From covenant to contract: Calvinism, the written constitution and American civil religion

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Although the United States is a strictly secular polity as guaranteed in the Constitution, the grounds of that secularity lie in the Calvinism of the first colonial settlements and may be traced to the Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine. The current rhetoric of American international diplomacy, based largely on a righteous confrontation with evil, while deep-seated in American ideals of manifest destiny, strains at the borders of the constitutional separation of Church and State. An understanding of these tensions has strong implications for Australian collaboration in US foreign policy.