“Even a national sentiment as secular in some ways as that of the United States has cloaked itself in ‘religious’ guise, with a kind of divinization of the founding fathers and a narrative centered on the special role and favor given by God to that people,” writes Father Joseph Lobo, SJ, of India. “In the period following the Second World War, the exaltation of the American way of life led to the apotheosis of national life, the equivalence of national values and religion, the divinization of national heroes and the transformation of national history into Heilsgeschichte (‘History of Salvation’).”