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.

Civil Religion: The Revival of a Slippery Term

I recently received the first copy of my new book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (Rutgers UP) and in an attempt both to shamelessly promote it and to place it in some context, I am going to write a few posts related to the resurgence of civil religion in recent books.

While the touchstone for most discussions of *American* civil religion is Robert Bellah's famous 1967 essay in Daedelus entitled, "Civil Religion in America," the foundation for the philosophical understanding of civil religion is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract Book IV, chapter 8.  Recently, the political theorist Ronald Beiner wrote a book length study of the term through the political philosophy of four dominant traditions: the original proposal of domesticating religion through a civil-religion in Machiavelli, Hobbs, and Rousseau; the liberal tradition from Spinoza to Rawls; the modern theocratic tradition represented by de Maistre and Schmidt; and the postmodern theism of Nietzsche and Heidegger.  As I read through Beiner's well-explicated treatment of civil religion, I was struck time and again by the clarity of Beiner's definition of the term and the ambiguity of what the term has implied over time.  For example, Beiner notes very early on that all the thinkers he profiles while contributing to the "radical secularization of modern politics," have expressed "not a little sympathy for some manner of theocracy."  The twist here, of course, what kind of "theocracy"?  Certainly not Christian or Muslim or Jewish but civil religious.  Giants of western modern western philosophy have all pondered how best to appropriate religion by politics for their own purposes.  As Beiner explains: "Civil religion is the empowerment of religion, not for the sake of religion, but for the sake of enhanced citizenship--of making members of the political community better citizens, in accordance with whatever conception one holds of what constitutes being a good citizen."(2)

Rousseau believed, as Beiner establishes forcefully, "a state has never been founded without religion serving as its base."  But to what end?  After all, "the religion that dominates Western political communities is in radical tension with the needs of political authority," Beiner argues, "yet religious profession of some kind is indispensable for a sound political order."  To Beiner, it is Rousseau's inability to resolve this tension between politics and religion that demonstrates both the philosophical allure of civil religion and the many unsatisfying versions of it. The tension is unresolvable and therefore the term, while relatively easy to define, is frustratingly impossible to realize in practice.  In Rousseau's mind, a "real" civil religion would require the practical application of a transcendent politics. Beiner points out the obvious contradiction--"we are left with two unhappy alternatives of a morally true religion that is in its essence subversive to politics, and a sound civil religion that is both morally unattractive and, historically, an anachronism."(14)

The alternative to Rousseau's unresolved contradiction is Machiavelli's paganization of Christianity.  Beiner writes: "What Machiavelli is saying to us is that it remains open to us as a civilization (or to some enterprising innovator within our civilization) to reinterpret Christianity in such a way that is secures the political advantages that the Romans were so adept at exploiting through a judicious manipulation of religious beliefs and practices."(20)  Rousseau and Machiavelli represent the two most widely understood versions of civil religion--neither is acceptable to true believers of religion and yet neither can be realized without some version of belief in religion.  Robert Bellah's innovation was to couple a Rousseauian version of civil religion with Durkheim's milder version of Machiavelli's faith in ritual over abstract belief.

I have done very limited justice to Beiner's expansive reading of the civil religion discourse, but would like to conclude this particular post with a nod to an ongoing conversation at this blog.  I have suggested in the past that the debate over American civil religion can be fruitfully understood in conjunction with (if not as an alternative) to the culture wars of the last 40 years.  Beiner points out that Machiavelli proposed a civil religion for his own period of culture wars.  In Machiavelli's Discourses, Beiner relates that a central theme is the contrast between founding and refounding or "how one restores a set of institutions to their original principles over against the inescapable process of decay and decrepitude to which earthly institutions are subject."(21)  Indeed, in my work on American civil religion, the use of real war (in Machiavelli's design, priests and philosophers as well as warriors and generals) attempted to refound the nation in successive generations.  As the American version of the culture wars were being waged over the role of women, the limits of marriage, the definition of art, etc., there were wars of sacrifice that consistently revealed how both armed and unarmed prophets (both warriors and pacifists) pushed refoundings of the nation.  And just like the culture wars, the key to the longevity of the debate over the refounding of the nation lie in the realization Rousseau made regarding civil religion--it is, as Beiner concludes, "a paradox rather than a proposal."(18)