If the American nation is in a covenant relationship with God, along the lines of ancient Israel, we would then have to inquire which institution is responsible to enforce this covenant’s terms. A nation, especially when conceived in undifferentiated fashion, can never be a responsible agent but only an amalgam of pluriform social structures bound loosely together by certain common elements, such as shared culture and language. Yet generally the nationalist assumption is that this responsibility belongs to the state, viewed as the highest agent in that nation. This again makes entirely too much of the state as an institution, in addition to misapprehending its normative structure as led by public justice—a proximate justice falling well short of God’s final judgement.
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