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.

Roundtable: Remillard on Haberski's *God and War*

In Search of a New American Creed
by Arthur Remillard
Saint Francis University (PA)


Halfway through God and War, Raymond Haberski shares his own close encounter with American civil religion. In 1976, on Independence Day, the author and his family joined millions of New Yorkers to celebrate the American bicentennial. “As I look back on it now,” he reminisces, “that celebration seems to stand outside of time” (p. 98). Indeed, in this liminal zone of swelling patriotic pride, crowds of strangers found common ground in their shared history. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, this sentiment was a welcome reprieve from the otherwise divisive tenor of the time. But if we scratch the surface of this expression of American unity, we find the looming presence of war, as the flashes of fireworks replicate exploding artillery shells. And parades and marching bands merely domesticate images of armed troops and battle formations. War is bloody. War is confusing. War is death. But when war moves from the battlefield to the ritual stage, war is sacred.

God and War investigates the sacredness of armed conflict in America, and the thorny issues that this reality brings forth. Raymond Haberski chronicles the civil religious discourse of political leaders and public intellectuals from World War II to the present who have struggled to make sense of the human and material cost of war. From Truman to Obama, civil religious rhetoric tactically replaces the language of loss with the language of sacrifice—sacrifice for a “higher cause,” a nation “under God.” And in public speeches and print culture, the events of war gain transcendent traction by buoying the narrative of American exceptionalism. But, as Haberski shows, there are always dissenters lurking in the shadows. These prophetic figures often ask whether or not a war is just. Or they doubt those who assume that any military conflict is free from moral hazard. To be sure, the bellicose patriot finds his or her dark twin in the gadfly who refuses to accept the status quo.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that Haberski follows his memory of 1976 with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr, a central and recurring character in the book. While the theologian had died in 1971, Haberski suggests that Niebuhr’s critique of American idealism resonated throughout the bicentennial year. “A common refrain heard from many leaders,” Haberski explains, “was for the nation to redeem itself through humility, to humble itself before God and by doing so to recall that the United States remained a nation under God’s judgment not merely his Grace—principles Niebuhr preached but had rarely seen followed in his life” (p. 99). Here, Haberski sets forth the central tension of the book, an ideological tug-of-war between grace and judgment, between national pride and collective humility, between blind faith and healthy skepticism. The author situates Niebuhr everywhere and nowhere in this tension, since the theologian’s “Christian realism” both affirmed the necessity of war, and refused to conflate God’s will with political power.

Ambiguity notwithstanding, Haberski’s choice to foreground Niebuhr provides a stable guidepost as he surveys the civil religious territory of God, nation, and war. Some voices express very little Niebuhrian nuance. We hear from Billy Graham and Cardinal Francis Spellman, who, Haberski explains, depicted the Cold War as a “battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness” (p. 64). Similarly, after 9/11, President George W. Bush developed what the author terms, “an absolutist moral theology of the nation” (p. 222). For those sharing Bush’s civil religion, Susan Sontag and her ilk were “un-American” heretics. “Let’s by all means grieve together,” she exclaimed after 9/11. “But let’s not be stupid together” (p. 204). A distinct strength of this book is Haberski’s masterful shifts between competing perspectives. For every reference to George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus, and First Things, we find counter-arguments from Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis, and Sojourners.

Yet, as the book concludes, Haberski circles back to Niebuhr. He notes that the theologian remains part of the American civil religious conversation, with everyone from Barack Obama to Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation channeling him. War hawks in particular admire Niebuhr’s abandonment of pacifism and advocacy of war in order to temper evil and establish justice. To this, though, Haberski responds, “Niebuhr’s sense of justice did not include endless wars, torture, and preemptive invasions of sovereign nations” (p. 249). Then the author steps out from his historical wizard’s curtain and presents his own civil religious prescription. “Believing in the myths that sustain American civil religion does not require the reduction of civil religion to a theology of war,” he explains. “And critiquing civil religion does not inevitably produce cynicism, for losing national myths can be as dangerous for the health of a people as believing in bad ones” (p. 253). In essence, Haberski calls forth for a new American creed where the voices of both judgment and grace have room to speak, where national pride does not require armed conflict, and where humility always trumps hubris.

God and War wraps a passionate appeal for a reformed civil religion inside a compelling intellectual history of modern America. The book’s accessibility makes it suitable for the undergraduate classroom. Questions raised by the author will no doubt generate vigorous class discussions. Scholars of American religion will also benefit by carefully reading this book. In addition to offering his own insights, Haberski opens new avenues of inquiry. For example, what would happen if we shifted focus from the metaphorical pulpit to the pew? In other words, what did the civil religion of the “common person” look like in this era? And how would it compare with the intellectuals of Haberski’s study? Yes, the old truism that good scholarship raises more questions than it answers applies to God and War. This book is a fine accomplishment and welcome contribution to the discussion of American civil religion. 

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Editor's note:  This is the third post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Hartman on Haberski's *God and War*

The Soul of the Nation
by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University


The nation was born when people committed to kill and die in its name instead of for God. Or so goes one of the major arguments put forward in the theoretical and historical literature on nationalism, beginning with Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. There are several important qualifications to this general rule, the existence of theocratic nations like Iran for instance. But among modern nations committed to Enlightenment values, this tenet has tended to hold steady in how scholars understand nations. The major exception, of course, is the United States. The first nation born of the Enlightenment, America has nevertheless always been one of the most religious nations on Earth, so much so that many Americans have believed their nation one with God. Conflating God and nation is otherwise known as “civil religion.”

Ray Haberski’s superbly written book God and War is a valiant effort to understand the American civil religion, a “strange beast” of an undercurrent in U.S. intellectual history. He writes: “There is a fundamental irony of American civil religion—the nation lives with a misbegotten confidence born from a union of religion and reason.” Haberski’s book is the best at seeking to explain how the modern democratic nation known as the United States goes to war in the name of God; how it finds national meaning in its wars. For this reason, God and War should become a touchstone for postwar U.S. intellectual historians.



Prior to reading this book, I was skeptical that civil religion was an important concept in seeking to understand the intellectual history of American nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century. It seemed to me that when Americans reached consensus on the national purpose, especially in the years between World War II and Vietnam, the non-religious terms of the Cold War were explanatory enough. For every John Foster Dulles who put the nation’s mission in millennial terms there was an Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who understood the nation’s struggle against the Soviet Union in more earthly terms. Along these lines, I remain convinced that American foreign policy is best understood via the lens of economic interests. William Appleman Williams is the best guide to comprehending how the United States got involved in wars in far-flung places like Vietnam. In contrast, Ray seems to agree with historian William Inboden, who argues that religious impulses determine U.S. foreign policy.

And as I was skeptical about the concept of civil religion in the early Cold War, I was even more pessimistic that it might help us understand post-sixties America, when fracture was the norm. In the years after the sixties, years when American history is best understood through the rubric of the culture wars, it seemed that only conservative evangelicals held that America was a Christian nation. “I believe that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has enjoyed,” Jerry Falwell preached, “because her heritage is one of a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible.” This type of rhetoric did more to divide Americans than bring them together. Civil religion was a ruse. Even when Americans came together for the cause of war—the Gulf War and the aftermath of September 11 being two prominent examples highlighted in God and War—such cohesion was fleeting at best. Shortly after American victory in the Gulf, Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” against Clinton and satanic liberals. And shortly after September 11, 2001, half the nation had turned against Bush and his ill-begotten adventure in Iraq.

In this way, civil religion operated as a sort of culture wars riptide. To his credit, Ray agrees. He writes: “The ‘culture wars’ seemed to mock the idea of civil religion.” God and War has been extremely helpful to my understanding the boundaries of the culture wars. The culture wars were a war for the soul of America. Civil religion was recognition that the nation had a soul to begin with.

But more than anything else, what brought me around to the usefulness of civil religion as a concept important for intellectual historians was Ray’s layering of the different understandings of it. On the one had were those like Falwell who believed the nation was inherently good because it was a nation under God. On the other hand were those like Lincoln and Niebuhr who had a more ironic understanding of civil religion, those who had complicated views of America in relation to God and war. In this way, Ray understands irony as a form of critical self-reflection. Lincoln and Niebuhr, the heroes of the book, believed they must fight their wars. They believed fighting their wars was the right thing to do and that their conduct must accord with Christian principles. They concluded that their religion played an important role in how they framed their wars. But these ironists never assumed they were acting in the name of God.

At times, I must confess, it was hard to see how the ironic notion of civil religion was even civil religion to begin with. But Ray’s analysis of it made for fascinating reading.

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Editor's note:  This is the second post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Sehat on Haberski's *God and War*

Civil Religion: Who Needs It?
by David Sehat
Georgia State University


The very phrase “civil religion,” the subject of Ray Haberski's God and War, commits its author to taking on several different projects simultaneously. The book is therefore written on several levels, some of which are more effective than others.  At its most general, this is a history of religion and politics from the Second World War to the present.  Slightly below that level of generality, this is a history of American foreign policy and military engagements from the Cold War to the Iraq War.  And at its most specific, this is a book about conflicting conceptions of American civil religion.  This last project is the one that Haberski intends his own book to be about. 

The basic problem is that civil religion has no real definition, or at least no stable definition.  It entered the American political discourse in a wildly successful 1967 essay by Robert Bellah.  Surveying the demise of consensus in the face of Vietnam, Bellah fretted that American society was coming apart.  He proposed a renewed civil religion, a new conception of American ideals, beliefs, and symbols, to heal the fractures of war. 

But almost immediately after Bellah proposed the term, it was taken up into political discourse and used in wildly different ways.  Some conservative religious commentators believed that civil religion was a form of idolatry, a worship of the state instead of God.  Others of a more ecumenical bent took it to be the expression of a lowest common denominator of religious expression.  This shared religious framework, ecumenicals insisted, created a unity out of diversity that held the nation together.  Still others used it in a more sociological sense.  Civil religion in this definition consisted of secular symbols, rituals, and genuflections such as the national anthem and the pledge allegiance to the flag.  And, finally, people such as Richard John Neuhaus used civil religion as a synonym for public theology, the moral framework that is available to all people because God worked his rules and laws into His creation.

God and War is, at its best, a history of this intellectual dispute about the meaning of civil religion.  But Haberski did not just focus on the contestation over these different meanings.  He also asserted his own normative definition into the book in a way that I found both unpersuasive and confusing. 

He begins the book with Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.  For Haberski, Lincoln provides a model conception of American civil religion in this haunting address.  Trying to make sense of the Civil War, Lincoln wondered if perhaps the massive death in the war was a judgment from God for the sin of slavery.  In invoking Lincoln, Haberski agrees with him that the nation is united under God.  What that means is that it courts His judgment and can, particularly in war, lose its soul.  Civil religion in this sense is essential for Haberski in his conception of the United States. 

But even after reading this book, I’m still not sure that civil religion is all that.  For one thing, its multiple meanings suggest that it is more a rhetorical posture than an analytic category.  And because Haberski uses it to explain the thought of people who never used the term (like Lincoln), there are too many times in this book when you can never be sure just what Haberski is talking about.   Take this example: “Before Vietnam, American civil religion had been primarily about grappling with the spiritual stakes of the Cold War—steeling the American soul for the ideological conflict with communism.  After Vietnam, American civil religion would contend with a national soul in shambles”  (p. 90).  Haberski’s statement raises all kinds of questions.  Leaving aside whether the nation has a soul and whether that soul can be first steeled and then shattered, what does civil religion mean in the above statement?  Which definition is in use at that moment?  I have no idea.  The general fogginess of this passage suggests that civil religion is just not sharp enough to do the work that Harberski wishes it would.

Still, Haberski offers a fairly straight-forward pattern of conflict that saves this book from its conceptual confusion.  Throughout his account, Haberski shows the way that political leaders and their allies marshaled religion for nationalist and often militaristic purposes.  They “treated the notion that the United States was a nation ‘under God’ as if religion were a natural resource.  It provided unlimited virtue for Americans, warded off the detrimental effects that came from living with the remnants of unbelief dredged up by the Vietnam experience.”  But these politicians, Haberski laments, never “showed any intention of acting as if the nation was under God’s judgment.” (p.146).  And on the rare occasion that politicians have done so—think Jimmy Carter—they were punished for it. 

The heroes of this book then are not the politicians but the dissidents, those people like Reinhold Niebuhr who maintained an ironic detachment in the face of war, Will Herberg who lambasted the shallowness of mid-century religion, Martin Luther King Jr.  and Abraham Joshua Heschel who objected to the American involvement in Vietnam by appealing to transcendent values, and Stanley Hauerwas who has asserted, again and again, that Christian ethics are for the Christian community, not the nation. 

The best parts of this book, and I really loved them, are the ones in which Haberski shows people squaring off about the proper role that religious ideas should play in directing the nation.  This is especially true almost every time Richard John Neuhaus comes up.  Haberski is now writing an intellectual biography of Neuhaus, for which we will all be thankful once it comes out.  We get a sense of that biography here.  Neuhaus was the person most responsible for the advancement of the term civil religion through the 1980s and 1990s.  His version, though it changed over time, meant something like a public theology that drew upon revealed Christian ideas that were applicable to everyone. 

Yet Neuhaus was consistently hammered, first by the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis, and then by Stanley Hauerwas, over his notion of civil religion.  The basic question in these disputes, and the basic question about the proper relationship of religion and the state in general, was, in Hauerwas’s words, “Who is the ‘us’?”  (p. 164).  “Your rhetoric,” Hauerwas complained to Neuhaus, “mixes ‘we Christians’ with ‘we Americans’ in a way that I think compromises our ability as Christians . . . to help our non-Christian fellow citizens realize the story of righteousness they associate with being Americans is deeply problematic.” (pp. 164-165).

What I like most about this response is that Hauerwas does not confuse the national community with the religious community.   He does not confuse the thick axioms of a religious tradition with the thin and minimal conceptions of moral obligation that guide the national community.  This, it seems to me, happens all to often when people talk about civil religion.  It is a rhetoric that acts to advance religious power while claiming a kind of consensus.  

But Haberski ends the book with a declaration of civil religion’s indispensability.  It is, he tells us, “the only way to acknowledge that we still need to believe in something worthy of the sacrifices that have been and will continue to be made in the name of the nation” (p. 254).  I see in this statement what I so often see when people start talking about civil religion: Christian theistic assumptions being smuggled into a debate about how people in a pluralistic nation can live and die together. 

So, Ray, why again do we Americans need civil religion?


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Editor's note:  This is the first post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Against Irony

"irony, language device, either in spoken or written form in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the literal meanings of the words or in a situation in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs" (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As historians, most of us probably take pleasure in highlighting ironies of the past. On occasion I point out ironies (perhaps as a way of showing how clever I am). For example, in the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress on the culture wars, I write: “Many radical feminists learned how to think about personal politics as members of various New Left organizations, especially SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was ironic, of course, since politicizing the personal, taken to its logical conclusion, led many women to believe that the New Left organizations to which they belonged were chauvinistic. Stokely Carmichael’s notoriously misogynistic claim that ‘the position of women in SNCC is prone’ symbolized the need for women to prioritize their own liberation.”

But should irony be an epistemological or political commitment? Several of my fellow USIH bloggers seen to think so. In his excellent book, Freedom to Offend, Ray Haberski positions himself between the two poles of the debates over sex in art: between the censors on the one hand, and the first amendment absolutists on the other. Ray claims such a position is where irony lives. Similarly, L.D. Burnett has written the following at this blog: “Irony. Humility. Detachment. This is what history has to offer.”

In his comments on James Livingston’s recent post about the historian’s obligations, Dan Wickberg concludes with what I take to be a call for epistemological irony (even though he doesn’t use the word): “All we’ve got are the tools we’ve got; critique is a modernist, historicist form. This seems hardly a reason for despair—it just means that the chastened and humble form of modernism is a better one for living than the totalizing and assertive form of endless revolution and dynamic progress. Maybe we need a new Stoicism—stop thinking you’re stuck, and you’re not. But don’t jump off a moving train—the results can’t be pretty.”

Epistemological wariness of “totalizing” forms of thought is one of the calling cards of  the ironic detachment so central to postmodernism. Of course, ironic detachment was also one of the signal sensibilities of Cold War liberalism, a liberal variant obsessed with consensus, pluralism, technical expertise, detachment, and irony, a zeitgeist that found its apotheosis in Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. According to the so-called pluralist thinkers who dominated American social thought during the 1950s, the era of encrusted ideologies, whether expressed from the left or from the right, had been rendered outmoded by the age of affluence. Government by scientific experimentation was the new order. President John F. Kennedy certified this technocratic ethos in a 1962 speech in which he declared that the nation’s problems were merely “technical and administrative” and, as such, “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

The pluralist thinkers were wrong about a lot. The greatest movement in their midst—the civil rights movement—was inspired by an epistemological orientation more attuned to what educational philosopher Theodore Brameld termed an “audacious and cosmic vision.” More damning to the pluralist thinkers, their ironic detachment from the anticolonial movements of the world often served as cover for U.S. aggression. Furthermore, they were not detached in the Cold War. They were more often decidedly in favor of aggressive American policies against the Soviet Union and its sphere, as if the encrusted ideologies operant in Russia were justification for American foreign policies based on equally encrusted ideologies. Ironic indeed.

In his provocative piece in the current edition of The Baffler, Steve Almond criticizes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for what amounts to their ironic detachment from the horrors of our society. He writes:

“Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”

Stewart’s shtick, like all among the ironically detached, is to portray himself above the fray. Almond illustrates this by way of a conversation he had with his guest in 2010, Rachel Maddow:

“…during [the interview] Stewart trotted out one of his favorite canards, that ‘both sides have their way of shutting down debate.’ Maddow asked, ‘What’s the lefty way of shutting down debate?’ ‘You’ve said Bush is a war criminal,’ Stewart replied. ‘Now that may be technically true. In my world, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the Nuremberg trials. . . . But I think that’s such an incendiary charge that when you put it into conversation as, well, technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter.’ This is the Stewart credo distilled: civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity.”

Is this the same thing as saying ironic detachment at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity? I guess what I’m asking for is a defense of irony from those committed to irony. I’m honestly curious. (By the way, is it ironic to be committed to irony?)

Ray Haberski, "God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945"

It is my pleasure to announce that regular USIH blogger Ray Haberski's new book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, is now published. Congratulations Ray! 

Abstract: Americans have long considered their country to be good—a nation "under God" with a profound role to play in the world. Yet nothing tests that proposition like war. Raymond Haberski argues that since 1945 the common moral assumptions expressed in an American civil religion have become increasingly defined by the nation's experience with war. God and War traces how three great postwar “trials”—the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror—have revealed the promise and perils of an American civil religion. Throughout the Cold War, Americans combined faith in God and faith in the nation to struggle against not only communism but their own internal demons. The Vietnam War tested whether America remained a nation "under God," inspiring, somewhat ironically, an awakening among a group of religious, intellectual and political leaders to save the nation's soul. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Americans might now explore whether civil religion can exist apart from the power of war to affirm the value of the nation to its people and the world.

Blurbs: "The idea that America has a civil religion has a notoriously slippery history. Raymond Haberski, Jr. gives us a wonderfully lucid and keenly perceptive account of how this idea has been variously appropriated and refashioned since World War II." (Gary Dorrien Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University)

"A self-proclaimed 'nation under God,' the United States has a pronounced affinity for war. In this illuminating and important book, Raymond Haberski explores the intimate and largely pernicious relationship between these two abiding aspects of American identity."(Andrew J. Bacevich Boston University)

“God and War perceptively reveals the component parts of America’s civil religion since 1945. It is a troubling story steeped in a mythical idea that the nation’s violence was blessed by God.” (John Bodnar author of The Good War In American Memory )

"The best book on American civil religion since The Broken Covenant. Haberski takes us up to the present day, illuminating how times of war can both summon and distort civil religion." (Philip S. Gorski Yale University )

Kevin Mattson's Many Books

Kevin Mattson is probably one of the most prolific U.S. intellectual historians of his generation. He’s also one of the few whose work likely gets read by a larger public. And yet, we don’t discuss Mattson very often here at this blog. This is somewhat surprising given that his interests—postwar political culture—overlap with many of ours. (It’s also surprising since one of our regulars, Ray Haberski, and one of our longtime friends, Julian Nemeth of PhD Octopus fame, both studied with Mattson.)

Why is this? I think it’s because his books, though written with verve, tend to bring intellectual history to bear on contemporary political concerns rather than offer new historiographical insights. This is not a critique. By focusing more on political relevance than on scholarly discourse, Mattson seems to have achieved what many of us claim to want: the elusive general audience. But it might explain why Mattson is unlikely to appear on any comp lists.

The first Mattson book I read, ‪Intellectuals in Action: ‪The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002), remains my favorite. In it Mattson examines four of the American intellectuals I find most interesting—William Appleman Williams, C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, and Arnold Kauffman—arguing that their thought, and actions, helped give rise to the New Left. I like it more than Mattson’s other books because the research and argument seemed fresh and because he seemed less interested in scoring political points. The book hinted at such politicization. His argument that those four intellectuals, though radical enough to be New Leftists, were at their core American liberals, was a defense of an expansive definition of liberalism. But, as I remember it, such politicization was hardly the driving force of the book.

The same perhaps cannot be said for Mattson’s next book, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Liberalism in Post-War America (2004). This book also sketches out the thought of major intellectuals, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Reinhold Niebuhr, this time in order to defend American liberalism from its detractors on both left and right. In what almost seems like an update of Schlesinger’s Vital Center for the War on Terror, Mattson wants his readers to think of liberalism as both tough and pragmatic, as capable of negotiating the rocky shoals between the ideological left and right. In this, When America Was Great seems like a companion to Peter Beinart’s shameful, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2004), a longer version of his (in)famous New Republic article, “A Fighting Faith.” This comparison is probably unfair. Mattson, unlike Beinart, did not use the history of liberalism to support the war in Iraq. But, that the two books seem like companions likely speaks to the dangers of historical relevance. Mattson gained a large readership, no doubt, but When America Was Great, unlike Intellectuals in Action, already seems dated a mere eight years after its publication.

Most recently, sticking with the liberal theme, Mattson co-authored with Eric Alterman the gigantic book, The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. I have not yet had the pleasure to read The Cause, though it is sitting on my desk as I write this. My guess is there will be much to like in it, and that I’ll agree with some if not all of the history and politics. But I also suspect the book will be more about the 2012 election than the 1932 election, even in the FDR chapters. So The Cause will be widely read and reviewed in places most of us can only dream of being reviewed in—The New York Times, for example. But it won’t be on any graduate comp lists.

Mattson has written several other books that I won’t discuss in this post. Like I said, he’s über-prolific. The one book I would like to briefly discuss is Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (2008). This book was published by the Rutgers University Press series, “Ideas in Action: Thought and Culture in the United States Since 1945,” edited by our good friend George Cotkin. Ray’s new book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, is coming out this summer as part of that excellent series. (I love the series description: “Ideas In Action allows established historians to consider broad and important issues pertaining to cultural and intellectual life in the United States since 1945. The books, based for the most part on secondary literature surrounding a topic, will highlight and dissect compelling controversies related to large cultural questions as they change over time. The series provides authors with an opportunity to interpret, to speculate, and to ‘think out loud,’ while furthering critical debate. Books deal not in abstractions but anchor ideas firmly in the context of politics, culture, and society. They are written in a style that is accessible to a wide range of readers and that captures the author’s personality and point of view.”)

Rebels All! lives up to the series description. It’s a broad, speculative interpretation of extant historiography. Mattson’s main point is that modern American conservatism should best be understood as “populist aggression.” In this, he argues that American conservatives are the true heirs to sixties radicals. Conservatives are the ones who have carried on the sixties legacy of anti-establishment utopianism.

I find Mattson’s argument that conservatives are the legatees of sixties radicalism very problematic. Conservatives are rowdy anti-establishmentarians in style. So what? In the first place, sixties radicals were hardly the first Americans to evince such a style. But more importantly, style should not always be conflated with substance, especially in this case. Sixties radicals were anti-establishment because they were against the war, racism, and sexism they thought endemic to the establishment. Obviously, the same cannot be said about conservatism.

I am currently writing a chapter on neoconservatism for my culture wars book, so I took particular interest in Mattson’s analysis of that persuasion. Mattson correctly points out that neocons helped the larger conservative movement by bringing less moralistic social science techniques to conservative arguments and by making an otherwise Protestant and Catholic movement more diverse. But he also argues that the neocons were often out of touch relative to the larger conservative movement. For instance, whereas neocons like Irving Kristol conceptualized religion in “small r” republican terms as a source of stability, conservative American Christians, in Mattson’s view, were populist dissidents who spread disorder. (This divide seems to speak to Ray’s work on civil religion.) More specifically, Mattson believes that, because neocons like Kristol hated populism, which he called an “antinomian impulse,” a “Jacobin contempt” for “law and order and civility,” they were somewhat irrelevant.

Relating this to the campus protests of the sixties, Mattson contrasts the neocons with conservatives like Russell Kirk, who enjoyed the campus protests of the sixties because of the pain it caused the liberal establishment. Mattson uses a famous Russell Kirk quote from 1969, where Kirk takes pleasure in campus protests, as an illustrative epigraph:

“Having been for two decades a mordant critic of what is foolishly called the higher learning in America, I confess to relishing somewhat… the fulfillment of my predictions and the present plight of the educationist Establishment. I even own to a sneaking sympathy, after a fashion, with the campus revolutionaries.”

Arguing that neoconservatism arose, in part, as a reaction to campus protest is true insofar as it goes. But contrasting that with Kirk’s schadenfreude does not quite paint a full picture. I argue that the neoconservative reaction against sixties radicalism was, in fact, internalized by American conservatism more broadly, antinomian style of the larger movement notwithstanding. The sixties protests, it must be remembered, were sopped up by the academy, among other liberal institutions, especially the identity power movements. In this way, conservative antipathy to the academy owes more to the neoconservative reaction than to “populist aggression,” however conservatives style themselves.


I'm still trying to figure out if and how Mattson's take on conservatism relates to goal of politically relevant scholarship.