Americans tend to believe that America's "greatness" - past or present - was directly tied to its "goodness". "America is great because it is good" is almost a campaign slogan. Implicitly, the belief is that America's goodness is a direct result of its belief in God. Hence "In God we Trust", "One Nation under God", "God Bless America", and so on, and so forth. The truth is that America never was good - its self-perception of its own goodness is a manifestation of a grotesque cultural distortion of historical and present reality. America is a country founded on the holocaust of the Native American peoples and on the slavery of the African; racial discrimination continues to be embedded in its law enforcement and judicial institutions; it is the only country in the world which has used the atomic bomb - twice - on already militarily defeated nation; it has ruthlessly employed its military might to serve the unscrupulous interests of multinationals around the world; furthermore, it has continued to use that same military might to enforce a hopeless policy of prohibition internationally which has only served to create narco states out of most Latin American nations, foster criminal empires worldwide, massively incarcerate thousands of American citizens - mostly Blacks and Latinos - and at the cost of over 1.25 trillion dollars to the American taxpayer. We need not mention the ongoing slaughter of millions of innocent civilians - including women and children - in a misguided "War on Terror" in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.

Since the days of the Mayflower, America has interpreted its economic fortune as resulting from divine favor, which implies its de facto righteousness. God, so goes this belief, has favored America and the evidence of this favor is in its greatness. The logic is defective: "We are great because God favors us, and because God favors us we must be good; therefore, we are great because we are good." This assumes three very questionable premises: a) that God exists; b) that God favors America; and c) that greatness can only come from God's favor. This widespread and deeply culturally engrained belief has blinded America from its own faults and accountabilities as a nation and as a culture.

Faith notwithstanding, America's former greatness has nothing to do with God or with righteousness. It has to do with America being both geographically fortunate in having a wealth of natural resources at its disposal and adequate climates to take advantage of them. America has also benefitted from history, particularly from WW II which not only left a power void for it to occupy but placed a goldmine of intellectual power - primarily Jewish - escaping from the horrors of the European warzone at its disposal. It has also profited in the past from remorselessly and immorally seeking the best interests of American multinationals anywhere and everywhere within its sphere of political and military influence. Nevertheless, the costs to its social and political "soul" will soon be too great to bear: the tremendous - and growing - economic disparity between the extremely rich and the average American citizen is both the representation and the result of a socially uninformed and a politically naïve electorate, cognitively handicapped by an outdated and obsolete (religious) worldview. America was never "good". Now America is no longer great. And all it will have left is its belief in God to thank for both.