Post at BSA by Steve Hunsaker on 7/13/2026 in God, Faith & Theology.
The Promised Land Is Not a Place
What does “holy land” and “promised land” really mean, and what we lose when we make it literal
You were handed these words as geography.
The holy land: a strip of earth at the far end of a map, on the far side of an ocean, at the far end of time. The promised land: a country given to a particular people, reached through a parted sea and a long wilderness, lying where it has always lain, elsewhere. Somewhere you are not. That is how most of us first received them, and there is a sweetness in it, the sweetness of a story about a real place where God once walked. Hold that feeling; we will need it. But first we have to follow the literal reading all the way to the end of the road, and look at what waits there, because it is not sweet at all.
Where the literal reading ends
Follow “the promised land is a place” to its conclusion and you arrive somewhere like this. On June 28th of 2026, in an arena at Brigham Young University, in the week the United States marked two hundred and fifty years, a religious leader taught a congregation that the Garden of Eden, the primordial garden of all humankind, lay “in what today we consider the heartland of America.” That after the Flood the very crust of the earth fractured into continents and drove the oceans between them for one purpose: to guard this soil as the promised land, “preserved for a righteous people.” And therefore that the United States itself is that promised land and, in his words, that is why we love our country.
Read it plainly, because it deserves to be heard plainly: the Eden of the human race, in Missouri. The reason God shattered the continents, to fence off one nation. The reason to love a country, because it is holy ground, chosen above the rest of the earth.
Do not mistake this for one tradition’s peculiarity. It is the universal temptation of the literal reading, and every people in history has surrendered to it. Egypt believed the cosmos was ordered from its own capital. Babylon believed it. Rome believed it. Christian empires drew the same map with their own borders at the center. The specific soil changes; the move never does. When a people announces that God’s chosen ground happens to be their ground, you are not hearing revelation. You are hearing the oldest sound in human history; power flattering itself, and reaching for scripture to make the flattery holy.
Why it cannot be true — and why it is dangerous
Set that teaching against the very books it claims to honor.
The scriptures say, again and again, that God is no respecter of persons, that He “inviteth them all to come unto him,” and that all are alike unto Him. That is the principle the great texts return to whenever they are at their highest: bond and free, every nation, every tongue, alike. Now hold it up against the crowning of one nation’s dirt. If all are alike unto God, there is no favored acreage, no chosen continent, no soil the Almighty cracked the planet apart to prefer. You cannot have both. Either all are alike unto God, or one heartland is His treasure and the rest of His children were born on the leftovers.
Then ask the question the sermon never asks. Preserved for a righteous people: preserved from whom? The land was not empty. To say God swept a continent clean and kept it in reserve for righteous newcomers is to say, in the gentlest possible voice, that the peoples already living on it were the ones swept off. This is how sacralized geography always works: it takes a conquest and writes it into the mind of God as destiny. A doctrine that turns dispossession into providence is not a high and holy thing. It is a nation’s guilty conscience wearing scripture as a costume.
And watch what it does to the word God. When “we love our country” and “we love our Lord” are welded into a single sentence, patriotism becomes piety and the nation becomes the vestibule of heaven. That is the flag laid upon the altar — and that is precisely the sin the prophets of Israel spent their lives tearing down. The true prophetic voice never once sanctified the empire; it afflicted the empire. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah stood in the palace and told the king his triumph was not proof of God’s favor. They knew a nation set upon the altar of God for exactly what it is: a golden calf. It does not matter that it is a handsome calf, a free calf, a calf you were raised to salute. It is still the thing Sinai forbade.
The reason literalism destroys the meaning
Here is the deeper trouble, the one that runs beneath all the others. Joseph Campbell said that once we read these sacred images literally, their meaning is destroyed, and he was not exaggerating for effect. He meant it precisely. A phrase like promised land is an instrument. It was built to point past itself, to do something inside the person who receives it. Read literally, it stops working. It hardens into a claim about real estate and history that you either accept or reject; a thing to be defended, surveyed, fought over, excluded from. Mistaking the word for a place is like mistaking the map for the country: you end up holding the paper and calling it the ground. What was meant to open a person opens, instead, a border dispute.
So the favored-land reading is not merely wrong about a fact. It is the corpse of a living thing. And once we see that, we can ask what the living thing actually was.
What the words really mean
Begin with the one truth these traditions insist on above all others: that God is love. Take it with full seriousness, and ask what love does. Love does not hoard. Love does not ration the sacred to one bloodline and lock the gate. Love does not build its home at the single address most of its children could never reach and call that grace. Everything love is bends the other way, toward giving itself away, toward closing distance, toward being present.
The texts knew this about themselves, even as their readers kept forgetting it. When Solomon finished the holiest building his people would ever raise, the first thing he confessed was that it could not hold God; the highest heavens cannot contain Him, how much less this house. Even there, the holy was already leaking past its own walls. And when Jesus met a woman at a well who wanted to know which mountain was the right place to worship, he refused the question entirely: the hour is coming, he told her, when you will worship neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth. The founder himself pulled holiness off the map.
Remember the bush that burned and was not consumed. A man was told to take the sandals from his feet, for the ground you are standing on is holy. Notice why. Not because the ground was special, it was a nowhere patch of desert he had walked past a hundred times. It became holy because God was met there, and because the man finally turned inside to see. That is the whole secret, and it is portable. Holy ground was never the property of a mountain or a country. It is the meeting. And a meeting can happen anywhere a person stops and takes off their sandals.
And here is the wonder that should steady you rather than frighten you. The recognition you have been coming to, that the holy is not somewhere else, that the ground beneath you is the ground; you are not the first to reach it. Walk far enough into any of the great traditions and you arrive at that same still place, and you find you are not alone in it. The Buddhist, emptied of illusion, who saw that this ordinary world, rightly beheld, was already the awakening he had gone out to seek. The Jewish mystic who kept the holy not in a place but in a day, a sanctuary built of hours instead of stone. The Hindu sage who said of the divine, thou art that, nearer than near, the ground of your own being. They were not saying one identical thing; their paths do not merge, and each would tell the others they had only half of it. And yet, setting out in every direction, they kept arriving on the same ground. You need not decide what that proves. It is enough, and it is astonishing, that so many who never met keep finding their way to it.
So here is what these words mean, said plainly, so you can teach it to someone else. The promised land is not an acreage and never was. The holy land is not a country. Both name a condition: the pure in heart, the awake, the transformed; reachable from any ground on the face of the earth, and therefore fenced off from no one. That is what the impartial God actually is: not a God with no holy land, but a God who made all ground capable of holiness and handed the key to every human heart. The impartiality is not absence. It is the withholding of the monopoly.
And do not mistake this for comfort that lets you sleep. If the ground beneath you can be holy, then holy ground makes a claim on the one who stands there. There is no longer any elsewhere to defer to, no holier nation across the water where the real thing is kept. There is only here, and what you will do with it. Wherever you are is not permission to relax. It is a summons to wake up. The bush is burning. It has been burning the whole time. The only question was ever whether you would turn inside and look.
So take the idol off the altar. Give Caesar back his soil, and give God back His name. The promised land is not behind you in history. It is not across any sea. It is not ahead of you in some favored nation’s destiny. It is under the feet of all people whose hearts are turned to love; which means it was never yours to hoard, and never theirs to lose.
Take off your sandals.
The promised land is wherever you are.
