From its Puritan genesis through the various theodicies of modernity, America has alternately claimed the mantle of a chosen nation and worried that it has lost such ordination. Where did this sense of providential status originate and how has it been maintained and reinterpreted historically? What have been some of the political, if not religious, implications of thinking and acting on this belief in American life? In an erudite and well written analysis, Andrew Murphy argues that the jeremiad is pivotal to understanding not only American “chosenness” but the very construction of American identity. Continuing the work begun by Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad, Andrew Murphy extends both the historical terrain of the jeremiad and its rhetorical details in his Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11.

Focusing on three pivotal American eras (Puritan New England, the American Civil War, and the resurgence of the Christian Right in the 1980s), Prodigal Nation makes a powerful argument that the theological narrative of the jeremiad is more than a simple religious trope in American history. Rather, through concise exegesis of various texts (ranging from inaugural addresses to television commentary) and agile reflections on historical context, Murphy develops a compelling argument for how the jeremiad illuminates the messy complexity of the American relationship between religion and politics, broadly conceived.

Although Murphy locates the origin of the jeremiad in the Hebrew Bible with the prophet whose name it bears, he is clear that the jeremiad is not the unique property of any particular culture; indeed, the jeremiad has been influential in many classical Asian and Western cultures. A jeremiad is a lament that the present has gone awry from its promise. That is, jeremiads are both narratives of decline and of potential that risks might be squandered. The jeremiad, as Murphy details, usually marks a turning point, a crisis that can be redeemed if the actors in the drama can be recalled to their principles; possibilities for reform, repentance and renewal are readily available if proper behavior and/or principles are restored.

The American jeremiad, Murphy argues, is distinctive in part because of its “connection to a larger, sacred story tied intimately to the particularities of the nation's origins and development” (10). In this way, the American jeremiad is part of our “civil religion” — America is a chosen nation and we, its citizens, are the inheritors of the promise of the ancient Israelites. In the American jeremiad there also is a perennial and enduring tension between perceived national decline and enduring national promise; this is an essentially American tension between despair and hope. Is American permanently chosen or do her lapses jeopardize her status?

Further, as Murphy argues, the American jeremiad plays a part in creating the very community it seeks to renew; that is, often the American jeremiad invokes a past characterized by unity and piety as well as a future in which such unity and piety might be recaptured. For example, the Puritan New England jeremiad served as an instrument of social cohesion and control, “an attempt to prod an oft quarreling and ever diversifying citizenry into a more unified whole and to direct that whole toward a specific political vision of New England's future” (38).

Because the jeremiad is a call to action, an exhortation to reform the community back into the image of its founders and godly ancestors, there is the temptation to assume that the jeremiad is always a conservative political gesture. Murphy corrects this assumption with a detailed exegesis of both progressive and traditional jeremiads. The former look to principles of the past, while traditional jeremiads tend to look to social realities, institutions, and ways of life. Traditionalist jeremiads understand the past's value to lie in its concrete social practices and lament the community's falling away from those practices. The goal is to recapture key elements of social reality as, in their understanding, it once existed. So, for example, the Christian Right cites the departures from traditional standards of sexual behavior and family-related issues as evidence of an increasing disruption from past behavioral standards anchored in Judeo-Christian piety (110.)

Progressive jeremiads, on the other hand, while similarly lamenting present conditions, look to the past not for concrete practices to emulate, but for fundamental principles lying at the heart of American nationhood. The past holds a promise; it is the source of emancipatory ideals and foundational principles, not model behavior. Embedded in the progressive jeremiad is a notion of birthright marked by both an historical inheritance and the possibility of growth and development. Martin Luther King, Jr. employed this kind of jeremiad, Murphy notes, when he told the story of America as based most fundamentally on a founding promise, a birthright of the check written to all Americans by the nation's founders. “King reached into the American tradition, not to find a Golden Age, but to reclaim a promise, to make good on a debt, to fulfill the radical potential of those founding principles” (118–119).

In contemplating the effect of the American jeremiad on American national identity, Murphy adroitly explores how the jeremiad has contributed to both American militarism and American altruism. Echoing Robert Bellah, he notes that the jeremiad contributes to both the best and the worst in America, with this chosenness often compelling Americans to alleviate suffering among the less fortunate and sometimes (perhaps with the same impulse) to engage in military interventions. On the whole, Prodigal Nation is a wide-ranging and thoughtful meditation on how the theo-political stories we Americans tell ourselves resonate with and sometimes even create the communities we inhabit. This book deserves an honored place among the oeuvre of work by political scientists and historians on the jeremiad.