Roundtable: Haberski Responds to Reviews of *God and War*

I am aware that employing civil religion has a price.  David Sehat’s critique of my book identifies that price: because civil religion gets deployed in multiple ways, scholars who study it can appear to be, at once, frustratingly vague and curiously moralistic.  Art Remillard, a scholar who has also written on civil religion, suggests a resolution to this problem—recognizing competing versions of civil religion is the point to using it.  That, Art notes, is what I attempt to do in God and War, to “chronicle the civil religious discourse of political leaders and public intellectuals form World War II to the present who…struggled to make sense of the human and material cost of war.” Civil religion can help both explain a recurring historical debate about war and describe the rhetorical tactics of that debate.

In God and War I do not embrace a single, normative version of civil religion, and I do not suggest that there is a single set of ideas or principles that if followed would correct American history.  I do suggest that a debate raged over who would determine the meaning of sacrifice in American wars and how that meaning was contested.  In that sense, I use civil religion as a way to describe historical change and conflict, just as I see David organizing history around his term the “moral establishment” and Andrew Hartman chronicling history through the “culture wars.”  Do we all agree on how we define those terms?  Of course not; rather we get interesting studies because we employ contested terms that describe contested histories.    

I am grateful to my three colleagues for reviewing God and War because they all identify in different ways the strengths and weaknesses of my attempt to wrestle with the implications of using civil religion.  And all three provide critiques that allow me to explain my use of civil religion that by necessity gets left out of the book.  There are three basic reasons I use civil religion in God and War.

First, as I researched the topic of religion and war in post-1945 America, I realized that relatively few scholars, until recently, studied the interplay between religion and U.S. foreign policy or, more specifically, religion and war.  There are, of course, plenty of people willing to speak about the relationship between religion and war, but as Andrew Preston’s book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith makes clear, there was no standard text in this field until Preston wrote it.  His experience and that of William Inboden, who wrote a fascinating book on religion and the cold war, both demonstrated that it is difficult to discuss the influence religion has on American foreign policy without getting bogged down in the intricacies of particular faith traditions, churches, and denominations that draw one away from being able to discuss the more general effect this interaction has had on American history. Unless, that is, one employs civil religion.  In the end, both Inboden and Preston turn to civil religion as well.

Second, as David correctly notes, I look to Robert Bellah’s famous essay, “Civil Religion in America,” for some inspiration.  Yet unlike many scholars who have found Bellah’s essay a model for doing or dismissing civil religion, I use Bellah as a historical actor himself, situating him within a history of debate over the moral implications of war.  In other words, I do not argue that Bellah developed his version of civil religion as a normative standard we must all follow but rather that he stands within a tradition that includes Lincoln and Niebuhr and Herberg and Neuhaus and others who have grappled with the way that in a time of war Americans rely on a particular kind of mixing of religion and politics to understand the sacrifices made in the name of the nation.  And so, I argue in the book that “in the middle of the Vietnam War Bellah had captured the way that war galvanized a moral understanding of the nation—not merely a moral critique of the nation but an accounting of whether the United States might be a force for good to its own people, let alone to other people around the world.” (79)

Finally, I use civil religion to address that contested yet resilient notion in American religious history that America is a nation “under God.” David, in particular, asks me to account for my apparent agreement with Lincoln’s theistic understanding of this notion.  Yet, while I do rely on Lincoln to make a point about civil religion, I don’t think it matters if I agree that he might have believed the nation was united under God. Rather, I bring Lincoln into my argument for two related reasons, he developed a sophisticated understanding of how religion and politics mix in a time of war and this understanding became, especially to the people I look at in the post-1945 period, a touchstone in the debate over civil religion.  I find Lincoln’s thought crucial to my study because through his particular experience with the Civil War he came both to accept and fear the way Americans found in war both sin and redemption. 

This last point is where Andrew and I meet.  I have argued previously that my work on civil religion is like the photographic negative of Andrew’s work on the culture wars.  He points this out in his review: “The culture wars were a war for the soul of America.  Civil religion was recognition that he nation had a soul to begin with.”  And even though I do not seek to prove the actual existence of this “soul,” I can’t escape the fact that historical actors suggest its exists and act on that understanding.

Let me end on a note about my use of irony.  In some cases, irony affords us a sense of detachment from the subject we study and through such irony we gain critical insight.  For example, I find it ironic that American Exceptionalism can withstand repeated failures of America to be the last best hope of the earth.  But the irony I find in civil religion is different because rather than pushing me further away from my subject it draws me closer to it.  This irony asks me to imagine how the Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address who seems to find national redemption in war is also the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural who came to rue the idea that war could redeem the nation.  It is an irony that compels me to address the way Reinhold Niebuhr could be both a hawk and a dove; a patriot and a harsh critic of America. And it is an irony that makes me appreciate the complexities in the debate between Richard John Neuhaus and Stanley Hauerwas over the word “we” in a time of war.  I use civil religion because it captures these tensions better than terms that I find too rigid or deterministic, such as religious nationalism or American Exceptionalism.  I use civil religion because it has an irony embedded within it that forces empathy for historical actors who might otherwise invite an irony of detachment.

Civil Religion: The Revival of A Slippery Term, Part II

In last week's post, I wrote about the philosophical foundation of civil religion through the recent study by political theorist Ronald Beiner. The upshot of this argument is that civil religion is the appropriation of religion for political ends.  If we accept this basic definition of what civil religion is, then we might ask, what are these ends and has there been a common thread running through examples of civil religion?

When I look at how other scholars have understood and employed civil religion, I am most interested in how they characterize the development of those ends.  Of course, we can describe the political appropriation of religion and, likewise, religious involvement in politics without referring to civil religion.  In short, combining religion and politics does not necessarily produce civil religion.  So why use it? And when does it seem sensible or even imperative to use the term?

A good test for the usefulness of civil religion might come when looking at a period saturated with politicized religion and religiously inspired understandings of the nation.  For this reason, I admire George Rable's recent book, God's Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War which came out in early 2010 and stands as astute example of how to employ civil religion almost in spite of the term's slipperiness.  He writes early in the book that "however pervasive civil religion proved to be in both the Union and the Confederacy, it is far from being the entire story."  Indeed, the great lesson to be learned from Rable's book regarding the scholar's use of civil religion, is not to assume that we know what civil religion is before watching it unfold through the historical record.  Rable argues that to emphasize "an all-encompassing civil religion would present a much simpler tale but miss important exceptions, ignore significant dissenters, and overlook paths not taken." (6)

Andrew Preston makes a similar point in his new book, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012) contending that a religious understanding of American both held up the nation as exceptionally well-suited to exercise imperial influence and exceptionally obligated to resist doing so.  But I see a problem with Preston's assumptions about this civil religion--he gestures toward the product of a mixing between religion and politics as something that we might consider as civil religion but chooses (for good reason) to resist delving too deeply into the contradictions imbedded in  civil religion (the paradoxes I wrote about in the last post).  Thus Preston sees civil religion as set of rituals  to be deployed by political leaders when useful rather than a historically contingent and contested term.  Across time, the contest over civil religion to Preston is over how to make America live up to its promise.

I do not dispute that Preston's view of civil religion is certainly part of what makes the term so intriguing, but it is only part.  For Preston's argument about the role of religion in the making and exercising of foreign policy, this angle makes good sense.  And because he did not set out to write a book on civil religion, he has no real need to address it much further.  That is what makes Rable's view so interesting, though. He too did not set out to write about civil religion, but determines in the course of his story that he need not avoid it, and in fact should explore it.

Rable writes in a passage that struck a chord with me in large part because he came to his insight through Reinhold Niebuhr (which is how I came to my understanding of civil religion as well), he writes: "The crosscurrents of civil religion pulled Americans toward repentance and arrogance at the same time, and the line between righteousness and self-righteousness nearly vanished.  Recognizing the hand of God in human history fostered neither humility nor even an appreciation for the majesty of inscrutable providence."  For me, Rable locates the forging of a civil religion in the tension that Preston sees between competing civil religious view of American foreign policy.  Where Preston finds civil religion useful to describe the tension between different appeals to a higher calling for the nation--whether to be imperialistic or not--Rable finds civil religion growing out of a paradox of holding two conflicting views of the nation at the same time in the same group.

It makes sense that Rable would come to this conclusion because he reads the Civil War through a lens similar to what Lincoln used, at once, to condemn and inspire all Americans in his Second Inaugural.  In this way, I make a point similar to Rable's but about post-1945 America, rather than Civil War America: civil religion does not merely describe how politics used religion or how religion used politics but how civil religion became itself a challenge to both traditional religions and traditional politics and as such would, inevitably, change and even disappear as the historical situation changed. In other words, civil religion during the Civil War is different than the one that emerged after 1945, even if they include similar characteristics it matters what the conditions were that forged them.

If this last point seems self-evident, the historical literature on civil religion does not confirm it.  By and large, civil religion is used to describe the most basic way religion and politics mix to create a ritualized way to regard the nation as a moral entity.  Which means that the nation can either be seen as good or bad, but not necessarily both at the same time by the same group and it almost doesn't matter which group one speaks about, it's pretty much all the same.  Thus, civil religion is often used almost as an analogy for American Exceptionalism in which the historical narrative revolves around the conflict between groups that see America as either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad at trying to be good.  For example, T. Jeremy Gunn's book, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (2009) proposes that an unholy trinity of governmental theism, military supremacy, and capitalism as freedom conspired to overwhelm any tendencies toward national humility and instead "shaped Americans' understanding of who they were in a way that they do not even realize," and presumably would not like. (11, emphasis in the original)  Walter Hixson arrives at a similar if even more radical conclusion in his book The Myth of American Diplomacy in which he posits: “Masses of citizens consciously and unconsciously consent to Myth of America identity as they repeatedly engage in such rituals as pledging allegiance to the flag, singing the national anthem…Pervasive nationalist discourse and representation effectively contain conunterhegemonic challenges and marginalize purportedly subversive critics through a cultural process that is ongoing (organic) and integral to national identity.” (9)


If religion is more than merely the affirmation of a statement of right, as I think it is, then it stands to reason that civil religion, in its various iterations, holds within it the ability to be complex and paradoxical.  For this reason, I like George Rable's fine book, God's Almost Chosen People.