Philip Freneau’s and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s “Poem on the Rising Glory of America,” published in 1772, early affirmed the character of this progressive doctrine. As a result, the main impetus of American thought has long been utopian. Together these ideas became providential and assumed the force of revealed truth.

The redemption from history and the regeneration of man became the very ethos of America to which all Americans were obliged to give unconditional assent.

Although the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment is now hopelessly antiquated, the emergence of an American Gnosticism remains its most important and enduring legacy: the belief that society is perfectible, that original sin is non-existent, and that humanity, especially the New Men and New Women who inhabit the New World, can, though their own agency, alter the nature of being. It had originated in the Enlightenment conception of Americans as New Men and New Women who, invincibly committed to Progress, transcended the limits that nature, history, and Providence imposed upon all human beings. At the heart of the American experiment was a vast delusion about the nature of man and history. Arising less from Christianity, even in its evangelical Protestant idiom, this faith in, this addiction to, Progress, Lukacs maintains, is among the principal consequences of the Enlightenment. This crusading zeal, John Lukacs argues, this sense that America is a nation set apart, has been inseparable from the religion of Progress. The New Zion, the New Jerusalem, the New Canaan, the City upon a Hill, America has been a messianic nation-“a country with the soul of a church” as Chesterton described it-the last, best hope of man. Throughout its brief existence, the United States for many Americans has seemed the nearest approximation to the Kingdom of God on earth. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946) Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. John Lukacs and the Problem of American History

The rising glory of america