The Changing Face Of American Civil Religion

For over two hundred years, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of "civil religion" has continued to influence Euro-American thinking about traditional Christianity's mesh with modern values of individualism, freedom, and the separation of church and state. For Rousseau, civil religion represented an understanding of God and the world whose source is common sense and reason operating independently of religious traditions, authorities and institutions. He believed that it provides the one best, permanent, and unifying alternative to the ineradicable divisiveness and mean-spiritedness of organized religion. Not surprisingly, many of America's Founding Fathers found much in Rousseau's notion to like.

In our own time, two sociologists of religion, Berkeley's Robert Bellah and Princeton's Robert Wuthnow respectively, describe American civil religion in terms of an amorphous blending of the Bible with secular understandings of a democratically-ordered society. The result, to simplify a little the nuanced contributions of these highly regarded scholars, is a peculiar amalgam of three especially prominent beliefs. The first is that both our country and our democratic institutions have a distinctively Christian foundation. The second is that the source of the strength of both is faith in God. And the third is that the United States was, is, and ever should remain a proudly Christian society.

My own take on American civil religion, from this particular description of it at least, is that it is a system of belief that seems to have functioned cavalierly in opposition to the clear intent of the First Amendment, and that it has been held in check at all only by the most diligent servants of our judicial system. Further, it is a far cry from the kind of outlook that Rousseau himself envisioned. Our own civil religion, unlike his, has at its core an appalling ignorance of history, in particular of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's excesses and the Constitutional Convention's geniuses, and basic beliefs that serve the purposes of mythology more than they do of faith.

Wuthnow's latest research, nicely laid out in his new book, After the Baby Boomers:How Twenty-and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion, suggests that 80% of present-day Americans are pretty much in agreement with at least the first two of the tenets of civil religion previously enumerated. In his analysis, though, the devil is in the generality, while the angels are in the details. One angelic detail is that younger adults hold much less strongly to American civil religion than older adults do. Another is that people with higher levels of education adhere to it less strongly than the less well educated do. For staunch civil religionists, of course, whether old or young, invoking the angels in connection with these details is likely to seem out of place. They may find little comfort in Wuthnow's finding that fewer and fewer young adults in our society believe in the kind of connection between Christianity and American values that our civil religion still takes for granted.

But civil religion at its best is about God and God's presence in the minds and hearts of human beings everywhere; putting it to the unique service of a single nation deforms its content into the very kind of tribal religion to which its exponents have always sought a better alternative. It is about a faith in God that has little to do with making either America or democracy stronger, but everything to do with making every human being, every nation, and every system of government responsive to the needs of the poor, the sick, the oppressed, and the despairing everywhere. And it is about a commonwealth that honors the Sacred in all and not in only one of its myriad expressions.

The Enlightenment's quest for a faith that can keep people from degrading and killing each other in the name of God is as important to civil order in our own time as it was to Locke's and to Voltaire's and to Kant's. To be sure, the latter's conjectures about the possibility of a religion within the bounds of reason alone were too optimistic about our ability to keep our reasoning always free from our prejudices. And they were too naive about our power to hold on to a religion without the nurture of faith communities and the protection of a democratically checked and balanced social order. But bringing all religious perspectives under the sway of the religion that is most natural to thoughtful men and women is our best guarantee against the kind of religious warfare that may end life on this planet altogether. If younger adults are getting this better than older adults are, more power to them.

Déjà Vu Economics

While many of us were otherwise occupied during the holidays, more politically conscientious fellow citizens were keeping the faith by following a long train of presidential candidates along backroads and into musty halls while struggling politely but forcibly to resist frenzied media representatives' substituting spin for candidates' words. We owe these friends of democracy a lot, even though the system seems to make their votes weightier than ours. The "vetting" they did for us in Iowa and New Hampshire beats the heck out of what we could have done ourselves.

Now that my attention has returned to looking more squarely in the face what is coming at all of us in this new year, including ideological assault and media manipulation, along with anxiety over making our votes count decisively at an historical crossroad, I am finding it interesting to read and hear that the big issue looming up all over again is the economy. It's about time. For one thing, to update the immortal words of the late Senator Everett Dirkson, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money. For another thing, in my words and not the Senator's, a tax cut here and a tax cut there, a new war here and a security plan there, and pretty soon we're talking about fewer and fewer people with access to either wealth, freedom, or a meaningful future.

There is certainly a lot to settle on the economic front. Surely the time has come for this country to guarantee at least a minimum level of health care for everyone; every developed country in the world does it, and provides better health care than we do to boot, for less money than our inequitable system costs to run. Would, for instance, allowing the current tax breaks for the upper crust to expire as they are supposed to expire, in 2010, by itself release enough money to fund universal health care? Possibly. It is morally offensive that the former is even now in place at the expense of the latter.

While we are at it, how about our representatives' really getting down to business and secure both treatment and a cure for our psychotic, double-bind thinking about so-called illegal immigration? "So-called" is the right word here; the fact that we have left unenforced the "laws" supposedly on the books strongly suggests that they do not in fact have the force of law except for law and order types whose world is the world of high abstraction and the a priori only. The economy won't work without "illegals." So let's send them all home? (A transfusion for ailing air and bus lines, or perhaps shoe manufacturers?) What about, instead, figuring out how to provide them the opportunities and benefits their service to the economy already warrants?

What will be especially worth watching in the months ahead is how the surviving candidates choose to draw upon or not draw upon their faith as they address the broader question of ensuring fairness, and even more, honesty, in the economic marketplace. I for one would like to witness less overreaching from evangelical Mike, less dissembling from Mormon Mitt, more Wesleyanism from Methodist Hillary, and more of anything from Barack without being referred to his books. If anybody else is left in the race, weigh in, too!

One thing that should be clear to all of the candidates, whether from the perspective of economics or of faith, is that the marketplace itself is neither fairness nor honesty-oriented. The ambivalences that lie deep in our sinful hearts make sure that it isn't. Nevertheless, and now from the perspective of faith, sin is not the last word on human behavior. Like every addiction and compulsion, it is forgiveable and correctible. And like all human behaviors, it is something for which we are the ones who carry the responsibility.

For the purpose of getting global economic issues in proper perspective, it might help to start with local ones. In the eighth chapter of the book of Amos, the ancient prophet spoke a word of judgment on people who treat the poor and the weak badly in the process of bringing to market goods (wheat and silver in this case) which will be fraudulently overpriced and whose producers will be bought for a pair of sandals and enslaved. In the present-day marketplace, of course, there are no longer any slaves, just "illegals." There is no longer any sanctioned discrimination, just racist attitudes and union-busting. There is no longer male and female, just glass ceilings. There is no longer separate and unequal education, just poorly funded public education for the have nots and cripplingly expensive private education for the haves. Will those candidates and party officials who have ears to hear please listen?