America’s high culture is sparse and in many respects deficient, but its provenance and purpose are unmistakable. It is unimportant that not one American in a thousand has actually waded through Bunyan’s allegory. All of our popular fiction, from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to the protagonists of Westerns and hard-boiled detective fiction descend from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Huckleberry Finn, who lights out to the new territory ahead of the others; the cowboy who rides off into the sunset; the private detective who fades into the urban nightscape; and the entire host of misfits and loners who stock the pantheon of American literary protagonists are all recognisable versions of Bunyan’s Christian. American literary critics have given little thought to the provenance of their popular heroes, although in private conversation the late Professor Harry Jaffa identified Huck as an avatar of Bunyan’s pilgrim. They are not the knights errant of European Romanticism, but hard men and sinners who hold to their own code of honour, and stand up to corrupt authority. The outlaw William Munny in Clint Eastwood’s 1990 film Unforgiven is a Christian pilgrim in the American understanding as much as is Huckleberry Finn.

Our “America First” President stands squarely in the mainstream of American culture. Donald Trump, I argued on the day of his Inauguration, “is instantly recognisable as the protagonist in a Christian drama: the lone avenger who stands up to the wicked powers of the world and calls them out for combat. Ted Cruz, though an engaged and enthusiastic evangelical Christian, failed to understand the religious impulse of the American electorate. They did not want a politician-pastor to preach to them what they already knew. They wanted a hero, sinner though he be, to give battle to the forces of evil — a Jephtha or a Saul.” No matter how far it strays from conventional religion, American culture remains stamped delibly with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. It does not look for saints who live exemplary lives but for sinners in search of redemption.

American identity has proven robust, transmitting the characteristics of the Puritan founders into its popular culture. It has pulverised the ethnic cultures that immigrants brought with them and removed virtually all memory of them by the second or third generation. Unlike the cultures of Europe, it depends on an imagined rather than an actual past. If Britain’s national epics are the histories of Shakespeare or Malory’s retelling of Arthur, America’s national epic is the King James Bible. The American pilgrimage emulates the history of Israel, with one profound difference: in the Protestant incarnation of an “almost chosen people”, Americans know that the City of God is not of this world, and that the goal of the earthly pilgrimage always beckons over the horizon. In a thousand versions, Americans are the poor wayfaring stranger of the song, hoping that “there is no sickness, toil or danger in that bright land to which I go”. In keeping with the limits of imagined memory, American culture is thin and repetitive. It provided poor soil for the flourishing of a literary high culture. Nonetheless, the American sense of the sacred is renewed and reinforced by a popular culture that retells the story of the individual journey to redemption.