfulness, which helped me reaffirm my sense that America’s spiritual mission remains vital, unfinished, and worth striving for.

Video of our dialogue:

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