Politics & Power Quote by Ezra Stiles

A mash-up of covenant theology and national branding, Stiles is doing something audaciously modern: turning a young republic into a chosen people, with God as its venture capitalist. “American Israel” isn’t a poetic flourish so much as a political technology. It imports the moral drama of the Hebrew Bible - exile, trial, deliverance, destiny - and bolts it onto the American project, offering a ready-made storyline in which expansion, sacrifice, and even conflict can be read as providential milestones rather than human decisions.

The phrasing “high above all nations” signals the real work of the sentence. It’s not simply reassurance; it’s hierarchy. Stiles frames American success as proof of divine favor, which flatters the nation while insulating it from critique: if outcomes are God-authored, dissent can look like impiety, and failure becomes either temporary testing or someone else’s sin. That’s the subtextual bargain: surrender complexity for certainty, policy for prophecy.

Context matters. Stiles was a prominent New England clergyman (and later president of Yale) writing in a period when Puritan inheritance still shaped elite language, even as Enlightenment rationalism and revolutionary politics remade the social order. The quote sits at that crossroads: a religious idiom repurposed to sanctify a new state. It’s early American exceptionalism before the term existed - a sermon-friendly way to claim global primacy while calling it obedience, not ambition.