Imagined Communities

When America was founded, it was based on principles such as freedom and equality. However, when it was first founded it did not adhere to these principles. In more recent times the country has made significant improvements in terms of religious and racial pluralism. This has brought America closer to the values and ideals that it was originally founded on. Benedict Anderson argues, "A nation is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."(Anderson, 6). Through these advances, America has come closer to achieving Anderson's belief of an imagined political community.

Anderson believes it to be imagined because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communities."(Anderson, 6) This can be seen in the example of the love that Catholics have for the Vatican or that Jews have for Israel. Both are their homelands and main places of worship, however most people in America have never been there. They still claim the other members of their religion to be their brothers in that religion and to love one another despite never knowing one another. It may be compared to a college fraternity or a sorority in which everyone refers to each other as brother and sister but they might not ever know any of their brothers and sisters from other colleges throughout the nation. Anderson claims, "In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are imagined."(Anderson, 6) just because we do not know everyone in a community does not mean we are not a part of it; we still identify ourselves as that whole community.

While we identify ourselves, as one community we are in fact limited both religiously and racially. Anderson states that "The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations."(Anderson, 7) It is religiously limited, for example, in that the Christians do not dream of having an entire Christian planet, there are boundaries there. There are too many other religions to make one completely Christian planet. America has done a great job with this in tolerating all religions, which is why America now has so many separate religions. America itself does not try to force other religions on other people; they are limited to their own individual sects as America shows a strong belief in religious pluralism. The development of religious pluralism in America was somewhat a lengthy situation in which there have always been advances by the Protestant religion to make America a Protestant nation. Hutchinson presents the reader with an example of what the Protestant nation tried to push for in the constitution, "We the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, and His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government."(Hutchinson, 79) of course, the nation would not allow this because we believe in religious pluralism and we respect the boundaries between each religion that takes part in American society. One can also look at the example of inclusion and exclusion, and how both have increased in America throughout time. When the nation was founded, America was 85% white protestant and there was not much to include or to exclude, there was nothing to put boundaries on or to limit. Nevertheless, as the population grew and America became a more diverse nation America found itself including and excluding many different groups for many different reasons and found those groups putting up boundaries between many different individual people of different races and religions.

Along with religious boundaries, America has also been imagined as limited racially. Similar to the Christians not wishing to have an entire Christian planet, African Americans don't wish to have their own separate national identity they wish to be American as pointed out by professor Yaminishi. In addition, one could also look at the example of inclusion and exclusion racially. However while there are boundaries dividing the nation they are not difficult to cross as one can determine from the increase in the number of immigrants coming to America. According to the 2000 census, there are 28 million immigrants in America. Tamar Jacoby mentioned "There have always been signs that ordinary people are not comfortable with rigid racial boundaries. The racial breakdown in birth certificates has never matched the racial breakdown in death statistics, suggesting that in the pre-civil rights era, it was often impossible to pin down people's origins." (Jacoby, 175) This shows that even though there are rigid racial boundaries people do not want it to be that way, they want to be part of the bigger picture of America, and they just want to be American. Along with this, David Carroll Cochran notes "The transformation, in short, of U.S. citizenship from a racially exclusionary model to one that is formally race neutral is slightly considered one of the real triumphs of postwar American liberalism."(Cochran, 55) This observation demonstrates that America has taken down the racial barrier largely in order to make the limitations inclusive for everyone.

Apart from being imagined as limited, Anderson also notes that the nation is imagined as sovereign. Anderson believes it to be imagined as sovereign because "the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm."(Anderson, 7) Anderson also notes that "Nations dream of being free, and, if under god, directly so."(Anderson, 7) this is in fact the definition of the sovereign state, being free in ones own country. America is not a nation of divinely ordained kings and queens; the president of the United States does not have to pass a theological test in order to be sworn in to lead the country. Hutchinson refers to National Brotherhood Week of 1942 in which the Jews, Protestants and Catholics released a document stating all common beliefs between the three religions. It stated, among other things "We believe that God's fatherly province extends equally to every human being. We reject theories of race which affirm the essential superiority of one racial strain over another..." (Hutchinson, 197) This provides further evidence towards a sovereign nation based on common religious beliefs.

Common religious beliefs are not the only insight to sovereignty, race is also. Observing the last used quote there was also