John Wilsey writes that in 2013 “a casual Google search of the term American exceptionalism” yielded nine million results, suggesting “the idea that America is . . . qualitatively different from, even superior to, the rest of the world is alive and well” (15). Writers associated with conservative think tanks, notably Charles Murray and the late Seymour Lipset, lately have been American exceptionalism's staunchest defenders. In the post-Iraq War era, however, a cursory search is increasingly likely to yield results that reject, not affirm, its claims about the unusual trajectory of American history and global benevolence, as suggested by recent critiques by Godfrey Hodgson, Donald Pease, and Davide Forsythe and Patrice McMahon.

American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion studies exceptionalism differently, in two ways. First, it traces the evolution of the concept over time to point out its surprisingly provincial and diverse roots. The Puritan John Winthrop called Massachusetts a “Citty upon a Hill” to express his hope that the colony could be a zealously anti-Catholic model to inspire other European Protestants. For Alexis de Tocqueville, Americans were “quite exceptional” because they had embarrassingly little interest in high culture. John O'Sullivan justified American continental expansion as an expression of “manifest destiny,” or God's providence for the United States, to provide space for the country's burgeoning population under uniform, republican political institutions (16, 28, 76). Second, the book criticizes exceptionalism's messianic and ethnocentric aspects, which, Wilsey argues, have caused Americans and others harm; shedding them could enable exceptionalist thought and policy-making to help guide the country in an era when American global leadership is less certain and nationalism is on the rise.

The book's introduction and five of its eight chapters offer a criticism of this “closed exceptionalism,” using historical examples to show aspects of exceptionalist discourse that have interpreted America to have divine meaning. This pattern is therefore “at odds with the Christian gospel”—such as when proponents have declared the country to be “chosen,” “commissioned,” “innocent,” or “glorious,” or declared Americans’ usages of its land “sacred” (19, 18, 7). Wilsey explains that national chosen-ness helped to justify enslavement of African-Americans and land expropriation from Mexicans and Native Americans. National mission, illustrated in the worldview of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, underwrote covert and overt Cold War interventions in developing countries. Assumption of innocence encouraged demonization or stereotyping of enemies. Glorification of the past manifested in the colonial era in a jeremiad literary tradition, interpreting national problems as a sign of God's people's sin, and in the late twentieth century (based on an interesting, if cursory, review of home school history textbooks) in teleological thinking about latter-day “culture wars” (192, 194). Land sanctification paradoxically justified the land's value for the commodities it could yield, and the spaces that invited civilized (meaning agricultural and then urban) settlement. In Wilsey's indictment of these forms of Americans’ hubris, there is an air of Reinhold Niebuhr's Irony of American History (University of Chicago Press, 1952), although Wilsey does not go as far as Andrew Bracevich, who cited Niebuhr regularly in calling American leaders to cease altogether their genuflections to American exceptionalism in order to develop a sustainable post-9/11 foreign policy (Andrew Bacevich, Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism [Henry Holt and Company, 2008]).

Besides Niebuhr, Wilsey also briefly discusses the perspective of other various critics of “closed” exceptionalist discourse, including Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and William J. Fulbright. Wilsey locates these individuals in what he calls an alternative tradition of “open exceptionalism,” dedicated not to purity of behavior or conscience, or civilizing the frontier, but justice (217). Thus “open exceptionalism,” Wilsey emphasizes, implies an Augustinian separation of matters of spiritual conscience from the nation-state, but also an obligation of Christian people to seek influence in national policies. Among others, he sees Abraham Lincoln as the paradigm of open exceptionalism because of his confidence in the possibility of American global leadership—the Union was “the last best hope of earth” (87). But such an example could occur only if Southern secession could be crushed and the central institution of slavery could be destroyed, even “until every drop ofblooddrawn with thelashshall be paid by another drawn with the sword” (Lincoln quoted in Edmund Fong, American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race: Multicultural Exorcisms [Routledge, 2014], 175). The great dilemma in post-1860 American history of reliance on the powerful central government to secure justice complicates association of American exceptionalism with laissez-faire.

Wilsey's illustration of the promise of open exceptionalism by asserting the intellectual kinship of Abraham Lincoln and Malcolm X decontextualizes the term's meaning a bit too much to remain coherent. Critics of governmental or corporate racism, greed, and chauvinism are not necessarily American exceptionalists. But Wilsey challenges thoughtful Christians to understand America's capacity for greatness as born, in the words of Jelani Cobb, of hard-earned “instances in which huge moral questions were advanced by people willing to risk their own well-being” (Jelani Cobb, “The Nation on the Hill: America's Greatness Is Hard Won, Not Inevitable,” New York Times, 17 September 2013). In this way, this insightful book salutes a particular, if not exceptional, national tradition of “dissent in the direction of just reform” (230).