The following is an overview of Law & Liberty’s October forum on the question of American civic religion.
What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? That has always been a difficult question to answer in America, a country heavily influenced by Christianity but also one with no established church at the national level, and for the last two hundred years, at the state level either. From the Puritans on, there have been inventive and evolving efforts to conceptually integrate the American political experience with Christianity, but there has also been strong resistance to such projects, including from people of faith. Law & Liberty’s October forum wrestled with this question of American civic religion.
Historian Richard Gamble warns against the casual blending of religious and political ideas in his lead essay by considering the work of twentieth-century sociologist Robert Bellah on American Civil Religion. Bellah embraced and reformed the “religious dimension” of political life. While this religion—and Bellah saw it as a genuine religion—made ample use of Christian aesthetics and rhetoric, it was founded solidly on American politics. ACR had long resembled a “Protestantism mobilized for social change.” And in the twentieth century, the activist faith lost the last trappings of Christianity and emerged as a world religion that could “bear prophetic witness against the materialism, consumerism, individualism, and conformity of middle-class suburbia’s complacen[cy].”
Genuine religious believers ought to think twice about whether such a purely political use of civil religion is inevitable. Allowing politicians and activists to borrow the language, symbols, and rhetoric of Christianity, Gamble worries, instrumentalizes faith and distorts understanding of politics. Efforts to integrate the two spheres in the public mind are dangerous games, and we would do well to learn more about those religious groups throughout our history that have resisted the temptation to a political faith.
On the other hand, religious rhetoric has long given American politics a kind of guide and moral compass. Mark David Hall draws attention to the importance of distinguishing between the kind of dangerous “civil religion” that Gamble has in mind and the religious language that has permeated American life from the beginning. Was Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer unacceptable? Or Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation?
Similarly, John Wilsey argues that a tempered civil religion is not only acceptable but necessary for America, a nation he says is “founded upon transcendent ideals.” Civil religion, which can be both “prophetic” and “priestly,” is part of the American identity, for better or worse. Rather than run away from it, we ought to encourage it in a way that protects the integrity of genuine religious faith and helps form a healthy American identity without devolving into political idolatry.
Joshua Mitchell points to a more fundamental problem with American civil religion—namely, that any healthy form can only flourish when actual, supernatural religious faith is flourishing. Only real, robust religious faith can “bring coherence and purpose to a nation that seems on the verge of being torn asunder.” Trying to construct a civil religion when the genuine article is absent will make it a substitute, rather than a supplement to faith and thereby undermine its very purpose—situating the nation in a broader, cosmic context.
Concluding the forum, Gamble specifies the ways in which attempts at benign, moderate, and supplemental civil religion fall into inevitable traps. To avoid exclusion and division, they must resort to vague theism, selective quotations, and misapplications that subtly or not-so-subtly change the fundamental meaning of religious belief, often putting American in the place of a chosen people. “Those who want to keep [American civil religion] congenial may find that their very efforts undermine their good intentions.”
The debate over the relationship between religious faith and politics is only intensifying on the right. Gamble, Hall, Wilsey, and Mitchell help to limn the outlines of the debate and consider the likely consequences of civil religion, from the Capitol building to the sanctuary.