The Holy American Empire

Instructor: Stuart Parker

Course Objectives

Today, over a hundred million Americans consider the United States to be a holy empire chosen by God to represent him on earth through the imminent end times. Its presidents, both Democratic and Republican place benedictions on the country, most commonly “May God continue to bless America,” and well over 50% of the nation’s population believe that atheism disqualifies a person from holding the office of president.

How can this be? America was the first secular republic in history. The first amendment to its constitution proclaims separation of church and state and freedom of speech in the same breath. Many of its founding fathers were deists, individuals who believed God to exist outside profane space-time and human beings to be on our own in the created world.

America did not merely begin as a secular state. The Supreme Court decision to prohibit local religious establishment in Utah came nearly a century after the nation’s founding. And the Scopes Trial, prohibiting the teaching of creationism in schools, fifty years after that.

But if America was the first country to secularize, we can also see it as the first to begin a process of de-secularization, beginning with the adoption of “in God we trust,” as a motto in the 1950s, ahead of the anti-secularist movements that would not begin to win victories elsewhere in the world until the 1970s.

How and why did these changes take place? And what does the current American attitude to religion augur for the future of geopolitics?

Difficulty Level

This course’s lecture content requires no prior specialized knowledge and is based on general knowledge widely available to any high school graduate who keeps up with the news. The one challenge element of the course is the reading. Most of the reading is in the form of academic articles that are not very accessibly written. To accommodate this, questions are expected, welcomed and encouraged for those seeking basic clarifications of opaque language and occult terminology in anything they are asked to read for the course.

Texts

At the beginning of the course, students will receive a series of Dropbox links to download each of the videos and readings we will be discussing.

Class Schedule

We will be meeting twice a week on Zoom 5:30pm Pacific Time (8:30pm Eastern, 1:30am Greenwich) on Mondays and Wednesdays. Participants will also be subscribed to a Google group and a Facebook group to carry on discussion outside of class time.  In all, the class will have thirteen episodes. The course begins on May 5^th.

This course is now available on Los Altos Radio Archive.