Faith and American exceptionalism

Is the United States, in the words of George W. Bush, "chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world"? Hitchens responds:

Anybody claiming to have the answer to that question—as George W. Bush once seemed to do—would be a fool. For a start, what would be his sources of information? And how good a historian would he be? In the long view, very few of the survivors of the Roman Empire would have predicted that the inhabitants of the frozen and backward British Isles would be among the next builders of a global system, but so it proved. And there was no question that the British or English, especially the Protestant fundamentalist ones, believed that they had God on their side. In fact, I know of no European state that doesn’t have some kind of national myth to the same effect. The problem, as everybody knows, is that not all these myths can be simultaneously right. 

(Image: Then-Senator Barack Obama addresses a crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church March 4, 2007. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images, via The Examiner)