The origin myth of America
According to John Locke, "In the beginning all the world was America." America stood for the primordial state of the world and man and was indeed seen, by the first generations of Europeans to learn of it, to be the last remaining remnant of that earlier time...America came to be thought of as a paradise and a wilderness, with all the rich associations of those terms in the Christian and biblical traditions, or, more simply, thus Europeans came to think of America as both a heaven and a hell. - Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 5-6
