From time to time I’ve used the phrase “American civil religion” here at The Glittering Eye. If you’ve been curious or skeptical about the phrase, this piece by Walter A. McDougall at The American Interest puts the idea into some historical context and provides some intellectual heft:
Gorski labels its dominant strain “prophetic republicanism,†which he describes as a more nuanced version of what Bellah called civic republicanism or covenantal religion back in the 1970s. More nuanced because the loudest voices today no longer emanate from the “vital center†of ACR, but rather from two of its extremes. The first trumpets religious nationalism, a toxic brew of apocalyptic zeal, which idolizes the United States as a uniquely virtuous Christian nation endowed by Almighty God with a mission to battle falsehood and evil until the end times. The other trumpets radical secularism, a toxic blend of cultural elitism and militant atheism, which damns the United States as a deeply flawed nation that progressive politics can fix only if atavistic religion is driven from the public square. The upshot, Gorski contends, has been a polarizing culture war that has tormented Americans at least since the 1990s. In other words, the author does not see ACR declining so much as evolving, but also drifting ever further into polarized and polarizing heterodoxy.
If Chesterton was right and the United States is a “country founded on a creed”, without ties of blood or shared history we need that civil religion to bind us together and neither of those two polarized versions will do the trick.
