IraChernus-UnpublishedFragmentsOnCivilReligion

Ira Chernus
PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

Here are fragments from two unpublished articles I’ve written relating to the category “American civil religion”:

U.S. civil religion was a hot topic from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. During the 1980s, the steady stream of publications on the subject slowed to a trickle. Even that trickle has now pretty much dried up, and for good reasons. One reason is a lack of intellectual coherence. The term was so broad and vague that no one was ever quite sure what it meant. In the ‘70s, efforts to classify and categorize types of civil religion got so complicated, it seemed the term could mean just about anything. As N.J. Demerath and Rhys Williams (1985:165) observed, “Discussion of the universal meanings of civil religion tenets has become an enterprise in scholasticism.” Some scholars rightly worried that it might really mean nothing at all. In 1979, John Wilson’s book Public Religion in American Culture helped to persuade many that the term “public religion” was preferable to “civil religion.” More importantly, it showed that, under a careful analysis, the concept of civil religion might quickly crumble, for lack of intellectual coherence and empirical justification.

But the problems with civil religion went much deeper. There was a growing suspicion that it was an ideological slogan masquerading as an analytical category. In academic circles the term is always linked with the famous 1967 article by Robert Bellah that brought it back into intellectual currency. Bellah seemed to be calling the U.S. back to some imagined core of universally shared, or at least universally valid, moral values that this nation was supposed to embody and promote. It was hardly an accident that his article made such a big splash precisely as most intellectuals began to question, if not directly protest, the war in Vietnam. A cottage industry sprung up around the study of civil religion, stimulated largely by a feeling that the U.S. had lost its moral compass. How could such an essentially good and decent country be doing such bad things? Some scholars hoped to find an answer by studying the many links between religion and our political life.

Ironically, the questions stimulated by the war eventually proved the undoing of the civil religion industry. Was Vietnam perhaps not an aberration from the civil religion, but a logical product of it? Did we do such bad things precisely because we believed that we were called to promote some unitary set of good values around the world? Did this belief lead to cultural imperialism and a denial of diversity, which could easily translate into political and military imperialism? Questions like these cast doubt on the underpinnings of the civil religion industry.

By the mid-‘70s, with the Vietnam war over, questions of diversity and multiculturalism began to dominate the academic agenda. In some quarters this raised other questions that seemed even more pressing: What are the sources of, the grounds for, and the route to national unity? When those questions were raised, though, many saw them as a thinly veiled attack on diversity, an effort to impose a specific set of values, which were supposedly the truly American values. The study of civil religion could not escape a similar suspicion. The way the issue had been framed, by Bellah and others, almost demanded the assumption that there was some basis for national unity. And most of the work tended, in varying degrees, to blend historical analysis with homiletic exhortation. It still called Americans back to some purported set of fundamental national values. Whatever these values might be, they had clearly originated among an elite group of white males. So there was understandable concern that the very term “civil religion” might help to foster cultural imperialism and protect the privileged status of white male discourse.

These critiques played a central role in moving the civil religion discussion out of the academic mainstream. To some extent, though, civil religion left the mainstream simply because that mainstream had shifted. In the 1980s, the political issues raised by Vietnam no longer seemed so pressing. It seemed that the proponents of cultural unity had said all they could say. Most scholars lost interest in civil religion because they had a different set of questions to ask and because the civil religion literature seemed inimical to their new concerns.

The timing was unfortunate, because at exactly that moment history was providing a magnificent case study for students of civil religion: the rise of Ronald Reagan. Academic historians of religion should have been overjoyed to have a president who talked about “a city on a hill” fighting off “the evil empire” and the political importance of prophecies of Armageddon. What great material! In fact, though, we had little to say, at least in print. We pretty much left the field to colleagues in other disciplines and to journalists. Some, like Gary Wills (1987), did a fine job. But the data and the situation cried out for informed analysis from our discipline. One fine example of what could be done was the work of Edward Linenthal, who studied the rise of Reaganism, as promoted by the Committee on the Present Danger (1989a), and one crucial result of Reaganism, the Strategic Defense Initiative (1989b).

Linenthal’s studies of the Reagan era, like his later studies of battlefields (1991) and places of commemoration (1995), offer a valuable reminder that the symbols of what we once called civil religion have never carried any simple monolithic meaning. Rather, they have been sites of often bitter contestation. There never has been a single civil religion. There have been only an unending stream of civil religions. Innumerable individuals and groups have framed their worldview and their ethos in terms akin to what Bellah and others have called civil religion. All those worldviews and ethoi are perfectly valid subjects of study. Although we can not study U.S. civil religion in the singular without inventing our subject as we go along, we can study specific civil religions.

People outside of religious studies have never ceased talking about civil religions. (Indeed, they usually use the term “civil religion” to denote the whole field of what we would call “public religion.”) If we don’t have anything to say about the subject, we leave it to others who are not as expert in the study of religious forms. If the subject is going to be discussed anyway, we ought to do what we can to keep the level of that discussion as high as possible, and to have our fair share in controlling the shape of the discourse. Along the way we can also explain why we prefer to talk about civil religions, in the plural, and we can explain the distinction between public and civil religions.

We should try to keep some control over the discussion of civil religions, not for reasons of professional ego, but because academic life ought to be, above all, an exercise in good citizenship. As scholars and teachers, we have a responsibility to serve the public in a time of bitter debate and considerable confusion. This point is often made to justify the study of religion as it is practiced in other nations. How can we be informed citizens and uphold democratic values in a world torn by religious strife, the argument goes, unless we understand the religious issues involved? If this argument is valid for Northern Ireland or the Middle East or South Asia, it is surely just as compelling for the political life of our own country. The centrality of religion in the Bush administration makes it even more urgent.

How, then, shall we understand civil religions? Linenthal’s work and the recent work of other historians of U.S. religion has reminded us that civil religions always involve place and performance. Religious studies historically has been biased toward words and ideas, and the great deal of recent work on embodiment, performance, and place is a useful corrective. Still, we can never get away from the central role of language. Consider a performance that cries out for analysis by historians of religions: the Fourth of July fireworks. In most communities, no other occasion brings together so many people, and such a wide socioeconomic cross-section, for a shared event that is not televised, but “live.” It is a fascinating civic moment. Yet what could we say usefully about that event until we have listened to the words people use, both the officially pronounced words of those in charge and the unofficial words of the ordinary spectators? The places and performances of civil religions, like all other places and performances, take on meaning primarily as they are interpreted in words.

Although civil religions always involve place and performance, they are primarily modes of discourse, intersections of language and power. Their distinctive mark is that they blend some kind of religious language with some kind of language about the United States as an imagined community—its nature, its meaning, its political life, and its world-historical role or destiny. That is a narrower definition than some people might use. I prefer it precisely because it is fairly narrow, certainly narrower than “public religion.” It defines the specifically political aspect of the realm of public religion. Of course the political is never isolated from other dimensions of public religion, and civil religions must always be studied in the larger context of public religion. But civil religions are uniquely important because they provide insight into the foundations of many other aspects of public religion. Those foundations usually remains implicit, and one valuable service historians of religion can provide is to make them explicit.

The scholarly tradition begun during the 1960s under the slogan “civil religion” still offers useful resources that can help us in this study. Of course those resources must be used carefully. The academic study of religion speaks a very different language now than it did a quarter-century ago. We ask new kinds of questions: How is discourse constructed? Who has privileged access to shaping its formulation? How is it related to social institutions and constellations of power? Since the first English immigrants arrived here, European Americans have been manipulating the language to create images of “America” and its significance. They have often passed off their language as simple description: the U.S. as a land of liberty, abundance, equality, leader of free world, etc. Or they have couched it as supposedly non-ideological rational debate: Should the U.S. show more resolve in world affairs? How can we best aid underdeveloped countries? How can we promote human rights in places like China?

Today we will recognize such descriptions and debates as discursive constructions, often with ideological overtones, deeply embedded in and influenced by religious (especially Christian) language, symbols, traditions, and doctrines. Historians of religion have a special expertise that allow us to uncover the layers of discursive construction at work in civil religions, analyze how they work, and examine theirs interactions with each other and with political, economic, and social processes, as well as with places and performances.

REFERENCES:

Demerath N.J. II and Rhys H. Williams. 1985. “Civil Religion in an Unicivil Society,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480.

Linenthal, Edward Tabor. 1989a. “War and Sacrifice in the Nuclear Age: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Renewal of Martial Enthusiasm,” in Ira Chernus and Edward Tabor, eds., A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age. Albany: State University of New York Press.

___________________. 1989b. Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

____________________. 1991. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

____________________. 1995. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking. Shepley, J. 1956.

Wills, Garry. 1987. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.

It may seem odd to look to “the ‘60s” to understand the decline in studies of civil religion materials. The study of civil religion under that particular name began with Robert Bellah’s article, “Civil Religion in America,” which was first published in 1967.[1] Civil religion was a hot topic from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. During the 1980s, the steady stream of publications on the subject slowed to a trickle. Even that trickle has now pretty much dried up, and for good reasons.

One reason is a lack of intellectual coherence. The term was so broad and vague that no one was ever quite sure what it meant. In the ‘70s, efforts to classify and categorize types of civil religion got so complicated, it seemed the term could mean just about anything. As N.J. Demerath and Rhys Williams observed, “Discussion of the universal meanings of civil religion tenets has become an enterprise in scholasticism.”[2] Some scholars rightly worried that it might really mean nothing at all. In 1979, John F. Wilson demonstrated at length that, under a careful analysis, the concept of civil religion could quickly crumble for lack of intellectual coherence and empirical justification.[3]

But the problems with civil religion went much deeper. It was hardly an accident that Bellah’s article made such a big splash precisely as most intellectuals began to question, if not directly protest, the war in Vietnam. A cottage industry sprung up around the study of civil religion, stimulated largely by a feeling that the U.S. had lost its moral compass. How could such an essentially good and decent country be doing such bad things? Some scholars hoped to find an answer by studying the many links between religion and our political life.

But the questions stimulated by the war eventually proved the undoing of the civil religion industry. Was Vietnam perhaps not an aberration from the civil religion, but a logical product of it? Did we do such bad things precisely because we believed that we were called to promote some unitary set of good values around the world? Did this belief lead to cultural imperialism and a denial of cultural diversity, which could easily translate into political and military imperialism? By the late 1970s, such questions and their implications were reshaping the academy. With the Vietnam war over, the political issues raised by the war no longer seemed so pressing. Issues of diversity and multiculturalism were dominating the academic agenda.

In some basic respects, the civil religion literature seemed inimical to these new concerns. The way the issue had been framed by Bellah and others rested on the Durkheimian assumption that there must be some consciously affirmed basis for national unity. So students of civil religion asked, either explicitly or implicitly, whether diversity carried too far might not tear the nation apart. For them, it was more urgent than ever to seek the sources of, the grounds for, and the route to national unity. Most of the writing about civil religion tended, in varying degrees, to blend historical analysis with homiletic exhortation. Many agreed with Wilson that Bellah and those who followed him were promoting a revitalization movement, calling the U.S. back to some purported core of universally shared, or at least universally valid, moral values that this nation was supposed to embody and promote.

This generated a concern that the study of American civil religion might be a thinly veiled attack on diversity, an effort to impose a specific set of values, which were supposedly the truly American values. Whatever these values might be, they had clearly originated among an elite group of white males. So there was concern that the term “civil religion” was an ideological slogan masquerading as an analytical category, a slogan that helped to foster cultural imperialism and protect the privileged status of white male discourse. In a recent brief survey of the study of civil religion, Robert Wuthnow noted among the reasons for its decline the desire for “a positive evaluation of diversity.”[4] Looking back 25 years after Bellah’s seminal article, Phillip Hammond (who sympathized and eventually collaborated with Bellah) saw this as the issue that “most profoundly disturbs critics of Bellah’s formulation of the American civil religion.”[5]

Yet Hammond seemed to confirm some of the suspicions of the critics by advancing the view that there are objective laws governing social relations that “exist independent of people’s knowledge of them,” laws that were virtually identical with “America’s ‘legitimating myth.’”[6] A decade later (35 years after his initial essay), Bellah seemed to confirm some of those suspicions, too. In the Preface to Richard Hughes’ book Myths America Lives By, Bellah asserted that “the role of world empire has been thrust upon us. … Everyone in the world today has two nationalities—the one they were born with and the American. … Chosen it seems we are, if not by God then by geopolitics. … Chosenness today is our burden.” Bellah added: “Richard Hughes writes as a Christian and so do I.”[7] Hughes endorsed Bellah’s views and added his fear that those who find no positive value in America’s myths would place the nation “in peril of disintegration. … Here we find the enduring problem that the fundamentalists of the left, who can find no good in America whatsoever, have posed.”[8] Hughes seemed to acknowledge that the study of civil religion, though begun in part as a protest against the perceived excesses of the right during the Vietnam war era, also stood as a protest against perceived excesses of the left, the proponents of radical multicultural diversity.

Very few, if any, scholars of religious studies could fairly be characterized as “fundamentalists of the left.” Yet by the mid-1980s, many were vigorous proponents of a multicultural approach to scholarship that went significantly beyond what scholars of civil religion like Bellah, Hammond, and Hughes seem prepared to accept. There were fewer and fewer scholars who feared any “peril of disintegration” from a full embrace of diversity. On the contrary, as Wuthnow noted, there was a growing belief that, if there were a civil religion, it would “benefit from internal conflict and disagreement that encourages it to change or engage in self-criticism.”[9] However, the overwhelming response from this emerging majority of scholars was not to call for a revisioning of civil religion, but simply to ignore it. Most scholars lost interest in civil religion because they had a different set of questions to ask, questions to which the civil religion literature seemed perhaps inimical, but more clearly just irrelevant.