Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Pip: There is a kind of pride that doesn't know it's pride — it just calls itself responsibility. Raymond Klassen at Ideals and Identities has thoughts about that, and they are not comfortable ones.

Mara: Today we're looking at American exceptionalism as a spiritual formation — what it costs to believe a nation is innocent by definition, and what honest reckoning might actually require.

Pip: Let's start with the innocence that kills.

The Innocence That Kills: Exceptionalism as Spiritual Pathology

Mara: The post opens with a personal note — the author's parents told him he was destined for something special — and uses that to frame a much larger argument: that American exceptionalism is a form of pride that presents itself as burden rather than boast.

Pip: The theological term the post reaches for is hubris, and the definition it offers is precise: "the inflation of the partial into the absolute — the moment when a genuinely good thing becomes a totalizing claim."

Mara: That distinction matters enormously. The argument isn't that America's stated values are fraudulent. Reinhold Niebuhr gets cited here as someone who acknowledged America's genuine commitments to liberty and democratic life — and then identified exactly why that made the danger worse. Genuine belief in your own goodness is what generates structural immunity to correction.

Pip: Which is a more unsettling diagnosis than simple hypocrisy — hypocrisy at least implies you know the gap exists.

Mara: Exactly the point. The post draws on James Baldwin to name what fills that gap: a willed innocence, a deliberate not-knowing about what was done to build the world Americans inhabit. Baldwin called it a progressive deadening — a shrinking of the capacity for genuine self-knowledge.

Pip: And then the historical ledger opens. Sherman's march, Hiroshima, the bombing of North Korea — which by General Curtis LeMay's own accounting killed roughly one-fifth of the population — Vietnam, Iraq 1991. Each one narrated afterward as reluctant necessity.

Mara: The structural claim is that each act of harm gets metabolized by the myth and converted into evidence of American seriousness. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 Vietnam speech is read the same way — not as outside criticism but as a heartbroken citizen naming what the post calls "ideological closure": the systematic inability to recognize the gap at all.

Pip: The present moment gets its own section. A leader threatening openly, on social media, that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" — the post reads that not as one man's pathology but as a surfacing of what has long been operational policy.

Mara: The post ends with Germany's concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the struggle to come to terms with the past — and asks why the analogous struggle in America keeps getting foreclosed by the very exceptionalism that makes it necessary.

Pip: Honest reckoning, it turns out, is not a political position. It's described here as genuine spiritual work — holding real achievement and real violence in tension without collapsing either.

Mara: The through-line is that a self which cannot acknowledge its shadow cannot integrate it — and remains capable of idealism and catastrophic harm in the same breath.

Pip: Which is, depending on your news feed, either an abstract theological point or a live situation report.