In “Is America a Creedal Nation” (First Things June/July 2025, pp. 33-8), David P. Goldman offers a fascinating take on America’s Volksgeist. Just what is that glue, that something, that underlying creed that holds the American people together?

Goldman’s answer: “Uniquely among the cultures of the world, it [American culture] is monothematic. It is obsessed with the individual’s journey to redemption, but that is a journey that can never be completed [in this lifetime]” (p. 34). That journey, Goldman goes on, can only end in the Heavenly City, not in the earthly one.

If this is correct, then the seminal failure of socialist thought is to posit that the Heavenly City–a classless, egalitarian society, in this case–can be realized here on earth. Such is at the heart of Joshua Muravchik’s sympathetic yet critical account of socialist thought in his fine book Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism (2019; 2nd ed.).

I’d like to loop back to Goldman’s thesis. What he definitely gets right is the way in which Americans are “obsessed” with stories of self-transformation. Once these were religious stories, yet now, especially in the digital age, they are secular or “secular spiritual” ones. Each day, stories of heath, emotional, relationship, etc. transformations abound. It would, in fact, be hard to imagine the tantalizing nature of social media without such narratives.

What’s more, Goldman is almost right when he asserts that redemption is not possible during this lifetime. In which case, most stories are indefinite, asymptotic, aspirational, rightly tantalizing. The trials and tribulations (“challenges,” “struggles,” “setbacks,” etc.) continue as does the “sense of agency” vis-a-vis these struggles.

It’s exactly here that the nondual teaching begs to differ with Goldman, since its central thesis–and it is more than a thesis–is that redemption is possible during this lifetime. Zen throws down the gauntlet and says: “See your Original Face now!” Indeed, great saints and sages report that their actual experience is nothing but unbroken, abiding peace and love.

The twist is that you must give up everything, including your sense of self, in order for redemption to take place. As Nisargadatta once commented, “You don’t want enlightenment because you won’t be there to experience it.”

There is no paradox evident in anything written above. The peace that surpasses all understanding dwells deep within the Heart. One need only grasp, experientially, the meaning of this verse from The Bhagavad Gita: “I, O Arjuna, am the Self seated in the Heart of all beings.”

Whoever you sense you are you are not; whoever you feel you are you are not; whoever you think you are you are not; whoever you remember you are you have never been. You are the Self that remains, that has always been, that has never not been, that shall always be. In fact, since the Self is not in time, only IT is. Only Being is.

Here begins a new or an ancient creed–and it is more than a creed.