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.