I believe that the author approaches American exceptionalism with an idealistic perspective. According to the unfortunate history rather than the idealized future of the United States, American exceptionalism does not derive from liberty (inclusion), but from oppression (exclusion). Although the author imagines the American project as liberty expanding despite opposition, as in the Civil Rights Movement, I would argue for the opposite perspective: oppression remains despite opposition.

Founded on the exclusion of non-male, non-white, non-wealthy, non-heterosexual, and non-Christian people from citizenship, the American nation epitomizes oppression. Preserving American values, therefore, involves preserving exclusion from liberty. We can imagine American history as the most powerful group, predominantly white and male, struggling to prevent disempowered groups from acquiring liberty.

Despite disempowered people dedicating themselves to social movements, from the suffragettes to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the empowered remain determined to prevent minorities from gaining liberty. Although women and African Americans earned the right to vote, the glass ceiling and the urban ghettoes still exist, impeding true liberty for minority groups. The heterosexual majority continues to withhold marriage rights from the non-heterosexual minority. “National exceptionalism,” the author writes, “is any nation’s compelling sense of purpose to recognize and promote human liberty.” On the basis of my examples above, I would re-define exceptionalism as the national attempt to restrict and confine liberty to the most powerful group.

Morgan uses the example of the sacralization of the American flag, and the advocacy of creating an amendment to the constitution that bans its desecration. This would, as he discusses, remove the flag as a potential symbol for dissent, and creates it as an everlasting symbol embodying the ‘sacred’ of the constitution. He mentions the Supreme Court decision, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), where a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are, according to their doctrine, prohibited from revering any symbols, sued the School Board, who was attempting to force students to salute the American flag. This would obligate them to honor a symbol of American patriotism, something that is considered to be sacred in the religion of the American constitution. However, if this is antithetical to the individual’s personal faith, then it is clearly wrong to force this ideal onto them. The Court agreed, and ruled in favor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This helps exemplify the religious strife that occurs in the United States as a result of its freedom of religion.

American civil religion is not private, it is both public and representational, and it is “an embodied, impassioned imagination of national community.” It is not supposed to supersede all faiths and tyrannically rule over them like a nationally established religion or a theocracy. Civil religion is supposed to “fit over them all like an apparatus that mimics their solemnity and ritual cohesion, emulates their themes of sacrifice, virtue, magnanimity, and devotional remembrance, but insists on dim theological tropes, the better to unify and to limn an overarching sublimity.” It is not supposed to, to put it colloquially, “step on the feet of” religion, like it did in the above example with Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, this was upheld by the Supreme Court decision, exemplifying America’s recognition of the place and legitimacy of civil religion.