Walter McDougall begins his sober analysis of civil religion and American foreign policy with a quotation from James Wilson, Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and subsequently Supreme Court Justice and professor of law at the College of Philadelphia (the ancestor of McDougall's own University of Pennsylvania). Reaching all the way back to Socrates's famous injunction quoted from the Temple at Delphi, Wilson warned that “a nation ought to know itself.” In fact, he called such self-knowledge “a duty” incumbent on any people.
The pursuit of national self-knowledge has animated much of Professor McDougall's work over the years, and now in The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy he continues that task in a way that draws together much of his previous scholarship. Self-knowledge is not a once-for-all thing, not for individuals and not for nations. The wisdom demanded in 1787 or 1898 or 1917 is not the same as what is needed today. Too much has happened to America and its standing in the world. Civil religion itself has been changed to accommodate America's transformation over time, and along the way it has been turned to purposes for which it was never intended—and indeed which it was cultivated precisely to prevent. Many of the words and symbols have stayed the same, but they have been emptied of their content and robbed of their power to contain destructive aspirations and behavior. America's policymakers exchanged liberty for power and had to reinvent American civil religion to do so. And therein lies the tragedy.
Instead of promoting self-knowledge (which takes courage for nations as well as for individuals), American civil religion now promotes what McDougall calls “delusional” and “magical” thinking for a world of make-believe in which all that is required of citizens and their leaders is a vacuous “faith in faith” or “faith in America,” with “America” having no stable identity. The pious smokescreen of modern civil religion makes it possible to believe that America's conduct as an expansive, interventionist, nation-building apostle of global democracy is in fact a fulfillment of the Founders' vision and not a betrayal. The imperialists of 1898 and Woodrow Wilson in 1917 performed this conjuring trick, and many American's found it seductive. Many still do.
University of Toronto political philosopher Ronald Beiner defines civil religion as the “appropriation of religion by politics for its own purposes.” This definition handily gets at one important side of civil religion: the state's mobilization of religion to advance its power, whether domestically or internationally.
This definition works well as far as it goes, but if we rely too much on it we might miss something important. Civil religion need not be intrinsically religious at all. It can also comprise a set of principles or affirmations elevated to the status of a civic faith meant to bind a people together. Secular heroes, events, documents, and principles can all serve as useful symbols and dogmas that bind a people together by means of common affections that help keep them safe, free, and prosperous. At least that's the hope. Such a civil religion need not appropriate any group's sacred texts, doctrines, rituals, or saints. If fact, the less it does so the healthier it is for both politics and religion. It need not pretend to be the highest or ultimate affection of the human heart. It need not compete with other bonds of affection. Civil religion in this sense need not become an idol, need not compete with or substitute itself for historic faiths and institutions.
So much for theory. In practice, these two kinds of civil religion became jumbled together.
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