Spiritual striving for American identity

The question of American identity has historically been both complex and contested. What’s more, it often yields mythic notions rooted in exceptionalist dogmas like election, commission, moral regeneracy, sacred land, and innocent past.

Embedded in religious American exceptionalism is the American Dream: if an individual works hard, perseveres, and is a good citizen, there is no limit to how far she can advance. One of this idea’s earliest articulations came in the 18th-century writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, specifically Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America.

W. E. B. Du Bois offered another notion of American identity from his perspective as an African American in Jim Crow America. The “spiritual striving” of African Americans informed his notion of a dual identity, “both Negro and American,” an identity in pursuit of a generous acknowledgment of humanity undergirded by economic, social, political, and educational liberty.