Civil religion in America

Daedalus

Volumn 134, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 40-55

  Bellah, Robert N ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b American Academy   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750149811     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/001152605774431464     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is in itself an interesting problem. Part of the reason is probably the controversial nature of the subject. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political groups have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. Some of them have from time to time and as recently as the 19508 proposed constitutional amendments that would explicitly recognize the sovereignty of Christ. In defending the doctrine of separation of church and state, opponents of such groups have denied that the national polity has, intrinsically, anything to do with religion at all. The moderates on this issue have insisted that the American state has taken a permissive and indeed supportive attitude toward religious groups (tax exemption, etc.), thus favoring religion but still missing the positive institutionalization with which I am concerned. But part of the reason this issue has been left in obscurity is certainly due to the peculiarly Western concept of religion as denoting a single type of collectivity of which an individual can be a member of one and only one at a time. The Durkheimian notion that every group has a religious dimension, which would be seen as obvious in southern or eastern Asia, is foreign to us. This obscures the recognition of such dimensions in our society.
2. Quoted in Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1955), 97.
3. God is mentioned or referred to in all inaugural addresses but Washington's second, which is a very brief (two paragraphs) and perfunctory acknowledgment. It is not without interest that the actual word God does not appear until Moriroe's second inaugural, March 5, 1821. In his first inaugural, Washington refers to God as "that Almighty Being who rules the universe," "Great Author of every public and private good," "Invisible Hand," and "benign Parent of the Human Race." John Adams refers to God as "Providence," "Being who is supreme over all," "Patron of Order," "Fountain of Justice," and "Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty." Jefferson speaks of "that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe," arid "that Being in whose hands we are." Madison speaks of "that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations," and "Heaven." Monroe uses "Providence" and "the Almighty" in his first inaugural and finally "Almighty God" in his second. See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington 1789 to Harry S. Truman 1949, 82d Congress, 2d Session, House Document No. 540, 1952.
4. For example, Abiel Abbot, pastor of the First Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts, delivered a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799, Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel, in which he said, "It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence OUR AMERICAN ISRAEL is a term frequently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper."
5. Cited in Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillian Publishing Co., 1961), 665.
6. That the Mosaic analogy was present in the minds of leaders at the very moment of the birth of the republic is indicated in the designs proposed by Franklin and Jefferson for a seal of the United States of America. Together with Adams, they formed a committee of three delegated by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, to draw up the new device. "Franklin proposed as the device Moses lifting up his wand and dividing the Red Sea while Pharaoh was overwhelmed by its waters, with the motto 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.' Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness 'led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night.'" Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1950), 467-468.
7. Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 12.
8. Quoted by Arthur Lehman Goodhart in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1964), 39.
9. Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, Ibid., 88-89.
10. Quoted in Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream (New York : Harper & Brothers, 1941), 162.
11. Karl Decker and Angus McSween, Historic Arlington (Washington, D.C.: Decker and McSween Publishing Co., 1892), 60-67.
12. How extensive the activity associated with Memorial Day can be is indicated by Warner: "The sacred symbolic behavior of Memorial Day, in which scores of the town's organizations are involved, is ordinarily divided into four periods. During the year separate rituals are held by many of the associations for their dead, and many of these activities are connected with later Memorial Day events. In the second phase, preparations are made during the last three or four weeks for the ceremony itself, and some of the associations perform public rituals. The third phase consists of scores of rituals held in all the cemeteries, churches, and halls of the associations. These rituals consist of speeches and highly ritualized behavior. They last for two days and are climaxed by the fourth and last phase, in which all the separate celebrants gather in the center of the business district on the afternoon of Memorial Day. The separate organizations, with their members in uniform or with fitting insignia, march through the town, visit the shrines and monuments of the hero dead, and, finally, enter the cemetery. Here dozens of ceremonies are held, most of them highly symbolic arid formalized." During these various ceremonies Lincoln is continually referred to and the Gettysburg Address recited many times. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1962), 8-9.
13. Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Religion of Abraham Lincoln," in Nevins, Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, 72.
14. William J. Wolfe of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written: "Lincoln is one of the greatest theologians of America - not in the technical meaning of producing a system of doctrine, certainly not as the defender of some one denomination, but in the sense of seeing the hand of God intimately in the affairs of nations. Just so the prophets of Israel criticized the events of their day from the perspective of the God who is concerned for history and who reveals His will within it. Lincoln now stands among God's latter-day prophets." The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (New York: n.p., 1963), 24.
15. Seymour Martin Lipset, "Religion and American Values," in The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 310.
17. Henry Bargy, La Religion dans la société aux Etats-Unis (Paris : A. Colin, 1902), 31.
18. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 311. Later he says, "In the United States even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment, as in politics the care of their temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. Thus every man is allowed freely to Lake that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven, just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his own government" (436).
19. House, U.S. Congressional Record, March 1.5, 196.5, 4924, 4926.
20. See Louis Hartz, "The Feudal Dream of the South," in The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
21. Speech of Senator J. William Fulbright of April 28, 1966, as reported in The New York Times, April 29, 1966.
22. Quoted in Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1964), 274.