In 1997, English Glam-Rock legend David Bowie released “I’m Afraid of Americans,” his collaboration with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. It was a frankly ballsy move for Bowie to release a single so totally calculated to alienate listeners in the single largest English-language market on Earth—especially since at the time of the song’s release, less than a decade after the defeat of the Soviet Union, the seemingly biggest thing to fear about America was the global spread of McDonalds and Coca-Cola.

But globalized homogenization was the canary in the coal mine; and indeed, given the outsized influence that America’s massive economy and astronomical military budget continues to exert upon the Earth, it feels downright rationale to be afraid of Americans nowadays. Especially in our post-9/11 America long gone mad, whose self-destructive insanities (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, the PATRIOT ACT, endless mass-shootings, climate change denialism, the 2016 election, the resurgence in white supremacism, the million dead of COVID, the January 6 terrorist attack, etc., etc.,) have continued unabated to the present moment, this song now feels downright prophetic. If Bowie seems a little paranoid in ‘97, well, as the old adage goes, just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.

Bowie himself is both an insider and an outsider in this song: The video is shot in his adopted home-city of New York, and is filmed in homage to the 1976 neo-noir Taxi Driver. Reznor himself keeps appearing around Bowie as an ominous presence openly stalking him on the streets of the Big Apple. As an increasingly paranoid Bowie races to escape him, he keeps spotting a series of New Yorkers pointing not-so-playful finger-guns at each other (this song debuted only two years before Columbine, mind you). Reznor reappears in the climax with an invisible gun that unleashes a series of gun-shots upon the cab Bowie was hiding in (to paraphrase Marianne Moore, “imaginary guns with real bullets in them”). In the video’s final scene, Bowie gazes on in both exasperation and horror as a macabre procession passes him by on the night streets of Manhattan, all while the song’s closing line of “God is an American” repeats into fade-out.

Or is he saying “God is un-American”?

Or is the homophonic ambiguity the point—that America simultaneously seems as omnipotent as the Almighty, yet also a false god set in place of the True One?

We as Latter-day Saints have a complicated relationship with America: on the one hand, it is codified into our own Doctrine and Covenants that the United States constitution is inspired of God, and in our own Book of Mormon that God Himself inspired and established this country, and in our tenth Article of Faith that the North American continent shall be the site of Zion and the New Jerusalem, and we are also fond of citing that Joseph Smith “White Horse” prophecy which states that if the constitution hangs by a thread (note the conditional language, by the way), it will be the Elders of Zion who save it.

On the other hand, the whole reason our Church is headquartered out of Utah in the first place is because Brigham Young and co. were quite literally fleeing the country (the Wasatch Front was still part of Mexico in 1847), after all those same constitutional rights were repeatedly and flagrantly violated in Illinois and Missouri, including in the murder of Joseph Smith. Utah was full-scale invaded by the Federal Government in the 1850s, and numerous church leaders were harassed and arrested all throughout the polygamy era right up until the end of the 19th century. The constitution has hung by a thread many times before (or, in the even worse cases of slavery, Jim Crow, the trail of tears, Native American genocide, Japanese internment camps, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the child separation policy at the border, etc., been straight up ignored entirely—and in which atrocities the Latter-day Saints have also often been complicit).

The Church then spent the 20th century aggressively assimilating itself into the American mainstream; yet it was also Spencer W. Kimball in his 1976 bicentennial address who splashed cold water on our patriotic celebrations by calling out America’s materialism, militarism, and wanton environmental destruction. Even in the 21st century, no less a staunch constitutionalist as Dallin H. Oaks has said in Conference that we invite all peoples, “including Americans,” to leave behind their cultures and follow Christ—because America is under no less condemnation.

In sum, we as Latter-day Saints are exactly the sorts of people who could cheerfully and unironically sing “God is an American”; yet also, given our history, the sort of folks who could sincerely say that “God is un-American,” precisely because God is higher, better, more righteous than this hypocritical nation that has so persistently failed to live up to its founding creeds from the beginning (as Samuel Johnson said clear back during the Revolutionary War, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”).

Perhaps we, like David Bowie, also sing both “God is an American” and “God is un-American” simultaneously—because both statements are simultaneously true. We are all afraid of Americans, precisely because we are all Americans, whether we want to be or not.