Mugambi Jouet's "Exceptional America"

Mugambi Jouet teaches at Stanford Law School. His writing has been featured in Mother Jones, Slate, The New Republic, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Salon, The Hill, Truthout, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, and academic journals.

Jouet applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other, and reported the following:

My book Exceptional America: What Divides Americans From the World and From Each Other aims to answer three questions. Why did Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Why is America so polarized? And how does American exceptionalism explain these social changes?

Page 99 of the book focuses on how faith in Christianity is generally far more intense in America than in other Western democracies—a dimension of American exceptionalism with distant historical roots that Alexis de Tocqueville had previously remarked upon. I describe on that page how these circumstances have been influenced by social pressure to be religious, especially in conservative regions of America. “[A] strong social norm of religiosity” among a rather devout population has led both Republican and Democratic U.S. politicians to regularly invoke God, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, and, to a lesser extent, Donald Trump. “In turn, religious rhetoric from the nation’s leaders helps normalize religiosity and dissuade skepticism, irrespective of whether such public displays of faith are heartfelt or contrived.” These circumstances are among the factors having led religion to play a huge political role in America compared to the rest of the West: European nations, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet religion is often as great a source of division as of unity in an American society where conservatives and liberals are divided by traditional and modern understandings of faith, as illustrated by clashes over abortion, contraception, gay rights, and the theory of evolution. In sum, this excerpt seems to exemplify the Page 99 Test. A distinctive understanding of religion is a major dimension of American exceptionalism, as well as a significant factor behind the acute polarization of modern America.

Learn more about Exceptional America at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue