american political religion

One necessary lack (because he is talking about Europe) in Burleigh's Earthly Powers is much discussion (amounting to a few paragraphs) of American political religion, and its consequences. Generally, Burleigh seems to adopt the Burkean view of the American Revolution–that it was about the restoration of traditional rights and liberties–and leaves it at that. There is some discussion about American exceptionalism later on, and a bit about slavery, but that gives a rather poor outline of the role of political religion in the US, not that it needed to do more.

However, I'd like to provide an outline for talking about the history of political religion in the US. I find that the term "civic religion" is fairly useless in American discourse. We use it both to embrace typical usage of rhetoric and themes from the dominant religion of the country, and actual exhortations of a special role, ethics or place in the cosmic order for the US. What follows is not particularly deeply considered, I would like to call it a collection of notes on the idea of American political religion.

In recent times, left-wing writers have used the term "civic religion" as a contrast to Republican messianism; right-wing writers are only now using this same contrast to the messianism of the Obama administration. Our current and prior administrations have both been well within the parameters of American political religion as it has developed over the years–apostasies among their followers notwithstanding.

If modern Evangelicals and their atheist opponents are equally confused as to the religious backing of the American experiment, they can be forgiven for both using the blunt instruments of trying to match current religious expectations to the past. It is hard for us to imagine today how Enlightenment expectations conditioned the attitudes towards religion across the elite classes of Europe and North America. (In France–for an example–there was little resistance amongst the elites and bourgeoisie to the dissolution of the monasteries by both the kings and their revolutionary successors. The vita contemplativa had no place in the Enlightenment sensibility.) This is why it is hard for us to distinguish between the uses of religious rhetoric between a relatively orthodox Anglican figure like Washington, a radical like Jefferson or a still-half-Puritan Unitarian like Adams. Much like many Christians today, traditional Christians of the educated classes in the late 18th c. conformed their traditional theologies with Enlightenment ideological positions.

This means that it is hard to separate the more traditional invocations of a Washington from the more secular, political religion, inherent in a Jefferson. The tenants of this American political tradition have changed in emphasis over the years, but we can list a few dogmas (sharper folks out there can probably list many more):

1. America is good, a "city on the hill" with a unique mission to broadcast its goodness to the world.
2. It is America's destiny to expand
3. Democracy is the natural form of government because people naturally will the good and the best.

And so on. All of these have gone through significant changes, but the second and the third have been the most notable. The second initially focused on the American destiny to dominate the continent: Jefferson in particular saw a grand march of history ending in US domination of North America, its native inhabitants either to conform ("mix" their "blood with ours" to dominate the continent together as he once put it) or die away. Today it is primarily expressed, not in territorial annexation, but ideological annexation. Bush and Obama both proposed it; they differed on the means.

Americans, I believe, tend to ignore the role of actual political religion versus our imagined "civic religion" (outside of narrow applications for partisan warfare), because of the general lack of a conservative party and of a radical one. We are, generally speaking, all Enlightenment liberals, and our political debates happen within that tradition, where the role of political religion is strong, but largely without self-consciousness (in this country: view France or risorgimento Italy for examples of self-conscious liberal political religion). Furthermore, Southerners typically blame American political religion on New England, and New Englanders on the South. Today we are treated to the spectacle of Southern apologist-libertarians ridiculing Yankee paternalism and moral uprightness, and New England liberals commenting about Southern expansionism and religious justifications of various freedoms from Federal interference. Neither understand the common territory.

It is also because we believe that our political religion has not claimed victims. I think I have a reasonable counter-examples in the form of Indian Removal (which is probably the first major conflict between the wings of American political religion, as well), the religiously-infused bloody-mindedness of the Civil War (on both sides), Theodore Roosevelt's ideological presidency (which has a strange cathedral in the form of the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History), the rhetoric surrounding US entry into WWI, and so on.

However, I would also contend that the political religion of the US–on both wings–has reached a state of decadence. It can no longer clearly articulate itself ideologically, and has lost much of its previous power to motivate the masses. This is why those handful of demonstrators who seem to worship the idea of national healthcare seem like such oddballs (and are primarily populated by remnants of the older upper classes, like Episcopalians), rather than an expected part of the political scene. The Tea Partiers seem to largely represent followers of the Jeffersonian wing of American political religion. (Enjoy the irony: The followers whose beliefs most resemble Christianity now follow the wing of American political religion that initially had the least to do with Christianity.)

Any additional thoughts? I'm out on a limb, here.