There are many lenses one can see Exodus through. -- I'm not sure that the mass killing of the Egyptians or the removing of the existing populations of Canaan (a process continuing to this day) completely shutters the story Gorski is choosing to highlight: The difficulty and challenge is looking through both lenses at the same time, hoping that we are moving towards a story that can have liberation without genocide. Given the history of humans so far, it's a hard story to write.The Exodus story has six acts: first, a life of slavery and oppression, then the revolt against tyranny, then the difficult flight through the howling wilderness, then the infighting and misbehavior amid the stresses of that ordeal, then the handing down of a new covenant, a new law, and then finally the arrival into a new promised land and the project of building a new Jerusalem.
There are many lenses one can see most of the bible through, no doubt. But to somehow imagine that - wait, where's that quote? I mean, (1) "for particularly narrow interpretations of 'Americans'" (2) it's the same story that makes plague blankets and death marches okay. "I'm oppressed, it's payback time." Having read up extensively on the Puritans, what they believed and what they were fleeing, I for one long for a country that never attempts to emulate them in any way, shape or form and I'm a middle-class, middle-aged white male.For most of the past 400 years, Americans did have an overarching story. It was the Exodus story.