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.

The Golden Cage

Thanks to Lora for extending the discussion on my last post.  I relish exchanges with my colleagues here at S-USIH.

I have an extension of my own: if Bellah and Kennan felt trapped by their own eloquence, can the inverse happen?  Can the golden cage of a term or concept release the author and entrap the culture?

The example I have in mind here is Richard John Neuhaus's use of the term, "the naked public square."  His 1984 book by that name, appearing in an election year and at a moment of impasse for the Religious Right, captured a transition in perils from the cold war to, perhaps, the culture wars.  Among the most remarkable features of the book is the limited discussion of communism--the specter that had provoked calls-to-arms of all kinds, secular and religious, since the late 1940s. But that peril had faded as a new peril was identified, manufactured, and endlessly debated. Neuhaus defined that new peril, Mary Ann Glendon asserted in a retrospective on Neuhaus's book: "Richard Neuhaus correctly saw that the chief threat to our republic was not communism (as many people thought at the time), but 'a collapse of the idea of freedom and of social arrangements necessary to sustaining a liberal democracy.'"

Before the publication of The Naked Public Square, Neuhaus had been a fascinating but not necessarily influential public intellectual.  As many know, he started his adult life as a Lutheran minister and pastor of a church in Brooklyn; a man of the religious left who marched with Martin Luther King and joined other religious leaders in opposing the Vietnam War.  By the mid-1970s he had begun to migrate away from the radical critique of the United States as a hopeless nation--fallen, perhaps, but Neuhaus argued it was redeemable.  By the early 1980s, he made an ill-fated alliance with a group of "paleocons" and in the aftermath of a minor fiasco founded the Institute for Religion and Public Life and the journal First Things.  In less than a decade he would enter the Roman Catholic Church as a priest and take up a place squarely at the center of the culture wars that defined the decade prior to 9/11.  At various times, Neuhaus expressed surprise that his book and the metaphor he used struck such a vibrant chord with so many people.  His fellow religious and conservative intellectuals had already come to admire him by 1984 but his presence at debates about the fate of American life undoubtedly grew more essential after the publication of his book.

Yet, one of the questions I wrestle with is whether his metaphor trapped the discussion about American life in a way that concepts launched by Bellah and Kennan had trapped them.  Neuhaus's public life benefited from the reception of his metaphor, but what did that metaphor do to the culture it attempted to describe?  Both Bellah and Kennan lamented the fact that their professional careers became defined by terms that they felt ambivalent about.  Their ambivalence seemed to come from finding the world around them too complex for simplification by terms such as civil religion and containment.  I don't know if Neuhaus had similar misgivings, but it seems to me that the golden cage that Bellah and Kennan felt trapped within did not prompt similar misgivings with Neuhaus. What "the naked public square" did as a concept was set the terms of a debate Americans have been having one way or another every since Neuhaus introduced it.  The 2007 issue of American Quarterly entitled "Is the Public Square Still Naked?" stands as a decent example of that.  Likewise the well-regarded religious historian Steven P. Miller recently took up the iconic metaphors of Neuhaus and James Davison Hunter in a paper at the 2012 AHA.  Is there significance in the different ways Bellah, Kennan, and Neuhaus (and perhaps Hunter) related to their iconic concepts?

The Albatross Concept

I have had a brief exchange with sociologist Robert Bellah about my characterization in God and War of his 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America."  The gist of the exchange would not surprise any one who has even a passing understanding of Bellah's relationship to the concept.  Almost from the moment his essay appeared he sought to distance himself from what became the popular implications of the term--that America had a collection of ideals that generations of its people could appeal to as a kind of normative faith.  Obviously, Bellah had good reason to disavow such a notion.  If we continue to search for the elusive/illusive singular American civil religion that will guide a consistently troubled nation, we will suffer the fate of Captain Ahab.

Bellah's response to me made me think of another allegory, the one to right: the plight of the mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge famous poem.  The albatross hangs around the mariner's neck as a reminder of an action with almost mythical portents.  It was, at first, an act that guided the ship and its crew to safety but its legacy led to great regret, felt most acutely by the mariner himself.  Bellah relationship to civil religion has not ended his career nor condemned his nation to some awful fate--in short he is not to blame for American ideological rigidity, stupidity, or naiveté.  But his desire to downplay the significance of his particular relationship to civil religion demonstrates a curious intellectual problem--the Albatross Concept.

Bellah published his essay on American civil religion in 1967 in the midst of the Vietnam War and in the middle of debates about the origins and responsibility of the cold war.  He was not the only scholar wondering what the times said about the identity and ideals that many Americans believed were in jeopardy (or that even existed).  Sidney Mead and Sidney Ahlstrom both wrote in this vein.  But Bellah's deployment of civil religion struck a particular chord with scholars because, it seems to me, he summarized ideas and sensibilities that were swirling around his era--everything from the secularization of the west to the rise of religious conservatives promoting the nation as a divine entity.  And even though Bellah had no plans to develop this term any further--he was a scholar of Japan and, more broadly, the sociology of religion--he became saddled with civil religion for the better part of his professional career.

This is the second such person I have worked on who had to endure a similar problem.  I wrote my master's thesis at SUNY Albany on George F. Kennan and worked with John Lewis Gaddis (the Pulitzer Prize winning-biographer of Kennan) at Ohio University.  Kennan, of course, went down in history as the "father" of the containment doctrine.  Containment was, for lack of almost any other real competitor, the foreign policy of the American cold war.  Kennan's authorship of this concept derives from his "long telegram" of 1946 and his "Mr. X" article in 1947.  From relative obscurity, Kennan rose rapidly in the U.S. State Department on the strength of these two documents.  Very much like Bellah, Kennan's distinction lay in his ability to bring together streams of thought that had been circulating throughout the upper levels of government and intellectual life; he provided eloquence and clarity to ideas that would have existed in disparate ways without him.  But his use of the containment did appear and did strike a chord with the right people at the right time.  And, also like Bellah, Kennan spent the rest of his life distancing himself from the implications of a term that hung on him (and I don't think this is too dramatic to say) like a dead albatross.

The albatross concept is a curious problem to have.  I think most of us would be fairly pleased to have a  well-known idea associated almost exclusively with something we had written.  I don't know this for certain, but I imagine James Davison Hunter has enjoyed his run with "the culture wars."  At the same time, though, Bellah's scholarship has almost nothing to do with American civil religion.  As he reminded me, his book The Broken Covenant (a text I channeled but did not dwell on in God and War) is a thumping conclusion to his relationship with civil religion. And yet, I find Bellah's original essay to be such a fascinating historical window on to a time that he captured.  But like Kennan, Bellah's reflection of a historical moment came through a term that lived long beyond its author's intention.  For that reason, the term itself has had a life outside of the author (as all terms do, of course) but will, for better and worse, pull the author along as it weaves its way through history.  As much as Bellah and Kennan and others would like to disengage from those terms that define part of their lives, they--the authors and the terms--become historical partners.  And the albatross remains.

The Myth of Civil Religion

Does civil religion even exist?

For many scholars who have addressed this strange beast, the answer comes down to whether civil religion has empirical value; in short, whether civil religion acts like a set of laws, standing as a lodestar for generations of people who live under it.  The notion that civil religion functions in this way stems primarily (though somewhat mistakenly) from Robert Bellah's influential 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America." In that essay, Bellah famously suggested that "American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality." It should not be surprising, though, that throughout American history groups have vied to project a single or unified understanding of the American experience based on a particular interpretation of a transcendent faith. As Bellah acknowledged in his best book on American civil religion, The Broken Covenant, he had been too optimistic about the symbolic power of special moments--JFK's inaugural address, MLK's "I have a dream" speech--especially in light of the reality of the interminable Vietnam War and the nefarious activities of Richard Nixon.  Civil religion's moral value seemed utterly bankrupt as Nixon used language similar to Kennedy's while at the same time ordering his dirty tricks and widening the war in Southeast Asia.

And so scholarship on civil religion has tended, since the early 1970s, to follow Bellah's own disenchantment with the term, arguing that civil religion is little more than a dangerous pipe dream.  My S-USIH colleague David Sehat captured this sentiment in the conclusion of his fine book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, asserting that versions of civil religion are a fantasy when they "share a belief in...a society gathered around a common religious center whose uniform and voluntary support makes possible a harmonious and socially integrated whole." That observation serves David's argument well as he seeks to demolish the idea that there exists a moral common ground that, historically, a moral establishment has attempted to affirm for the good of all Americans.  Rather, civil religion becomes cover for coercion deployed by a moral establishment that David argues has stifled dissent in order to maintain and expand political power.

Few scholars would disagree with David's specific dismissal of civil religion as a normative replacement for American religious conflict.  In fact, conflict has been at the heart of recent scholarship on civil religion.  Ronald Beiner makes clear that civil religion captures the fight within the history of political theory to make religion serve the ends of political authority.  Philip Gorski uses civil religion to chronicle the long-running battle over competing systems of truth and national understanding throughout American history. In this respect, Gorski has undertaken in a book-length study he is writing the most comprehensive reassessment of American civil religion to date.  Richard T. Hughes, a religious historian, calls civil religion a collection of "myths that America lives by."  Hughes writes succinctly that while national myths are those "by which we affirm the meaning of the United States," they are also myths that have been absolutized and thus "confuse the ideals of the creed with the realities of the present moment, and eliminate dissent."

Art Remillard, a historian of the New South, mulled over such trends in civil religion when he produced his book Southern Civil Religions.  Art explains in a recent blog post  that he came to use civil religion to contextualize "the realities of American many-ness."  Again, the emphasis is on the conflict rather than the potential unity that civil religion portends.  What Art discovered in his research on the post-Reconstruction South (or the New South) was a series of civil religions competing with each other to redefine the future "good society" that would follow the sea change wrought by the Civil War.  Moral visions conflicted and overlapped and canceled each other out; but the language and structure of those visions shared enough in common to act like civil religions.  I know that Art continues to think about his use of civil religion and I would like to know more about why the visions of these disparate groups seemed to share similar rhetorical structures.  I think this is where Phil Gorski's future book will be a great help.  His bold claim appears to be that civil religion is normative because has been forged about of certain rhetorical traditions and competing systems of belief.

If, though, there is one reason why civil religion seems a long-suffering term, the reason lies in its popular understanding--or lack thereof.  Intellectual historian Wilfred McClay points out civil religion is very much a "scholar's term...even though it describes a phenomenon at has existed very since the first organized human communities." Thus, importantly, civil religion does not have the popular cache of a term like the "culture wars."  Even though recent scholarship on the civil religion addresses conflicts and structures very much involved in various culture wars, civil religion has been saddled with the limited understanding attached to Bellah's initial essay.  Whereas the Culture Wars clearly defines the sense of conflict that many Americans believe they have been living through for the last forty years, civil religion, when it has been considered at all, has not really risen above the notion of being either a silly myth or a lost chance.

Obviously, I think there is reason to change that perception.  Next week I will propose how.

Brokaw and Bourne

While watching the reports about the mid-term elections, there was one person I looked forward to seeing. Not Jim Lehrer, or Chris Matthews, or even John Stewart; no, I looked forward to Tom Brokaw. Why? Because I thought he might bring up one issue that seemed forgotten—war! In an op-ed in the New York Times on October 17, Brokaw thumped his point: “The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.” On Tuesday night, while the likes of Michelle Bachmann chanted about taxes and…taxes, Brokaw took a moment to remind his colleagues of the “blood and treasure” squandered by the wars on terror. But in the midst of a yet another round of the culture wars, real war got lost.

By calling attention to war, we might hope to have a vigorous debate about its costs, too. In the question and answer period that followed James Kloppenberg’s talk on Barack Obama as a pragmatist, Jackson Lears pointedly critiqued Obama’s handling of the war on terror. While we might find reason to admire or, at least, be sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the economy, health care, and education, his handling of the war on terror has been, Kloppenberg noted, deeply distressful. This exchange suggested that Obama’s failure might indicate a deficiency in his pragmatic thought. Might it also suggest a hole in our intellectual history? In other words, if the battles against Obama in the mid-terms illuminate the cultural wars, what does this failure to contend with real war reveal?

I asked this question knowing that we have intellectual histories of the culture wars, for an incisive treatment of this subject see the work of my USIH colleague Andrew Hartman. The significance of the culture wars, as Andrew writes in a blog posted earlier this year, is the “multiplication of mini-grand narratives.” We are awash in ways to explain the purpose of our age, our nation, and ourselves. The culture wars might not be good for politics but they do raise fundamental questions about the identity of the nation—this fractured, contested identity. Except, it seems, when we go to war. We dismiss each other’s view about art but, according to polls, agree on the heroism of American troops; we war over who gets to interpret the history of the nation but have faith that the nation, even when it is at war, is essentially good; and we wield religious views like weapons but find it entirely appropriate for our political leaders, in a time of war, to lead us in prayer. But in a dangerous twist, where the culture wars force us to recognize differences in ideas, wars tend to blur those differences until we become like Michelle Bachmann—in a trance, mouthing slogans.

Given my configuration above, what we have is an era of “multiplying mini-grand narratives” that has developed and continues to develop alongside and in some cases in relation to a grand narrative of war. The latter has an intellectual history, too. And we might investigate the irony of that history through the concept of civil religion.

The touchstone for thinking about contemporary versions of American civil religion remains Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America.” Reading Bellah in light of our recent wars, what struck me was not so much his defense of civil religion but the fact that civil religion seemed most relevant and apparent to Bellah in times of war. The heart of his argument relied on the significance of what he called “times of trial.” He concluded that the United States did not fight wars for higher ideals as much as find its ideals in the wars that it fought. In short, American civil religion was forged in war. Sacrifice in the war for independence made apparent a civil religious covenant among Americans. The Civil War incarnated that civil religion through a massive blood sacrifice (to summarize Harry Stout’s recent application of Bellah). World War II certified the promise of civil religion through heroic sacrifice on behalf of ideals embodied by the original American covenant.

The postwar period offered a new twist to the evolution of American civil religion. This was an era in which the notion that America was a force of good in the world went from functioning basically as an abstraction to a historical proof. Because the United States has been in an almost constant of war and because for the first time the abstract notion of the American promise had unprecedented American military power behind it, American civil religion grew exponentially more significant and more dangerous.

Bellah wrote his original essay in light of Vietnam, a war, he argued, that did not disprove the idea that the nation could still be a force for good in the world. Out of the depths of one of the most divisive periods in American history, Bellah offered one of the most attractive versions of American civil religion as a historical proof, arguing that “American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” In short, Americans not only had a common creed that unified them but they also had a tradition of using that creed to evaluate their nation's actions. In parlance that became popular following World War II, the United States was a nation “under God,” meaning, as Bellah explained, “the will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. The president’s obligation extends to the higher criterion.”[1]

Bellah suggested a way to claim moral authority in a time of moral tragedy by making adjustments in light of that higher authority. However, Ben Alpers, another colleague of mine at USIH, reminds us in a recent post that Randolph Bourne’s admonition regarding war haunts us. Bourne’s critique of pragmatist support for war included things familiar to us today: the cost of war in treasure and blood; the misguided expectation of a “gallant” war; and the contradictory logic that if a “war is too strong for you to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mould to your liberal purposes?” But perhaps Bourne’s most incisive observation was his lament that pragmatists led by John Dewey believed they could calibrate the techniques of war to the advancement of democratic values. In other words, winning a war made it possible for a philosophy of the good to flourish.

Yet, as Bourne so succinctly put it: “war always undermines values.” Indeed, calibrating values to technique in a time of war invites tragedy. And Bourne’s insight is devastating given our current predicament. Contemporary America is dangerously well-equipped to experiment with technique and tragically uninterested in contending with the psychic damage war has on its values. While our planners fiddle with troop levels, drone attacks, and secret-ops, thousands of soldiers stand to lose their lives for a war of almost no consequence. And while our electorate consumed its politics like so much tea, the wars have consumed at bit more of the national soul. Bourne castigated the young intelligentsia of his day for its infatuation with the technocratic side of war; in organizing for war they had forgotten to give much attention to reasons for fighting it. As our conversation about the role of intellectual history continues, is there a way to theorize war as we have the culture wars? Is there way to answer the call of Randolph Bourne and, of course, Tom Brokaw?

---

[1] Robert Bellah, http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.

Brokaw and Bourne

While watching the reports about the mid-term elections, there was one person I looked forward to seeing. Not Jim Lehrer, or Chris Matthews, or even John Stewart; no, I looked forward to Tom Brokaw. Why? Because I thought he might bring up one issue that seemed forgotten—war! In an op-ed in the New York Times on October 17, Brokaw thumped his point: “The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.” On Tuesday night, while the likes of Michelle Bachmann chanted about taxes and…taxes, Brokaw took a moment to remind his colleagues of the “blood and treasure” squandered by the wars on terror. But in the midst of a yet another round of the culture wars, real war got lost.

By calling attention to war, we might hope to have a vigorous debate about its costs, too. In the question and answer period that followed James Kloppenberg’s talk on Barack Obama as a pragmatist, Jackson Lears pointedly critiqued Obama’s handling of the war on terror. While we might find reason to admire or, at least, be sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the economy, health care, and education, his handling of the war on terror has been, Kloppenberg noted, deeply distressful. This exchange suggested that Obama’s failure might indicate a deficiency in his pragmatic thought. Might it also suggest a hole in our intellectual history? In other words, if the battles against Obama in the mid-terms illuminate the cultural wars, what does this failure to contend with real war reveal?

I asked this question knowing that we have intellectual histories of the culture wars, for an incisive treatment of this subject see the work of my USIH colleague Andrew Hartman. The significance of the culture wars, as Andrew writes in a blog posted earlier this year, is the “multiplication of mini-grand narratives.” We are awash in ways to explain the purpose of our age, our nation, and ourselves. The culture wars might not be good for politics but they do raise fundamental questions about the identity of the nation—this fractured, contested identity. Except, it seems, when we go to war. We dismiss each other’s view about art but, according to polls, agree on the heroism of American troops; we war over who gets to interpret the history of the nation but have faith that the nation, even when it is at war, is essentially good; and we wield religious views like weapons but find it entirely appropriate for our political leaders, in a time of war, to lead us in prayer. But in a dangerous twist, where the culture wars force us to recognize differences in ideas, wars tend to blur those differences until we become like Michelle Bachmann—in a trance, mouthing slogans.

Given my configuration above, what we have is an era of “multiplying mini-grand narratives” that has developed and continues to develop alongside and in some cases in relation to a grand narrative of war. The latter has an intellectual history, too. And we might investigate the irony of that history through the concept of civil religion.

The touchstone for thinking about contemporary versions of American civil religion remains Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America.” Reading Bellah in light of our recent wars, what struck me was not so much his defense of civil religion but the fact that civil religion seemed most relevant and apparent to Bellah in times of war. The heart of his argument relied on the significance of what he called “times of trial.” He concluded that the United States did not fight wars for higher ideals as much as find its ideals in the wars that it fought. In short, American civil religion was forged in war. Sacrifice in the war for independence made apparent a civil religious covenant among Americans. The Civil War incarnated that civil religion through a massive blood sacrifice (to summarize Harry Stout’s recent application of Bellah). World War II certified the promise of civil religion through heroic sacrifice on behalf of ideals embodied by the original American covenant.

The postwar period offered a new twist to the evolution of American civil religion. This was an era in which the notion that America was a force of good in the world went from functioning basically as an abstraction to a historical proof. Because the United States has been in an almost constant of war and because for the first time the abstract notion of the American promise had unprecedented American military power behind it, American civil religion grew exponentially more significant and more dangerous.

Bellah wrote his original essay in light of Vietnam, a war, he argued, that did not disprove the idea that the nation could still be a force for good in the world. Out of the depths of one of the most divisive periods in American history, Bellah offered one of the most attractive versions of American civil religion as a historical proof, arguing that “American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” In short, Americans not only had a common creed that unified them but they also had a tradition of using that creed to evaluate their nation's actions. In parlance that became popular following World War II, the United States was a nation “under God,” meaning, as Bellah explained, “the will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. The president’s obligation extends to the higher criterion.”[1]

Bellah suggested a way to claim moral authority in a time of moral tragedy by making adjustments in light of that higher authority. However, Ben Alpers, another colleague of mine at USIH, reminds us in a recent post that Randolph Bourne’s admonition regarding war haunts us. Bourne’s critique of pragmatist support for war included things familiar to us today: the cost of war in treasure and blood; the misguided expectation of a “gallant” war; and the contradictory logic that if a “war is too strong for you to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mould to your liberal purposes?” But perhaps Bourne’s most incisive observation was his lament that pragmatists led by John Dewey believed they could calibrate the techniques of war to the advancement of democratic values. In other words, winning a war made it possible for a philosophy of the good to flourish.

Yet, as Bourne so succinctly put it: “war always undermines values.” Indeed, calibrating values to technique in a time of war invites tragedy. And Bourne’s insight is devastating given our current predicament. Contemporary America is dangerously well-equipped to experiment with technique and tragically uninterested in contending with the psychic damage war has on its values. While our planners fiddle with troop levels, drone attacks, and secret-ops, thousands of soldiers stand to lose their lives for a war of almost no consequence. And while our electorate consumed its politics like so much tea, the wars have consumed at bit more of the national soul. Bourne castigated the young intelligentsia of his day for its infatuation with the technocratic side of war; in organizing for war they had forgotten to give much attention to reasons for fighting it. As our conversation about the role of intellectual history continues, is there a way to theorize war as we have the culture wars? Is there way to answer the call of Randolph Bourne and, of course, Tom Brokaw?

---

[1] Robert Bellah, http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.