Americans have always had a sense of divine destiny. The Puritans who settled this untamed land were convinced they were reliving the story of the Exodus in the New World. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote, “the Israel of our time.” Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century fire-and-brimstone preacher best known for his phlegmatic sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” liked to describe America as “the new Canaan,” declaring that “America has received the true religion of the old continent.”
