Yesterday, I discussed with my class Robert Bellah’s famous 1967 essay entitled “Civil Religion in America.” In a time when news commentators and some scholars express concern that there is too much religion in American politics, Bellah’s essay reminds us that religion has always been part of American politics and national discourse.
Referring to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Presidential Inaugural speech, Bellah remarked that President Kennedy referred to God three times in that famous speech. Bellah then asks, “Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word ‘God’ at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion.”
Before watching President Kennedy’s speech, which I suggest you do, my students wondered “Isn’t civil religion just an unspecified form of Christianity or at least monotheism?” I think not. True enough, during this speech, I counted that President Kennedy made 3 references to God, 2 references to Biblical stories (Isaiah and Paul), 1 to faith and 1 to blessings. However, he also referred 10 times to freedom, 7 times to the nation, 8 times to war or the powers of destruction, 5 times to the enemies of the U.S., and 5 times to the destiny of the U.S. in the world, and 4 times to our forbearers.
Hence, I think Bellah’s argument that civil religion is distinct from Christianity is correct. Bellah thus writes, “What we have, then, from the earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity. This religion-there seems no other word for it-while not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.” Bellah’s whole point in coining the term civil religion was precisely that our public speeches, ceremonies and monuments are full of symbolism, narratives, and references to a national destiny, intended to unite Americans under a common symbolic banner.
Watching the speech gave me the chills. Perhaps it was simply because of his marked Boston accent, so reminiscent of my now-deceased Irish-American grandparents from Cambridge. Perhaps it was because he started the speech saying that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life”–reminding me both of the fear of nuclear war that formed me in childhood and my frustration and how hard it is indeed to abolish poverty. Perhaps it was his multiple references to human rights, his call to serve the nation, or his frequent reminders that the U.S. has a mission to protect liberty in the world.
Reflecting on the larger implications of this speech with regards to current debates about religion and politics, it is worth noting that if a specific form of religion sometimes appears in political events, civil religion also does. And I think we are a better nation, a nation more true to its character, if both specific forms of religion as well as civil religion have a place in important public events. Our nation was founded on constitutional guarantee of of religious freedom, and even if referring to one’s religion or to civil religion in a public speech may turn some people off, it is neither a new phenomenon nor is it unconstitutional. To ignore the history of any particular religion or civil religion in the U.S. at important moments presidential inaugurations would certainly offend other people. Even if we somehow muffled all references to God or civil religion in political speeches, wouldn’t we lose the ability to have our leaders reflect on the larger meanings of our nation, the world and humanity?
Margarita Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Faculty Fellow in the Carolina Population Center, and the author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora. This post originally appeared on the blog, Black, White and Gray.
November 28th, 2011 | 2:02 pm
On May 4th, 2009, a bipartisan group of 25 members of the House of Representatives submitted H.Res. 397. It called on Congress to affirm “the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as ‘America’s Spiritual Heritage Week’ for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.”
The text of H.Res. 397 can be read here:
http://fota.cdnetworks.net/pdfs/2009-05-13-hres397.pdf
I submit it here for review, not because I want to convince anyone that we were founded as a Christian nation, although one might understandably conclude that after reading the numerous citations it contains that seem to indicate that, but only to point out that the contemporary understanding of many of the meaning of “separation of church and state” doesn’t even remotely reflect the thought of our Founding Fathers or the facts of history.
John Quincy Adams’ Jubilee of the Constitution speech makes this clear, the text of which can be found here:
http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/misc/1839-jub.htm
It is obvious that Adams’ understanding was that our government was founded upon natural law, or the “laws of nature and nature’s God.” This was not his unique idea, but was the view of the Founding Fathers. They were vehement in their disagreements on how to best form a government based upon theism and natural law, but in agreement on that principle. For a detailed and scholarly explanation of this, see Heir to the Fathers – John Quincy Adams and the Spirit of Constitutional Government, by Gary V. Wood.
Not in the wildest dreams of the Founding Fathers did they imagine a phrase like “separation of church and state,” which many believe actually appears in the constitution somewhere when it doesn’t at all, would be used as though it did to undermine the fundamental principle of the government they founded. Such a government indeed
And sadly,
There is no foundation for “the natural equality and inalienable rights of man” outside of “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” The mistaken manner in which “separation of church and state” is today being interpreted is destroying the greatest and noblest political/governmental experiment in the history of the world.
November 28th, 2011 | 5:19 pm
Perhaps–or it is a form of idolatry.
The modern state emerged by vacating Christianity from the public realm into the private and dominating public life. Religion went from a public expression of Christian practice to privately held beliefs with little public relevance. In order to legitimize this, the state was construed as a sort of sovereign quasi-deity on earth, which becomes evident after a few minutes of reading Thomas Hobbes or Jean Bodin.
In this respect, it is best to recall Carl Schmitt’s famous claim that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” or Walter Benjamin’s parable of the Puppet and the Dwarf, where a hidden dwarf, representing theology, manipulates a puppet playing chess, which is history. These both suggest that theology resides behind the curtain, if only transposed and hidden, animating current Western ideas on sovereignty, universalism, the religion/secular distinction, political evangelism, etc. This is what Karl Marx realized when he compared the modern state to a type of Christ: whereas the latter mediates before God on our behalf, rendering us all equal, the former makes us equal in its own sight by providing equal political rights to all its citizens. The state then is an attempt to create paradise of a sort on earth. It is also one that does so at the expense of the presence and activity of the Church by crowding it out, by demanding the use of our bodies in wars of political evangelism and domination, and by refusing to acknowledge God as the basis for human society rather than as a rhetorical justification for a secular paradise of man, for man, and by man. In all these ways and more, the state functions as a competing kingdom to the eternal one.
None of this is, of course, original or provocative amongst scholars. This is an argument that theologically conservative Catholics have made. Below is a link to an essay by one such theologian, William T. Cavanaugh, who writes almost exclusively about political theology.
http://www.jesusradicals.com/wp-content/uploads/wars-of-religion-and-the-rise-of-the-state.pdf
November 29th, 2011 | 9:41 am
Hello, JA,
Scripture and Tradition both attest to the fact that the legitimate, temporal authority of the state comes from God. The Church has its own legitimate, spiritual authority that comes from God. The best situation we can hope for in this life is for both Church and state to properly exercise their own legitimate authority and not usurp that of the other. That happening won’t bring about any kind of utopia — there can be no such thing in this life. That happening would bring about basic justice, not deliverance from all injustice or from the toil and troubles of life.
Currently the modern atheistic, secularized state has usurped not only the authority of the Church but that of God Himself, claiming for itself authority over innocent human life that belongs only to God. It has done this by pretending to authorize and legitimize taking the lives of innocent human beings via abortion and euthanasia in violation of God’s command “Thou shalt not kill.”
The Church has yet to resist rendering unto Caesar authority over innocent human life that belongs only to God to the extent the early Church resisted rendering unto Caesar worship that belonged only to God. The contemporary Church’s silent compliance with Caesar’s usurpation of God’s authority over innocent human life is the modern equivalent of burning incense to Caesar. This is indeed idolatry.
November 29th, 2011 | 5:30 pm
[...] Civil Religion in America Then and Now – Margarita A. Mooney, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
December 1st, 2011 | 12:46 pm
[...] “Civil Religion in America Then and Now,” Margarita A. Mooney, First Things [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact