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.

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?