Dark green religion, as I have constructed the term, involves the perception that nature is sacred and has intrinsic value, the belief that everything is interconnected and mutually dependent, and a deep feeling of belonging to nature. Often rooted in an evolutionary understanding that all life shares a common ancestor, dark green religion generally leads to a form of kinship ethics that entails ethical responsibilities to all living things. From this stance, all life is, quite literally, related—a belief that leads naturally to empathy for other living things, who, like us, have evolved through what Darwin aptly called the struggle for existence. Such perceptions generally lead people to see more continuities than differences between their own and other species, and this perception generally leads to humility about one’s place in the grand scheme of things.

I will presently say more about what a civil earth religion might involve. But, for comparative purposes, I will first summarize some conceptions about civil religion in the United States, including those presented in the preceding reflections. As Catherine Albanese noted in her essay, these reflections have run along both descriptive and normative lines.

Descriptively, some argue that the theory of civil religion has explanatory power, as it helps to account for citizen loyalty to the United States and other nation-states that justify their existence with some putative divine establishment, approval, or mission. Others find the theory empirically wanting and wish it would be abandoned. Some of those who value the proposal descriptively also consider it from an ethically normative perspective. Of these, some consider civil religion to be a pernicious social force that has legitimated imperialism and sometimes racism, first through the conquest of the continent’s aboriginal peoples, and later by promoting military adventurism abroad and economic injustice both within and beyond the nation’s borders. They contend, moreover, that by establishing the boundaries of citizenship and thus moral concern, civil religion is inevitably exclusionary, despite its pretensions of respecting pluralism, fostering unity, and promoting a higher, common good.

Defenders retort that, despite civil religion’s history and dangers, such condemnations are too categorical. For them, civil religion is not static, rooted only in an imperial mission: it also has resources for self-correction, including prophetic voices. According to this point of view, civil religion provides a basis for community that would be absent without its ability to inculcate shared values. Its defenders aver that by rooting such values in deep cultural streams, including the republic’s founding documents, and within the religious traditions of its inhabitants, it provides a basis for moving toward a culture that respects diversity, promotes justice, and creates sufficient unity to enable an ongoing struggle for authentic democracy.

For my part, I am ambivalent about civil religion. I agree that the notion has explanatory power. Both in the USA and in other nations, there is strong evidence that a generic, non-sectarian religiosity has often been used to reinforce patriotism and even, sometimes, virulent religious nationalism. I think, however, that the critics often ignore or downplay times when oppressed individuals and groups have turned the tables on those in power by demanding consistent application of the nation’s own stated ideals, whether these echo Abrahamic traditions or natural law philosophies that have advanced specific freedoms from arbitrary state power. The archetypal figure in this regard is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. In promoting civil rights, King drew on the soaring rhetoric of the nation’s founding documents, which were steeped in European notions of natural rights, as well as on prophetic streams in the Bible and principled non-violence, the origins of which he attributed to Jesus and Gandhi.

It may also be, however, that the root of civil religion’s power lies in the human need to belong, whether to tribe, nation, or holy cause. From an evolutionary perspective, we can even plausibly postulate that this trait is deeply rooted in our genome because it has adaptive or survival value. In any case, since the best known version of civil religion theory has focused on the United States, and given the robust debate about it that has followed, it should be obvious by now that categorical normative assessments, whether positive or negative, cannot easily prevail.

What, then, if we change our frame of reference to include the fundamental shift in human understanding of our place in the world and how we got here, which is exemplified by the Darwinian revolution and has been spreading globally ever since? What, then, if we speculate, based on currently observable trends, not just a few years or decades into the future, but a century or more?

Trends easily discernible since the middle of the nineteenth century, and that began to intensify in the middle of the twentieth, reveal that, while nascent, the “dark green” nature religion that I introduced at the outset of this essay, and have detailed in a recent book, is spreading rapidly, if unevenly, around the world. While some devotees of the world’s largest and best known religious traditions are grafting dark green perceptions and values onto their own traditions, this trend is unfolding more dramatically outside of long established religious traditions. Indeed, it is most powerfully expressed within the ecological milieu, namely, those social spaces where diverse individuals and groups encounter and mutually influence one another as they struggle to understand and respond to an increasingly alarming global environmental crisis.

Participants include environmentalists and scientists, politicians and diplomats, artists, writers, filmmakers, business people, professors, and museum curators, as well as mountaineers, surfers, gardeners, and many others. Some of these actors believe in the existence of non-material divine beings, others are agnostic or atheistic, but they all affirm an evolutionary, ecological worldview. Those who are good examples of dark green spirituality have often had experiences of awe, wonder, and belonging to nature. Some add that they understand, personally and/or scientifically, the possibility of communication, and even communion, with non-human organisms. Their most common shared value is that all organisms, and the environmental systems upon which life depends, should be treated with respect, if not also reverence. Among those with dark green perceptions and values, however, the overall trend appears to be toward more secular forms.

Is it possible, then, at least when thinking long-term, that such perceptions and values could provide an affective and intellectual basis for a planetary civil earth religion? If so, can such a civil religion (spirituality, or worldview) withstand the criticisms typically leveled against civil religion, at least when it is associated with nation-states?

When speculating about the future on the basis of current trends, it is possible to conceive of the emergence of a planetary civil earth religion. Such a religion would shift, or supplement, current identities and loyalties linked to nationality, ethnicity, or religion to those inspired by allegiance to the biosphere. With such a shift, one’s identity as an earthling would come to trump other identities. The political theorist Dan Deudney has even argued that a planetary civil religion, for which he cleverly coined the term “terrapolitan earth religion,” is not only possible but needed as an affective basis for environmental values as well as for a federal-republican Earth Constitution. Such a constitution, he contends, is a prerequisite to the construction of an international political system capable of reversing the global decline of environmental systems. It is Deudney’s view, and that of many environmental and social scientists, that environmental decline is already causing the collapse of many ecosystems around the world, with corresponding—and intensifying—stresses on the human societies that depend upon them.

To those who fear that terrapolitan identities and political institutions represent totalitarian perils or utopian fantasies, Deudey’s comments about nationalism provide a counter-argument. Nationalism, Deudney notes, involves “an identity and loyalty based upon the experiences and feelings of connectedness to a particular place or area.” Since civil religion reinforces place-based national identities, then it is at least conceivable that the consecrated place could be the biosphere, rather than one or another nation.

Concrete evidence of just such a possibility can be seen in those whose primary identity is, already, as an evolutionary and earthly being, and whose preeminent political loyalty is to the biosphere, rather than to any human political system. We can also consider whether Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of topophilia, E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, or other theories purporting to uncover people’s natural connections to nature, might also lend plausibility to the terrapolitan vision.

(As a quick side note: Those I have mentioned as pioneers of such a terrapolitan vision are not guilty of charges that they are environmental determinists, for they recognize that ecosystems and human cultures are mutually influential. They are, therefore, best understood as theorists of bio-cultural evolution, even though, as natural scientists, they generally have more insights into biological influences than cultural ones. For such theorists, any evolutionarily shaped predisposition to value nature is not causal; it also requires cultural reinforcement. This would not be the case were these theorists environmental determinists.)

In addition to providing provocative thoughts that address the possibility of terrapolitan spirituality and polity, Deudney contends that what he has also called “Gaian Earth Religion,” “Earth Nationalism,” and “green culture” would be significantly different and far less dangerous than other forms of political religion. Green culture would “replace or moderate state and ethnic nationalism rather than make it more truculent,” Deudney believes, because “environmental awareness brings with it awareness of the interconnected and interdependent character of the earth’s diverse inhabitants.” Expressing sympathy for James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Deudney also suggests that unlike religions established long ago, earth religion has “a moderate worldview with a scientifically credible cosmology.” It could, therefore, have greater staying power in the modern world and eventually, “underpin the social norms and behaviors of restraint that are necessary to achieve a sustainable society [. . .] providing a system of meaning that can span generations and foster a sense of transgenerational communal identity.”

This is a plausible argument because the traits typical of what I have labeled dark green religion, and which I see as exemplary of the earth religion Deudney envisions—such as a stress on ecological interdependence, an affective connection to the earth as home and to non-human organisms as kin, and resistance to anthropocentric hubris—are unlikely to promote cultural homogenization, xenophobia, or jingoism. This unlikelihood is evinced by the concrete examples of such spirituality that have already emerged and spread widely, encouraging terrapolitan earth identities, undergirding the global sustainability movement, and promoting humane and environmentally responsible public policies and institutions. Moreover, while many involved in these efforts consider themselves secular and eschew beliefs in non-material divine beings or forces, still others retain conventional religious beliefs while grafting onto them either a newly invented or ecologically enriched reverence for nature. So, for the most part, the more conventionally religious involved in these movements, and those whose spirituality is grounded in more naturalistic understandings, coexist with little friction, for they recognize that they share more with those who understand the biosphere as sacred, and who are working to protect and restore its environmental systems, than with those who are indifferent or hostile to such objectives.

In 1990, when we first met, Professor Deudney and I discussed the possibility that a few shared values, understood as spiritually significant, even if in different ways, might eventually provide a basis for new forms of environmental and political cooperation, both within and between nations. We were not the first to wonder if a form of civil religion might emerge that would support international cooperation, promote peace, and provide an antidote to virulent religious nationalisms. Early on, Robert Bellah had envisioned such a possibility, and in a September 2008 interview with Mark Jurgensmeyer, Bellah even approvingly observed that the sacredness of the human person and of the planet “is a view that transcends any nation and is shared by millions all over the earth.”

I have sought through my ethnographic and historical analysis to show that these trends are assuming an increasingly naturalistic/secular orientation, and that they are gaining traction much more rapidly than has been commonly recognized. I have also argued that dark green religion has characteristics that can function in ways that resemble what scholars have referred to as civil religion. What Deudney has illuminated especially well is that the perceptions and ideas inherent in earth religion make it unfriendly to religious nationalism, while suggesting hopefully that earthen spirituality might well develop in ways that are both ecologically and politically salutary.

I conclude in a more speculative direction. I think that profound changes began with the publication, 150 years ago, of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species that will eventuate in a decisive watershed in human culture and religion. For the first time there is a cosmogony capable of being compelling, in its main outlines at least, to the world’s intelligentsia (including educators and other thought leaders, economic elites, and political decision makers). There are also communicative technologies ubiquitous enough to spread this evolutionary cosmogony wherever powerful political and religious forces allow it to propagate. This evolutionary cosmogony is generally fused, as well, to an ecological understanding of the interdependence of life. This hybridized, evolutionary/ecological worldview is spreading widely and rapidly. Sometimes it is being grafted onto existing religious worldviews, but for an increasing number of human beings, it provides a self-sufficient meaning system, one that is often also considered a source of spirituality and ethical guidance.

This perceptual revolution has faced incredulity and resistance, of course, yet it is no different in this regard from earlier cognitive shifts that decisively changed the way most people who are reasonably well educated view the universe and the human place in it. The evolutionary/ecological revolution will continue to win minds in a world that, at least if we extend the time horizon well into the future, will most likely be far more secular than it is today, for this worldview does not require beliefs in invisible beings or cosmic processes, but rather, on ordinary human senses (as enhanced, of course, by our increasingly clever gadgets). That this trend is present wherever educational systems are relatively strong also provides evidence that this revolution is here to stay and will continue to gather strength.

Another reason the evolutionary/ecological revolution must continue to strengthen is that, without an understanding of ecological interdependence, human beings will not succeed, long-term, in developing economies and social systems that can live within the carrying capacity of the habitats upon which they depend. Put bluntly, human societies that do not understand population dynamics and the human dependence on ecological systems will eventually collapse, taking with them their maladaptive cultural systems, including the religious beliefs and practices that hindered or prevented such understandings. Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems, religious or not, eventually kill their hosts.

Whether we are interested primarily in the descriptive aspects of the civil religion thesis, or more in the variety of moral issues that the phenomenon raises, or are concerned about the long-term viability of our species, we would be wise to broaden the geographic and chronological range of our analysis as we consider its characteristics, impacts, and future. When we do so, we may well discover that powerful new forms are emerging in which it is not the nation but the biosphere that is considered sacred and worthy of reverent defense. We would also be wise to wonder whether such developments constitute an ecologically and socially adaptive form of bio-cultural evolution.

I recall a course I taught on “American civil religion” a few years ago, when I was beginning to prepare an essay on the subject for a volume of essays that will appear this spring. For weeks, I patiently guided my students through some three decades worth of cogent criticism of the concept. I made it clear that the thing is indeed an artificial concept, not a natural object—an invention of American scholars (most notably Robert Bellah), drawing on European thinkers (most notably Durkheim, with the inevitable nod to Rousseau). I pointed out a recurring concern of the scholarly critics: If no one can say exactly what the thing is, perhaps it should be written off as (like the vampire) a mythical beast.

When it was all done, the class discussion made it clear that the students, having understood the validity of all the critiques, nevertheless clung to the concept. For reasons that they themselves could scarcely understand, they just didn’t want to let it go. I get the same feeling reading some of the previous contributions to this discussion.

The most recent contribution, from Richard Amesbury, offers a valuable clue to the persistence of “American civil religion”: “Pluralist democracies like the United States depend on unifying acts of collective imagination,” Amesbury asserts (without demonstrating, as far as I can tell). “The moral challenge posed by the democratic ideal of equal citizenship is to imagine anew, to think differently about what ‘we’ mean when ‘we’ talk about ‘ourselves’ as a nation.”

The mythical “America” seems as resistant to attack as the mythical vampire because “America” gives so many of its inhabitants a sense of belonging to something vast, grand, even pivotal in world history. Who would want to be a small lonely individual, a cosmopolite with no anchor, when one can be firmly rooted in an enduring project of cosmic import? Who would want to sacrifice that sense of collective importance when it can be purchased at the mere price of imagining and saying a national “we”?

At this point, though, some readers may recall the immortal response of Tonto, when the Lone Ranger warned him that “we are surrounded by Indians.” (“What you mean, we?” was Tonto’s reply, for those who have forgotten the old joke). Readers who have followed the whole discussion on the subject know that some of the contributors are indeed skeptical about Amesbury’s assumption of a meaningful “we,” and with good reason. As Amesbury himself acknowledges, “the moral borders of a democratic state are inherently fuzzy and contestable, always provisional and subject to being redrawn.” In other words, no one knows who this “we” is or might be.

My argument against continuing to use the concept relies partly on this empirical observation, but more on theoretical concerns about the dangers of insisting on imagining an American “we.” However “American civil religion” may be defined, the very use of that combination of words is likely to contain a tendentious agenda and to foster the belief that there should be something “religious” (in a largely Protestant sense) about American identity. It surely perpetuates (albeit sometimes unintentionally) the underlying Durkheimian premise of the whole “civil religion” discussion: that all Americans should, or even must, share some common values that are acted out in the political realm. The very words “American civil religion” always suggest that it is legitimate, perhaps even necessary, to debate about right ways and wrong ways to be American. Thus, the concept divides society unnecessarily and mitigates against a thoughtful, open-minded public life that truly values diversity.

Any act of imagining a “we” tends to do the same. Whenever “we” are imagined and common values articulated, the process is hardly shared in equally by all the inhabitants of the land. Some have more power than others in shaping the process and its outcomes. So the premise that unity is necessary will most often end up privileging the views of the most powerful segments of society. They typically define themselves as the upholders of supposedly common values, hence as the most virtuous, and pit themselves against purported evildoers. Thus they undermine the very unity they seek—which is probably a good thing, since the unity they seek is bound (again, as Amesbury acknowledges) to exclude other members of their own nation.

Even more inevitably, it will pit their America, and all too often its armies, against other nations—which brings us back to the tragic matter of bloodshed and the vampiric nature of “American civil religion.” Despite the long history of compelling arguments against the concept, no one has been able to forge a stake strong enough to pierce its heart. Or perhaps the stake is already there in the copious critical literature, but no scholar has had the requisite combination of strength and accuracy to drive it home.

Which brings me to one last concern about the ongoing debate over “American civil religion.” Even the best scholar has limited energy and limited time. Every moment and every drop of mental sweat spent in theoretical debate about “civil religion”—even in efforts to kill it—takes a scholar away from more important subjects. Those who are drawn to this debate obviously have a strong interest in what John F. Wilson once called the “cultural materials in which we might locate the potential for an American civil religion.” Those materials, Wilson added, “are better understood as aspects of an incredibly rich and internally complex culture.”

In my own field, the academic study of religion, those particular aspects of American culture have tended to be neglected for a long time—largely, I think, because studies of them were suspected of being surreptitious ways of reviving the study of “American civil religion,” a field that most scholars in religious studies have eschewed for nearly three decades. Yet in those three decades immensely important events and processes have unfolded in the U.S. public arena which cried out for carefully scholarly analysis.

Now the cry is finally beginning to be answered. Yet I fear that the response may get bogged down once again (as it did in the 1970s) in endless speculations about a mythical beast. What we need instead are illuminating analyses of the cultural traditions and practices that allow the palpable, and all too often murderous, injustices of the state to continue. Both the content and the methods of the academic study of religion afford unique insights into that thicket of questions.

Having made my feeble effort to push the stake at least a few millimeters into the heart of “American civil religion,” I shall return to the daily task of untangling a few branches of that thicket, keeping in mind John Wilson’s wise observation: “Recalling the civil religion exchanges opens the door to asking whether less condensed and more diffused means of attachment to the collective society may exist that link Americans in whole or in part to the nation. As this line of questioning has been pursued, it is increasingly disconnected from the civil religion question.” And so it should be.

At the heart of the democratic enterprise lies a paradox: on the one hand, democracy is possible only when there is a demos—a people—and constituting a demos inevitably produces exclusions. In other words, citizenship requires that we distinguish insiders from outsiders, and the democratic struggle among citizens to be treated equally to one another is almost always, in effect, a quest to be treated differently from those outside the polity. On the other hand, there is no democratic way of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, of determining who belongs and who does not. The question of who gets to vote, for example, cannot, on pain of circularity, be decided by a vote. In short, democracy seems both to demand and to resist closure: it necessarily requires exclusions, but no particular exclusion can be justified democratically. The result is that the moral borders of a democratic state are inherently fuzzy and contestable, always provisional and subject to being redrawn.

Historically, of course, one way of legitimating the nation and establishing collective identity has been by linking civic or political membership, on the one hand, with religious belonging, on the other. The concept of “civil religion” captures something, though not the whole, of this relation. To the extent that scholarly discussion of American civil religion has tended to focus on public rituals and the pronouncements of elected officials, on what is explicit, centralized, and produced by elites—references to God in Presidential inaugural addresses are often treated as paradigmatic of the genre—it has tended, unfortunately, to obscure the rhizomatic character of what might be termed American civic imaginaries. These imaginaries operate largely below the surface of explicit discourse and can survive, even flourish, when certain of their more visible appurtenances have been pruned away. By contrast, the more explicit forms of civil religion, though not simply epiphenomenal, are nevertheless dependent on the subterranean formations of the civic imagination: cut off from these, they quickly wither.

Religion is simply one possible dimension of collective self-understanding, and even when religion and political membership have been linked, the nature of this linkage has been differently articulated, evolving largely in response to perceived threats to the nation. Earlier understandings have tended not so much to be replaced by as sublated into newer ones. The conception of the United States as a “Christian nation,” for example—though still an influential imaginary in its own right—was reconfigured during the middle of the twentieth century into a new, more “pluralistic” narrative. On this new account, which I have described elsewhere on this blog, America was portrayed as a religious nation, in contrast to the “Godless” Soviet Union. In his 1955 book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Will Herberg wrote, “It may indeed be said that the primary religious affirmation of the American people, in harmony with the American Way of Life, is that religion is a ‘good thing,’ a supremely ‘good thing,’ for the individual and the community. And ‘religion’ here means not so much any particular religion, but religion as such, religion-in-general.” The construction of “religion in general”—and of the “world religions” as species of this larger genus—emerged in conjunction with the identification of “secularity” as its contrast case, and it was against the specter of “atheism” that the imagined community of “America” as a religiously plural nation came to be defined. The sometimes strident rhetoric of the “new atheists” can be interpreted in part as a contemporary response to the ongoing social exclusion of “unbelievers.”

Currently, a new, post-9/11 discourse of religion is emerging. Whereas earlier ways of linking civic and religious belonging contrasted Protestantism with Catholicism, Christianity with other religions, or “religion” with “secularity,” this new discourse distinguishes “genuine religion,” conceived quasi-pluralistically, from various ostensibly “political” phenomena said to be operating “in its name.” By means of a curious inversion of traditional Orientalist rhetoric about the excessive “religiosity” of the other (and in obvious tension with competing constructions of national identity, both Christian and secularist), movements deemed threatening to the American order are increasingly depicted as not religious enough. In this way, the potential for violence is placed outside the boundaries of “true religion,” and safely external to the civic self-understanding.

On Bellah’s account, the American civil religion is a religious tradition in its own right, distinct from and existing alongside the Protestant Christianity from which (much of) it has been “selectively derived.” Although subsequent commentators have preferred to treat civil religion as a more diffuse phenomenon, usually dropping the definitive article, they have agreed that the adjective “civil” serves usefully to delimit a particular modality or style of American religiosity. Though protean, civil religion, it seems to be assumed, can be distinguished more or less cleanly from non-civil religion—that is, from religion untainted by the politics of national identity: religious religion. But recasting the discussion in terms of the broader question of religion’s role in the construction of national identity (and vice versa) brings into view a messier picture. What is allowed to count as genuine “religion” is deeply intertwined with how Americans understand themselves collectively, and the content of civil religion sensu stricto is largely moulded to fit the shared theological and symbolic space, however cramped, in which the various socially permissible creeds overlap: hence the difficulty of bringing atheism into the fold. Even ostensibly “private” forms of religion and spirituality are implicated in the rhizomatic structure of these civic imaginaries.

Another advantage of distinguishing conceptually between civil religion and civic imaginaries is that it allows us to see that many of the claims to necessity advanced on behalf of the former properly pertain only to the latter: a house divided against itself cannot stand, but its foundation need not be religious (or anti-religious, for that matter). Even if pluralist democracies like the United States depend on unifying acts of collective imagination, there is nothing inevitable or necessary about American civil religion, and scholars would be wise to avoid taking upon ourselves the role of its apologists. Every democracy has its limits, but where they lie is a matter of perpetual political negotiation. The moral challenge posed by the democratic ideal of equal citizenship is to imagine anew, to think differently about what “we” mean when “we” talk about “ourselves” as a nation, and then to do it all over again.

Philip Gorski argues for revivification by using categorization: he saves the idea of civil religion by distinguishing it from “religious nationalism” and from “radical secularism,” as if civil religion were the “mean” between them. While “religious nationalism” links nation to “blood” and produces “excessive” unity, and while “radical secularism” is invested only in individual autonomy and produces “excessive fragmentation,” the “balance” between “solidarity and pluralism” can be sustained by “civil religion,” defined as a “mode of civic engagement” centered on the idea of covenant. In a parallel formulation he says: “liberal secularists believe that religious and political spheres should be radically separated; religious nationalists believe that they should be tightly integrated; and civil religionists believe that they should be overlapping but interdependent.” Similar moves characterize arguments claiming to distinguish “civic” from “ethnic” forms of nationalism, or claiming to distinguish properly “liberal” from “ascriptive” languages in the American political tradition, as if these were really separate strands in reality, and not artifacts of definition.

While there may be some truth in such categorizations, we need to see them for what they are: efforts to salvage a concept or practice from contamination by intellectual surgery, which separates out the violence or domination historically associated with it. As Bellah himself readily acknowledged about Vietnam, and as Pamela Klassen argues in her essay on native peoples, the American language of civil religion is inseparable from expansionism, racialized domination, and state violence; though some have indeed invoked elements of civil religion to oppose those practices, such critics were and remain marginal(ized). Speaking from the point of view of indigenous peoples, Klassen thus shows that the language of covenant and law—civil religion rightly understood, in Gorski’s view—has been and remains linked to state violence. His effort to save the concept by academic redefinition, then, repeats the ongoing disavowal that violence underwrites civil religion—or covenant and law—for others.

In earlier posts, I argued that Obama does speak the language of civil religion, in the senses that Bellah imagined and that Gorski endorses. But the example of Obama thus proves how this language cannot be saved from its history or sanitized by categorical fiat; for we should recognize that he speaks this language as the chief executive officer of the national security state. He does not literally claim that the United States is god’s chosen people, mandated to impose freedom on other parts of the world, but he insists that our power rests ultimately on our character and ideals, that we have never sought to dominate others, and that we have made mere “mistakes” of judgment (neither faults of intention nor criminal acts) in our exercise of state violence. He seems like a “realist,” rather than a “Wilsonian,” in foreign policy, unlike his predecessor, but under conditions when the United States is at once a nation and an imperial power, these categories cannot readily be separated in political and rhetorical practice, just as we cannot sever civil religion from its association with both nationalism and violence.

I do not see civil religion as a dying discourse, therefore, but as a hegemonic language, replenished precisely as the reality of American power erodes under the impact of globalization. The United States is an empire in decline, as well as a nation under enormous economic duress, and civil religion remains the language by which people here struggle to engage and make sense of those circumstances. The very decline of American power will intensify attachment to the language and symbols typically associated with civil religion, and politicians will feel incredible pressure to invoke it, because they strategically seek electoral legitimacy, and because they themselves are deeply invested in, gripped by, an “American” political identification. The only alternative is that Americans mourn their investment in empire—i.e., in being god’s chosen nation and the “world’s greatest superpower”—to confront and accept the loss of a beloved identity and worldly power. Then, perhaps, a melancholy and compensatory attachment to the language of civil religion can recede. The political challenge, therefore, is to find ways to avow (rather than deny) a complex history of economic predominance and state violence, but also our relative economic decline, and the impossibility of exercising unilateral and worldwide military power. We need to re-present, or re-conceive, these losses as an opportunity to make them into conditions of democratic possibility. That would mean admitting, at long last, that we are the United States, not “America,” one profane nation among others, called neither to an exemplary nor to a coercive supremacy.

As David Kim argued, the closest an elected American leader came to this perspective is Lincoln, who called the United States god’s “almost chosen,” and who insisted that neither North nor South—and so not the re-unified nation either—could claim god’s sanction. This is the spirit of humility that Bellah sought to foreground in his version of civil religion, and it is this spirit that some see in Obama today, particularly because he has seen the national frame from the outside and from below. But the greatest native version of this perspective remains the prophetic, which de-centers the valuation of any nation as a form of idolatry, and which advances a critical perspective on its injustice by avowing identification with those it casts out or renders invisible.

Therefore, rather than imagine a civic nationalism or covenantal civil religion that we can save from a long history of violence in its name, let us instead ask what the investment in nation means if we see it as the idolatry it is. If we take seriously Bellah’s association of civil religion with covenant, and if the meaning of covenant is to live by promises rather than coercion, then surely democracy is the value “behind” or “in” the national(ist) form of civil religion. No doubt, “democracy” is a discourse authorizing American nationalism and state power, so creedal assertion does not assure any particular (e.g., egalitarian or non-violent) political outcome; and indeed, as Talal Asad argues, “democracy” as a discourse has historically justified state violence. But as Asad also argues, we need to see religion less as creedal assertion and more as embedded, embodied practice. In just these terms, in turn, David Morgan’s post redefines “civil religion,” not as a set of beliefs, but as a body of practices that convene people and conjure their aspirations toward a future. While Morgan holds onto the national frame, and repeats the futile effort to distinguish a “civic patriotism” from its dark double, his turn toward practices is incredibly important as a way to think what “religion” means if we put the focus on democracy, rather than nationality.

Morgan focuses on the speech-acts by which political collectivity is imagined, summoned, gathered, called to commitment and action. He does not replace the nation, but he does imagine a non-theist civic religion, in which speech-acts replace (the idea of) god with (the idea of) the future, and so with the gap between present experience and ideals, between aspirations and their realization. Morgan thus imagines what he calls a “horizontal” transcendence in temporal terms of a not-yet, and I would add to that an imagined relationship with the dis-remembered, in the present and not only the past—another site of a horizontal “transcendence” that breaks through what is exclusionary in the consensus of “the people” as it now constitutes itself. If we imagine democracy, not as creedal doctrine, but as liturgical practices embedded in ordinary life, then perhaps we can salvage something of value from the nationalist (and religious) traditions braided by the discourse of civil religion. To truly listen to those the enfranchised have cast out as others, to hear their experience of the conduct of the enfranchised and their sense of their own needs, and to debate what that testimony means about how security and identity are conceived, is to begin to rebuild a democratic life in which “the people,” or political community, is reconstituted. That life has creedal elements, to be sure, but politics is a relation to people, not principles, and is thus a relation that requires listening as well as claim-making and conflict. My thought, then, is to shift from seeking to define a benign civil religion focused on state sovereignty in national form, as if democracy is thereby housed or engendered, to exploring “democracy” directly in popular and local, but also electoral practices. We should ask what practices constitute this form of life, and should identify the dispositions, capacities, and commitments we must try to engender if we are to sustain it. Such questions by no means require a localist answer, and indeed will generate arguments in favor of state power, as well as deep conflict over competing claims to represent both “the people” and a democratic faith.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Political Religion”

Once he was elected President, the candidate of hope, Barack Hussein Obama, sought to dispel the messianic expectations placed on him by his followers at home and abroad—an attempt at hope management that had mixed results. Among scholars, however, his election has clearly carried with it the power to resurrect a scholarly category that some had declared well and truly dead, namely, civil religion. In the heady weeks after his election, which occurred just the day after the American Academy of Religion meetings closed in a Chicago that had been awash in pre-election social sentiments of anticipatory pleasure and dread, the North American Religions Group and the Religion and Politics Group of the AAR decided to hold a panel on “Revisiting Civil Religion” at the 2009 meetings in Montreal.

Montreal was a particularly appropriate site for such a return. A civic polity not part of the United States, shaped by both the political traditions of Rousseau and the Roman Catholic Church, its very foreignness forced the US-based panelists to catch themselves when using what David Kyuman Kim called the “register of the collective ‘we’.” At the same time, Quebec’s own conflicted history of “civil religion,” rooted in profound contests over sovereignty, was a reminder of how civic identity is premised, at least in part, on the violence of imperial conquest—in this case, the French subjugation of the Mohawk, Cree, and other First Nations, and in turn that of the French by the English. These legacies of conquest still haunt any possibility of civic covenant in North America, and probably always will.

Civil religion, in its 1967 revision by Robert Bellah, was a powerful discourse brewed from a mix of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument for rooting the authority of the state in the social contract and what Bellah argued were some of the most testing trials of US history: the war against the British monarch for independence; the violent struggle to abolish slavery’s legitimating conceit that one human being could own another; and the simmering, as well as boiling, conflicts over the global influence of capitalism vs. that of communism, as Americans were faced with, in Bellah’s words, the “problem of responsible action in a revolutionary world.” Bellah argued that US civil religion—as the symbols, rituals, and beliefs of the nation-state expressed outside of the parameters of organized religious institutions—was in sore decline. At the same time, he pleaded for a “world civil religion” that could establish a “genuine transnational sovereignty” in the United Nations or a similar, globally legitimated institution, and which would draw on religious traditions beyond “the sphere of biblical religion alone.” All of Bellah’s trials, rooted as they were in the spilling of blood in the service of three very particular forms of freedom, were also trials of sovereignty—of where the power to govern others was to be located, and on what grounds it could be claimed and preserved.

For Rousseau, such sovereignty was best rooted in three bases: “the sacred nature of the social contract, and of the laws,” the existence of a “powerful, intelligent, beneficent, prescient, and provident Divinity,” and the cultivation of “sentiments due to a society” that would make for both “good citizens” and “faithful subjects” engaged in the “passion of being-together.” Any kind of religious intolerance was anathema to civil religion for Rousseau, who largely—but not entirely—saw such intolerance coming from Christian sources: “But whosoever should presume to say: There is no salvation out of the pale of our church, ought to be banished [from] the State, unless indeed the State be an ecclesiastical one, and the prince a pontiff.” Drawing a genealogy of civil religion that traced the path of sovereignty through Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim examples, Rousseau clearly wanted to banish most Christian versions of “political religion” from his ideal, without entirely letting go of the power of the Christian-inflected deity.

Drawing more from Bellah and Max Weber than from Rousseau, Philip Gorski is engaged in a new project to revivify civil religion, in which he distinguishes among three types of American traditions for imagining the relations between religion and politics: civil religion, religious nationalism, and secular rationalism. Since he clarifies them himself in his own post, I won’t do so here. Gorski frankly states that his project is aspirational—in fact, normative. He sees civil religion as the best way forward, against the spectre of violence and intolerance in religious nationalism and the impractical myopia of the secular rationalists. Civil religion makes space for both overlap and independence of the religious and the political, argues Gorski, an overlap that then allows for an effective balance of pluralism and solidarity. Gorski, with Barack Obama as his most eloquent spokesperson, argues for American civil religion as a mode of civic engagement that can overcome—or perhaps avoid—conflicts over first principles, or the specificities of theological convictions, by way of a shared commitment to justice, liberty, and democracy.

David Kyuman Kim, by contrast, puts Obama’s speeches to a very different end in his call for the “mourning” of American exceptionalism and the cultivation of an “elegiac temperament.” For Kim, Obama’s eloquence risks reinscribing the ideology of American imperialism, albeit in a friendlier guise. He argues that the myth of American exceptionalism underwrites Obama’s pledge that America’s “beacon” still burns bright enough to defeat its enemies, but that this is an exhausted exceptionalism that must be mourned with what he hopes is the death of American imperialism. At the same time, Kim, with Abraham Lincoln as his inspiration, hopes for an America that will be, in the future, a more perfect union.

Approaching civil religion neither from Gorski’s normative framework nor from Kim’s elegiac hope, David Morgan, in his argument about the material culture and embodied sensations of civil religion, demonstrates why scholars need more methodological reflexivity in their use of political speeches as data for their arguments for or against civil religion. Exploring the “social sentiments” of civil religion and the aesthetics of its performance, Morgan argues, would show how the “social body” imagines the nation in idealizations of the past and the future. In a similarly decentering approach, Ebrahim Moosa argues for a comparative approach to gauge both the utility and problems of the concept of civil religion. Moosa is less optimistic than Kim that such a “future perfect” can be achieved without a more profound break from what Kim describes, following Bellah, as the “pieties” of civil religion. For Moosa, “American civil religion is part of the problem, and not part of the solution.” In a world where yet another war, or set of wars, is being waged with American civil religion as one of its fundaments, the “mourning” of civil religion is perhaps premature. Revisiting civil religion, then, requires examining when and for whom it works as an aspirational project.

How different, then, are Canadians and Americans invested in the notion of civil religion from the Greeks, who rediscovered their gods in the barbarians only to assert their natural sovereignty over them? Rousseau came to this insight, of course, at the same time that the French and the British were making their own fantasies of sovereignty into reality, in the Thirteen Colonies, New France, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Whether Roman Catholicism, varieties of Protestantism, or capitalist expansion (or, in complicated ways, all three) undergirded their projects, the British and French clearly leaned on economies of transcendence to achieve the displacement and destruction of Native peoples.

A few minutes after chairing the lively AAR panel on revisiting civil religion, I moved to another room in the Montreal Convention Centre to chair a very different session, entitled “Our Home and Native Land: Colonial Encounters and the History of Religion, Spirituality, and the Secular.” This panel, convened together with my AAR colleagues Ebrahim Moosa and Lou Ruprecht, gave me a remarkably divergent perspective on the question—or even the possibility—of civil religion. Bringing together scholars of colonialism and Native American traditions in the Americas—Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Ines Talamantez—with the documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin and the poet and literary critic George Elliott Clarke, the panel clearly and painfully articulated the violent effects of fantasies of sovereignty. The panelists showed that whether at the level of language imposition, scholarly categorization, or the continued battles over fishing rights and “land claims” in Canadian and US courts of law, sovereignty is still actively contested in North America. George Elliott Clarke’s reading of his poem “The Gospel of X” was a virtuoso performance of the possibilities of transforming what counts as “civility” or even “religion” in a vivid play with language. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ines Talamantez, and Alanis Obomsawin all demonstrated, in different ways, how colonial languages have been one of the primary tools for the enactment of colonial sovereignty. Obomsawin, in her more than forty years as a filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada, has used imagery and conversation to both depict and challenge the contested, and far from natural, construction of sovereignty in Canada, in both religious and political registers. In a conversation after the panel, I asked Obomsawin what she considered to be the path forward, if not to a future perfect, then at least to a future. Her reply: “to listen.”

As an aspirational project with such deeply colonial convictions of political power, can civil religion really function as a critical tool for the scholar of religion? So clearly indebted to a Christian political theology of covenant (informed in various ways by older and more recent traditions of Jewish thought) that has been premised on the violent destruction of other lifeways, most notably those of Native Americans, can civil religion be a category that describes anything more than sovereignty premised on a powerful Deity that is not always beneficent? In North America more broadly, the culture of the law—and its rule—is premised on a displacement of indigenous traditions of social and legal organization, a fact that is still being challenged by First Nations peoples in courts of law, as well as through both activism and the revitalization of indigenous models of justice. That the Christian-inflected culture of law has played a large role in constructing the category of religion itself, and forcing First Nations people to make themselves “religious,” suggests that the construct of civil religion is problematic for its claims of both civility and religion.

There is nothing natural about the sovereignty of US or Canadian law, which is not to say that these systems will disappear any time soon. There is much about these legal systems that is worth protecting, perhaps even through their transformation. The sovereignty of the United States and Canada is aspirational, and premised on initial acts of violence that must be remembered. To work towards the always out of reach goal of future perfection will necessitate a full re-encounter with the visions of sovereignty of the First Nations traditions that U.S. and Canadian political theologies attempted, unsuccessfully, to eradicate. Within our community of scholars, as a starting point, this will take the kind of listening that we are only slowly learning to do.

Robert Bellah catalyzed that debate in terms of his compelling act of naming—his talk of civil religion. But as the debate over the concept grew between 1967—the date of Bellah’s famous Daedalus essay “Civil Religion in America”—and the 1970s, a number of things became clear:

1)  Bellah’s term of choice came trailing an ambiguous past and legacy, dating from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, with its chapter “Of Civil Religion.”
2)  Other American voices had noticed some things about collective American history and public identity that seemed to bear a family resemblance to what Bellah was talking about.  Of these, the two most salient expressions became those of Sidney Mead, the historian-turned-public-theologian, with his concept of the “Religion of the Republic,” and of Will Herberg, the sociologist-turned-moralist, with his “American Way of Life.”

Given this background, a discourse developed that was clearly moral in nature, but which, as in David Kim’s notion of the exhaustion of a myth, finally exhausted itself—not in poetry and elegy but in the failure, after a time, to produce anything new. The civil religion proposal collapsed into more circumspect observations about a waxing and waning public religion (cf. John Wilson). And it collapsed because the moral stances that were part of the discourse, once stated and argued, did not achieve sufficient ballast to catapult the debate into new knowledge and a clear agenda for action.

Briefly, Mead’s “Religion of the Republic” argued for an ideal and transcendent form of the nation—incarnated perhaps only once, in Abraham Lincoln. (In this light, it is surely interesting that Kim’s essay turns again to Lincoln—something that Mark Noll, on the evangelical Right, also does.) Meanwhile, Herberg’s “American Way of Life” offered a counterproposal of sorts. The “American Way of Life” was a meta-folk religion encompassing not only government but also, and especially, collective mores that included strong sanitation practices and a fondness for Coca-Cola. It earned from Herberg emphatic condemnation for its idolatry, and it prompted a call for return to the worship of the true Judeo-Christian God. Finally, Bellah’s ringing proclamation of civil religion celebrated a glorious past of Puritan covenant and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, both of which had been critically challenged and stood in danger of being undone in America’s “third time of trial,” the Vietnam War.

So, civil religion was good and to be praised (Mead); evil and to be condemned (Herberg); or once good, now evil, and thus in need of redemption and reform (Bellah). In the background hovered the forefather of the conversation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his original formulation that contrasted the religion of the state with the religion of Christianity. It was Rousseau who exposed in the process the twin brutality and necessity of a religious nationalism that demanded the citizen’s sacrifice, even the death of the self, on the altar of a nation’s wars. Rousseau’s civil religion offered such sacrifice by feeding lives to the state.

In this context, what resemblance is there between past and present civil religion discourse? Given this past discourse and its winding down, how do we explain the new interest at present in the civil religion proposal? How does the present discourse avoid the pitfalls of the past and take us to some place genuinely new?

It is clear that the present discourse, as the earlier one, is moral (or ethical) in nature. Moreover, two of the posts (Kim, Morgan) invoke myth in ways that echo Bellah. Two eschew religious nationalism explicitly (Gorski, Morgan), and two others surely imply non-acceptance of it (Kim, Moosa). Two posts turn to a past and, their authors hope, continuing tradition of rational discourse as the way to resolve the dilemmas of the present (Gorski, Moosa, with his South African comparison). Two make a cultural turn to aesthetics, thus seeing the ethical—which is about values and valuing—as an entrée into a register that conflates goodness with, in the broad sense, harmony and beauty (Kim, Morgan).

Significantly, given the Judeo-Christian character of most of the discourse from the past, all four of these posts seek to position civil religion outside an explicitly Jewish-Christian framework. As a historian, I cannot help noting this in light of the changed and still changing social reality of the American populace. Ours is a nation in which strong pluralism is a fact and is also the increasingly fertile ground for a rising new mythos of the American nation.  In the emerging mythos, arguably, the traditional Christianity of the Puritans and the Enlightenment ideology of the American Revolution are being folded into a new and different vision, perhaps signaled (as some of the posts note) by the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency. Here, I believe, lies the beginning of an explanation for the revisitation of the civil religion proposal by these authors in our time.

So what, then, can be said about the emerging renewed civil religion proposal and the clues that these posts give us about it?

1)  The old outlines are still there—good and to be praised, if we distinguish between left and right or reason and unreason (Gorski); bad and to be condemned, if we make the same distinctions (Moosa); once good (well, maybe), but now manifestly in need of redemption through reason, elegiac processes, good Emersonianism, and a better imaginary and consequent practice (Kim, Morgan).
2)  The present discussion is more chastened and circumspect, more complex and nuanced, more tentative than that of the past. Indeed, it is readier to release that past (pace Kim’s elegiac temperament) than the earlier debate ever was. That debate centered on return; this one turns on finding a way into a new imaginary that recoups some of the past—the most valued parts—in order to advance it to a new place and time.
3)  The introduction of an aesthetic dimension, along with its invocations of an American imaginary, provides a new jumping-off point for discourse. There is a sense, perhaps, of Adamic newness here, even in hard times; of a felt confidence in the human ability to re-create and co-create into a future that we shape to our liking and that might bring us some joy.

Finally, let me close with an anecdote that I hold near and dear.  A long time ago, in my last year in graduate school at the University of Chicago, we students held a conference on American religion, and Jonathan Z. Smith was a featured speaker.  “How do you dream America?” he challenged us.  The posts here presented are important beginning points for answering that question—a question that, at least in my imaginary, has echoed down through all these years.

In making this claim, I am looking for a way to open a space for a disposition and an outlook that I believe can help mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. Let me be clear: I do not think that the myth of American exceptionalism has gone away quietly in the twilight of the Bush administration. In my estimation, the disenchantment of giving up the myth of American exceptionalism will involve experiencing the lived effects of the catastrophic, of coming to terms with cultural nihilism, and even with worldly collapse. It will involve relinquishing the comforts—metaphysical and otherwise—of being an imperial power.

With these severe conditions in mind, let me refine the idea of adopting a poetic disposition in the face of crisis, and propose that an effective and important response to cultural nihilism and worldly collapse will require the cultivation and adoption of what I call an elegiac temperament. The moral psychology of enduring and surviving the catastrophic—which is to say, the conditions that motivate the self, that allow the self to enact agency—requires considerable maturity and courage.  It beckons an acknowledgment of what is lost, as well as a vision for making the move from one way of life to another, from one world to another; or, to use Jonathan Lear’s phrase about surviving cultural devastation, surviving the catastrophic requires “radical hope.”

So why call for the cultivation of an elegiac temperament for our times? A simple answer is that the catastrophes and crises of our times demand strategies to make sense of the cataclysms unfolding before us: namely, moral crises of war, of ecological disaster, of economic meltdowns, and the like. More specifically, the catastrophic also has the potential to set in motion a re-evaluation of political and moral commitments, whether those follow the conventions of civil religion (e.g., piety about constitutionalism) or those attending the ethos of American exceptionalism. In other words, the elegiac temperament evokes an attitude and disposition of humility and lament—one that spurs efforts to rethink the present in light of a revised view of the past and future. One finds expression of the elegiac temperament—though not quite elegy itself—in W. E. B. DuBois’s lament in “The Passing of the First Born” from The Souls of Black Folk, when he writes of “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.” More specific to the condition of the exhaustion of American exceptionalism, the elegiac temperament registers in the concluding passages of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, where he writes of his ambivalent “love” of America:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty?

And later:

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

The elegiac temperament, as well as the modern elegy itself, begins and ends in thoroughgoing skepticism about conventions and received practices, and does so in counterpoint with the travails of the late modern self. In other words, the late-modern mourning and memory work of the elegiac temperament—akin, really, to a register of melancholia—works with and against the late modern self’s struggle for freedom, agency, authority, and identity.

So let me pose my vexing question once again: how do we effectively mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism?

There is a paradox here: on the one hand, there appears to be increasing popular recognition among Americans that America is an empire. This, in turn, comes with the further recognition that the animating ethos of the American imperial project—namely, American exceptionalism—has exhausted itself. This is a situation akin, as I suggested above, to worldly collapse. On the other hand, this world (here, the world of American exceptionalism) collapses, and yet it goes on. Hence the paradox.

A fundamental challenge becomes how to evaluate and judge the best means of working with the remnants of a tradition—here, the tradition of American exceptionalism and perhaps that of civil religion—after the catastrophic has done its work. In the case of mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism, the analysis is twofold.  First, of course, is the need for acknowledging that the myth has indeed been exhausted, if not altogether “lost.” This is the strenuous work of reckoning with the catastrophic. I for one am relieved that the language of crisis and catastrophe has been re-introduced and reclaimed in American public and political discourse. Bursting bubbles, rising tides, bearish markets, homes foreclosed, dreams deferred, and abounding terrorism are just a few of the markers of our dark times, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase.

The second move is the tougher one—namely, the task of finding a language, a means of intelligibility, or of making sense in a way that will help to brace the spirit through crisis, through the catastrophic.

I should also note that I am invoking the double meaning of “exhaustion” here in regard to the myth of American exceptionalism. On the one hand, I am referring to the exhaustion of the idea and the ethos of American exceptionalism, in the sense that it has played itself out and has been used up. On the other hand, I also mean exhaustion as depletion, as draining, and as extreme mental and physical fatigue.

I am dispatching the call to cultivate an elegiac temperament in response to an acknowledgment that the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism comes at a price—call it pride, call it a sense of public dignity—and knowing, also, that the stakes are quite high given that empires tend not to relinquish pride and dignity gracefully, but will often resist their own imperial decline with lethal brutality.

In regard to the elegiac temperament and to civil religious traditions, let me cite the example of one robust tradition and myth of American exceptionalism—namely, the ambiguous legacy of Emerson.

So, what, if anything, survives of this tradition/myth of American exceptionalism? Perhaps the most obvious and telling example of the enduring power of what I would call a debased-Emersonian strand of American exceptionalism, finds its most prominent, and arguably most articulate, proponent in the person of President Barack Obama.

Obama is fond of invoking the language of debased Emersonianism. Its simple version finds expression in the use of Emerson’s language of self-reliance and self-determination as bromides of American distinctiveness—indeed, exceptionalism. It is an ethic that is of a piece with the providential view of America as a nation of destiny. There have been deeply problematic and widespread effects on American foreign policy and American self-conception that have yielded and been guided by the ego-ideal of debased Emersonianism. America has been a nation guided by the arrogance characteristic of empires. We are now at a moment in which the fractures and tensile relations rendered by the long war on terrorism and other catastrophes have ostensibly revealed that the myth of American exceptionalism can no longer bear the weight of the American imperial enterprise.

Obama consistently appeals to the ethic of self-reliance, often couched as a charge for “self-responsibility.” The overwhelming evidence of Obama’s electoral victory last year, and the broad resonance of his campaign, should be sufficient proof of the durability of this aspect of the Emersonian legacy. What I want to argue, though, is that it is a legacy of ambiguous expression, at least as it is articulated by Obama and reiterated by the American populace—both of whom seem to yearn for the reinvigoration of the singularity, and presumably of the supremacist qualities of American exceptionalism. Consider Obama’s election night declaration: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you.” Now couple this with the legacy of American supremacy, and it should be evident that we have before us a troubling brew. This is not to say that I think we shouldn’t be fighting terrorism. Of course we should. Nonetheless, I have deep concerns about the ways in which Obama could end up, not turning America away from imperialism, but instead enabling the transformation of America into a more efficient and, frankly, a “friendlier” empire.

Now, given what I have identified in terms of American imperial practices and attitudes as promoting the myth of American exceptionalism as their horizon of meaning, it is fair and right to ask: “why would we want to mourn that world view?” After all, isn’t it a good thing, one might ask, that this imperial ethos is dead or dying? Isn’t this a cause for celebration rather than mourning?  I am certainly one to argue that we as a nation not only should but must comport ourselves in the world in fundamentally different ways. And it is my hope that someone like Obama will help to render that a reality. Having said that, history teaches that the U.S. is a nation that has enormous trouble resisting the urge to act with arrogance, rather than humility. Even in his speeches, Obama incants the ringing tones of songs of American exceptionalism: “Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes […] from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

Let me put it more forcefully: I am trying to engage and join a project that recuperates these values of democracy, freedom, and hope. Nonetheless, I think that such recuperation can only take place through a reckoning with American complicity with evil in the world and with the acknowledgment that it will be difficult to be different from what we have been––as a nation, as a people––for the last two-plus centuries. Again, I worry that America is a nation that is too prone to arrogance, to over-confidence, to the indulgence of self-interest. And I also worry that once we realize as a people—the social imaginary of “the American people”—that we are in fact living through a catastrophic age, the relinquishing of the myth of American exceptionalism will leave us prone to reactionary forces rather than to moral and ethical ones.

So, how do we recoup a constructive Emersonian ethos from the legacy of its debased version? My strong sense is that if we are to avoid repeating the arrogance of the American exceptionalist project, it will require somehow revealing and uncovering values and virtues of redemption in the Emersonian ethos after the catastrophic. This work can begin by asking: To what remnants of this tradition does the elegiac temperament attune us? What resources can we bring to bear to render the elegiac temperament effective and generative? In contrast to what I was earlier calling “debased Emersonianism,” consider Stanley Cavell’s project of Emersonian perfectionism—in my view, one of the most effective and most fecund transpositions of the tradition. This is a legacy of Emerson that seeks deep democratic expression, rather than radical individuation and triumphalism. It finds genius in ordinary people and in the everyday. There is a hermeneutics of humility at work in this version of the Emersonian legacy, and it is one saturated with what I am calling the elegiac temperament. It finds expression in Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionist ethic and aspiration, which demands the commitment to becoming intelligible to oneself (and, collectively, to ourselves) through an active refusal of presiding norms of conformity and authority, such as an unflinching piety toward the providential view of American exceptionalism.

I am arguing for sober reflection and consideration of the debilitating, yet constitutive ethos of American exceptionalism on the parts of political liberals and conservatives alike. The challenge is finding a way to lift up the version of Emersonianism that I want to claim—call it Emersonian perfectionism, strenuous Emersonianism, or even Emersonian attunement—as a remainder worth retrieving and distinguishing from the debased Emersonianism that has served as a core of the myth of American exceptionalism. In this sense, the elegiac temperament can clarify what is often a confused (and confusing) practice of discerning honor and integrity amongst competing moral genealogies of American values and virtues.

Cultivating the elegiac temperament of the future perfect possibilities of lives not yet lived, and the sobering absorption of the past conditional of memories hard won constitute a set of pre-conditions for mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. It may be that we will only be able to mourn as we live through the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism if we are able to self-elegize ourselves against this myth; that is if we can engage in the Socratic practice of self-knowledge—in the spirit of Cavell’s ideal of aspiring to become intelligible to oneself—and subsequently come to realize an elegiac temperament that reflects a candor about each of our commitments and beliefs that will reveal, through psychic interrogation, contradictions that reside within each of us. Certainly, we all find contradictions within ourselves, as well as with the people that we love. I certainly know how hard it is to reconcile who I say I am, for example, and what it is that I love, with the ability and willingness to act on these claims about myself. To adopt an elegiac temperament is to embrace an ethic of aspiration, as well as the commitment to self-cultivation and attunement. It is, finally, also to acknowledge that one has to die a little in order to live fully, freely. This is an elegiac move because it requires acknowledging that with change there is loss, especially a loss of love. It requires sacrifice.  And it requires courage, conviction, and the willingness to leave one world behind in order to lay claim to another world, and, further, to leave a love behind by claiming a new love.  Disenthralling ourselves from American imperial ideology may mean that we will make a world with heavy hearts, but hearts that have turned, converted, shifted to a world worth dying for and living for.

A crucial assumption made by the Declaration was that its ten “principles will function within the framework of a Bill of Rights,” and the conference thus proposed a clause for such a Bill of Rights. The proposed clause stated:

1. All persons are entitled:

1.1 to freedom of conscience
1.2 to profess, practice and, propagate any religion or no religion
1.3 to change their religious allegiance

2. Every religious community and/or member thereof shall enjoy the right:

2.1 to establish, maintain and manage religious institutions;
2.2 to have their particular system of family law recognized by the state:
2.3 to criticize and challenge all social and political structures and policies in terms of the teachings of their religion.

The “Declaration” also defined a “religious community” as “a group of people who follow a particular system of belief, morality and worship, either in recognition of a divine being, or in pursuit of spiritual development, or in the expression of a sense of belonging through social custom or ritual.” In the Declaration, the signatories acknowledged that under apartheid religion was “used to justify injustice, sow conflict and contribute to the oppression, exploitation and suffering of people.” At the same time, the signatories also recognized that religion also upheld human dignity and justice in the face of oppression. For this reason, the representatives of the various religions gathered at Pretoria in 1992 undertook to redress past injustices and committed themselves to the construction of a just society.

Careful observation of the way the religious sector itself defined religion, and of how that notion was grafted onto the 1996 Constitution, will help to illuminate the discussion. “Religion” was defined in the Declaration as “belief, morality and worship” in the recognition of a divine being, and/or in pursuit of spiritual development, and/or as a sense of expressing one’s belonging. In the pursuit of all of these rights and responsibilities, the religious communities bound themselves to an “expression of religion [that] shall not violate the legal rights of others.” In so doing, religious communities thus affirmed a form of religious freedom that was subject to the surveillance of the law. Religious rights were to be circumscribed by an authority outside of religion. This extra-religious authority, or referee, was assumed to be the state and its legal apparatus. In the same breath, however, the Declaration asserted that religious communities, singly or collectively, “shall have the right to address the state and enter into dialogue on matters important to them.” Any conflict between religion and state was thus to be resolved through “dialogue.” What the parameters of this dialogue should be and how it was to be organized remained unstated, unless one were to infer a commonsense understanding of the term. The Declaration also stated that the religious sector would “critically evaluate social, economic and political structures and their activities.” In a bid to prevent the state from co-opting the religious community, the Declaration appealed to the religious leadership to “follow the dictates of their consciences to avoid conspiring or colluding to violate the public good or the legal rights of others.”

Religion, as articulated in the Declaration, saw its future role in the public square in two senses: a passive, private role and an active, public role. The passive role was to ensure that the rule of law be enforced and that all public activities take place within the framework of legitimacy set by the state. The activist role was limited to the extent that the religious sector would, at its discretion, invite the state to an undefined mode of dialogue about social and political issues.

In terms of this self-understanding of the role of religion in post-apartheid South Africa, it remained unclear whether civil disobedience on the part of the religious sector, for instance, was an option in the event that dialogue failed. In fact, the action of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu and other religious activists have since shown that protest was part of the duty of the religious sector.

Yet one cannot ignore the fact that in claiming to be a corrective force and a moral voice of society, the religious sector inevitably envisaged a political role for itself. While there was a resemblance between the ethical imperative of the South African religious community and Bellah’s ethical narrative of civil religion, the modalities of operation were envisaged differently. The authors of the Declaration viewed the correction of society to take place via politics and the law. Bellah’s ethical capital was invested in the symbolic and mythic nature of American civil religion.

Whatever the religious sector expected in 1992 regarding matters of religion, it turned out to be very different when the Bill of Rights was adopted in the 1996 Constitution. According to the latter, the only power that religion could lay claim to was an appeal to the power of morality. In the Declaration, one should recall, the religious sector, in some instances, proposed itself as an alternative to the political authority vested in the state. There could be several explanations for this gap between expectation and fulfillment. It appears that the religious sector in South Africa either overestimated its own future role or that the incumbent political powers in South Africa were unwilling to concede unregulated moral authority to an unelected constituency like religious groups. In fact, South Africa’s religious sector may have lacked the foresight to prefigure what the possible role of religion would be in a modern state with a liberal, secular, and human rights-friendly Constitution. Public expressions of religious beliefs were thus constitutionally subordinated to the state and the principles of morality were to be theorized separately from the domain of politics.

Some Conclusions

The upshot of the South African experience is that religion is not disengaged from the public sphere and there is no Jeffersonian wall of separation between religion and state. If and when religion does engage in public policy, it is subject to regulation and must conform to constitutional tests of equality, justice, and freedom. If one were to test Bellah’s civil religion thesis in South Africa, then I would say that the tolerance that he seeks is promoted primarily by the South African Constitution. Constitutionally protected “civil religion” in post-apartheid South Africa affords religious communities multiple opportunities to bring religion into the public domain, provided, of course, that religious practices do not discriminate against other religious communities or the values of the general citizenry. In fact, at a meta-level, South Africa’s version of “civil religion” is constituted by the secular values of human dignity, equality and freedom. But unlike Bellah’s model, South African “civil religion” is driven by a secular constitutional order: sacred, but non-theistic.

Apart from enabling a range of transformative practices, the South African version of civil religion recognizes a form of legal and religious pluralism. Thus, customary and religiously-based family law practices, as well as religion-based educational services, are recognized in South Africa, but under the watchful eyes of a vigilant legal community and the adjudication of the Constitutional Court, which serves in a guardianship role with respect to religious communities.

A key feature of the South African version of “civil religion” is that it fosters dialogical engagement between the various players in South African politics. This includes the state, the judiciary and organs of civil society. In other words, it is about a future based on rational dialogue, rather than a mythical and messianic future.

Bellah implicitly acknowledges that a particular kind of theology-lite underwrites American civil religion. In South Africa there is no such theology; rather, it is the specificity of the rule of law that binds all citizens to a rational project, in which national privilege is avoided. A number of recent constitutional court judgments have mandated that far-reaching, socially transformative practices be put into effect: from mandatory medication for HIV patients to the right to housing for all citizens and social welfare payments for documented immigrants to the country.

If one contrasts the South African experience with its version of “civil religion” to the American experience with Bellah’s civil religion, then one counterpoint strikes most forcefully. In South Africa the category of “religion” in the formulation “civil religion” resonates much strongly with activist politics and critique. The Bellah-inspired notion of civil religion could profit from an interrogation of the category of ”religion” and an exploration of the possibilities that such a critique of “religion” might offer, in order to make the thesis of American civil religion a more robust and meaningful one.

This brief reflection will explore and critique the notion of civil religion as it is debated within the United States. I will then turn in a subsequent post to South Africa, where the notion of civil religion is not formally known.  But, I will argue, something analogous to a civil religion exists there, which might be explored for its merits and could serve as a counterpoint to the US experience.

American Civil Religion

American civil religion, as Bellah pointed out, was framed by the crucible of three definitive trials in US history: the War of Independence, slavery, and responsible action in a global atmosphere that fostered revolution, namely, the Cold War. In short, many have argued and observed that Bellah has basically shown that America legitimates itself with a dynamic of sacred and secular myths.

Civil religion, on one hand, links the US to the biblical tradition; on the other hand, the moral and political philosophies of the Enlightenment instill a deeply utilitarian orientation. Civil religion portrays a divine order of things and provides Americans with a sense of worth and direction in relation to ultimate purposes. Utilitarianism provides Americans with proper governmental procedure, legitimates the economic system even in a time of recession, and underwrites the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All of this has been radically challenged in one manner or another in post-9/11 America. Civil religion has also been tested in the post-November 2008 environment, when the economic collapse precipitated by Wall Street’s reckless casino capitalism began to expose the vulnerability of the American capitalist system. Yet these moments of national shock and setbacks have created an insufficient amount of questioning of the American civil religion project.

Bellah has himself noted that some disturbing developments have occurred in post-9/11 America.  He was especially critical of what he saw as America’s flexing of an imperial posture.  Yet, paradoxically, after 9/11 American civil religion has been updated and supplemented by a further trial, namely, America’s confrontation with Islamic terrorism.

It might be worth reiterating that what Bellah described as American civil religion in the late 1960s was a product of a unique American experience that welded together the rhythms of state and society, which Bellah, as the theologian of that secular/civil/religious moment in 1967, best described.

It is also important to recall that the conception of civil religion in Rousseau that Bellah drew on is similar to ideas favored by Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.  But the civil religion of Rousseau or Franklin was quite different from how Bellah ultimately framed American Civil Religion.  The Rousseauian model emphasized a certain form of deism, but, more importantly, it searched after tolerance.  By contrast, Bellah’s civil religion finds its genealogy in a discourse of alterity; that is, with reference to those things to which America was opposed: British colonialism, slavery, and its Cold War adversaries.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—and the God they invoked—are the two presidents whom Bellah recruits for his model of civil religion, which placed America in a providential orbit. Providential preference tied America to its manifest destiny in the world and sowed the seeds of a messianic future.  At its core, it is a form of idealism or a certain kind of progressivism. If one were to take recourse to Karl Popper, then American civil religion would betray an impoverished kind of historicism, one in which there is no contingency but only certainty, since history’s outcome is already known: America will always win.  Apart from the absence of contingency and unpredictability, there is also a remarkable inability to hear the ‘others,’ whether they are internal minorities or global partners. This inability to hear others still occurs even at a time when the US President is black, smart, and the son of an immigrant father.

This might also be the moment to make a further point.  When the organizers of the American Academy of Religion panel on civil religion described its purpose a year ago, they were fairly optimistic and upbeat about the Obama-era. They wrote wistfully: “the Religious Right’s political capital has subsided and a new White House may take a different direction […].” Did anyone anticipate the rise of the tea-party network, rowdy town-hall meetings, Democratic Party electoral setbacks in the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races, or that Obama would intensify American military adventures in Afghanistan and beyond?

The larger comment to be made concerns the way the concept of the political is tied to Bellah’s notion of civil religion.  The political, it is widely agreed, is marked by contingency.  To build a normative framework of civil religion around political contingency implies that in order to give it a modicum of stability it has to be retrofitted with the equivalent of a political spine: call it a political theology or a metaphysics.  Everyone might not be in agreement about the kind of political theology or metaphysics at work, but often these are hidden aspects of political life, and only come into question in instances of critique or crisis.  It may well be that at the time when Bellah framed his thesis, the kind of political theology in use went unremarked or was not challenged.  But, in an increasingly diverse and assertively plural America, where multiple political theologies and metaphysical projects compete for attention, this issue might have to be revisited.

For instance, Bellah’s idea of the deity is the God of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Johnson.  These are capacious invocations of the deity, which might in theory sustain a humane ethos.  But why should we not also take seriously the God of George W. Bush?  For George W. Bush’s deity is one of hyper-masculinity, hyper-manifest destiny, and hyper-imperialism—if not apocalypticism—and it remained so even as Bush’s flawed ideological projects seemingly crashed in the sands of Mesopotamia or on the rock-filled hills of the Hindu Kush mountains, drenched in human blood.  In short, the idea of civil religion has strong features as a rallying cry for unity, but it falls short of serving as an instrument of critique.

I say this with the knowledge that in a 2002 essay Bellah bemoaned the “New American Empire.”  But he did so without reviewing or revising some of the crucial assumptions embedded in his idea of American civil religion, a topic to which I will return later.

Bellah explains that he invoked the term civil religion “as a source of opposition” to the Vietnam War.   He believes that his goal was to put American civil religion “in a powerful, ethically charged, narrative perspective.”   Having endured some serious criticisms that portrayed his idea of civil religion as the “worship of the state,” Bellah says he dropped the term altogether.

Perhaps another way of exploring the phenomenon of American civil religion would be to probe it from the perspective of those on the receiving end of the effects of Bellah’s normative paradigm.  If civil religion unites America around a certain set of values and creates tolerance at home, what are its effects on other shores?  The true taste of the civil religion pudding must include how it tastes for those on the receiving end of it.

Was George Bush’s God not the same God who also legitimated Hiroshima, Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the invasion of Granada?  Would one be wrong to draw a straight line from Kennedy to Kandahar, and from Reagan to Ramadi? The results of such a thought experiment will not be very favorable to civil religion’s foreign policy reflexes.

The incoherence or shortfall in the narrative of American civil religion might not be apparent if one uncritically belongs to the two dominant religions marked by the term “Judeo-Christian tradition,” constituted in the American context by mainstream as well as evangelical Christianity, along with a spectrum of Judaisms, especially those tied to Zionism.

But if you are a Spanish-speaking Catholic living in America as a political minority, and the war on drugs affects the well being of your relatives in Colombia, American civil religion becomes a source of anxiety.  Furthermore, it followed from the impetus to protect America that foreign nationals in Latin America were killed as victims of the plots hatched in the School of the Americas in Georgia.  What kind of work does civil religion do when your relatives are subject to punitive sanctions in Cuba? Recall that civil religion fosters certain common values, and that America’s wars are conducted under the sign of its values.

The same set of questions could also be posed about Muslim-Americans.  The harassment and spate of unwarranted arrests of Muslim-Americans after 9/11, and the repatriations and continued monitoring of Americans who have an Islamic heritage are all indications of a state apparatus targeting a particular community.  Of course, it would be premature to pass any judgment on the 2009 arrests that placed some individuals under charges of terrorism, but some observers have raised questions about the cases brought against those accused.  And on the foreign policy front, US military and security involvement in majority Muslim countries is one major source for increased militancy, at home and abroad.

To be fair, Bellah’s essay on “Civil Religion in America” does envisage what he calls “some kind of viable and coherent world order.” In his words, he longs for “the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty” that would infuse a “vital international symbolism into our civil religion […] American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the world.”  He sounds like an incorrigible internationalist when he proclaims that “a world civil religion could be accepted as a fulfillment not a denial of American civil religion.”

There is no doubt that Bellah was also deeply disturbed by what he saw as the new American empire emerging after 9/11.  In his 2002 essay he eloquently petitions for an international police force, a network of treaties and also calls for a reconsideration of how American national interests are defined.  He rightfully predicted that America’s post 9/11 standing in the world, in his words, “will mobilize most of the world against us.”

But Bellah still thinks of American civil religion as a benign form of social cement.  After nearly four decades since he floated his theory, Bellah neither revisited nor recanted some of the fundamental building blocks of his 1967 essay. Despite recognizing the place of manifest destiny in American civil religion, he does not factor into his analytic how such deeply held sentiments, if not civil theologies, can morph into forms of toxic nationalism and, ultimately, into the very “arrogance of power” that he decries.  In other words, Bellah does not recognize that American civil religion is part of the problem and not part of the solution.  For in many ways it is a form of nationalism coated with a no-name brand theology. And the theory contains very little by way of the restraint needed to play the role of a critical civil religion.  At times of crisis most American theologies, because caught in the web of national jingoism, are ineffective in protest and policy. Far from playing the role of a deterrent of moral excess, they specialize in conducting post-mortems of what went wrong.

Take, for example, the case of American Muslims. Many American Muslim organizations before 9/11 were deeply invested in the American dream.  These were largely immigrant Muslim communities, who were prepared to purchase into the mythic qualities of American civil religion.  But they were oblivious to the struggles of other Muslim Americans, especially African-American Muslims, who had seen only the underside of American civil religion.  Many African-American Muslims experienced both the civil rights movement and Jim Crow, and African-American Islamic religiosity differs fundamentally with that of their immigrant co-religionists.  In other words, race and racial experience were critical differences in the appreciation of civil religion.  Those who had longer memories of America were skeptical about the healing powers of civil religion, whereas those who were recent arrivals saw the glitter of the melting pot.  But as all Muslims became suspect in the post-9/11 hysteria, many Muslim immigrants to the US realized that civil religion was marked by both race and creed: you had to be Christian and white to be counted among those people who automatically have a God; others must prove to the rest that they have a God and, moreover, make sure that their God resembles the Christian God.

President George W. Bush’s visit to a Washington DC mosque and the distinctions he made between good Muslims and bad Muslims did not efface the stain in the minds of many.  After 9/11 many Muslims in the US realized for the first time that the civil religion they aspired to partake of was represented by a white God; they were thus left to seek shelter in a black God and in the embrace, in a few cases, of a ‘Left’ God. Otherwise they were on their own, despite a good number of palliative voices calling for calm.

Clearly President Obama is doing a great deal to rehabilitate the image of Islam and Muslims nationally and internationally, from his inaugural address to his Cairo speech.  But his legacy will be judged by what he does in Afghanistan and Iraq: talk is not always cheap; it can also come at a price. And, ultimately, it is bombs and bullets that take the lives of people.

Read the second part of this essay here.—ed.

Discussions of civil religion commonly focus on what politicians, clergy, or military speakers say, analyzing texts and public discourse as the principal medium of a public theology of symbols of belief understood to bind individuals into a polity, to make singular people into citizens, or parts of a larger whole. The assumption, it appears, is that by believing a few common things about God, nation, and justice, citizens are held together in a social and political unit. However generalized and universalizing it may be, the thesis of civil religion pivots on the idea of belief as it has been understood by the history of Christianity. But since the appearance of Robert Bellah’s classic article in 1967, the concept of belief has undergone substantial anthropological and historical critique. A number of scholars have objected to the assumption that belief is a universal and necessary category for defining religion, pointing out that belief is a conception rooted in the Christian tradition, which makes assent to statements of doctrine normative for “true religion,” or that belief may be universally defined as an inner mental state of volition, a bedrock experience that constitutes a more or less uniform standard for defining an essential feature, indeed, perhaps the very essence of religions. By contrast, a great deal of work on ritual, performance, and media have broadened our understanding of public imagination and practice, encouraging scholars to look beyond creedal statements to the social arena of civil rituals for the production of citizens and the bonds of affection. Lived religion, ritual performance, the social life of feeling, the role of material and visual cultures in the social construction of reality—these rubrics and others have stressed the primacy of feeling, sensation, and action in the study of religion in recent years.

Not only have scholars of religion de-centered the role of belief as creedal assent in their understanding  of religion, they have recognized that belief in God or gods is not the sine qua non of religion. Forms of transcendence may be better ways of characterizing religions, and transcendence is a bodily affair, a broad range of experiences that take shape in the media of feelings and sensations.

In view of these developments, we might wonder what constitutes civil religions and how they operate as practices (and not only as theological discourses). We would do well to scrutinize more than the texts of speeches on national occasions in attempting to understand the power of civil religion and the arguments for its efficacy. What people say is part of a larger event. Expanding the register of analysis in order to avoid reducing civil religions to creedal assertions, to something that people say they believe, will require us to consider the relation between concept, symbol, and practice. What role does the practice of attending a parade or collectively reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the national anthem in a ballpark play in shaping civil identity? What happens when people visit national monuments or the nation’s capital? Can we actually describe civil religion in terms of particular feelings and sensations that discrete situations generate among participants, thereby creating a common medium of experience? Words and ideas are perhaps simpler to work with, or at least more accessible than studying bodies, feelings, and large events. What people do, how they feel, what they fear and desire, what they see, how they see, the way they dress—these will become the principal data for measuring the degree to which forms of association and shared practice serve as the public ways of imagining that are thought to shape the body politic and endow it with a common sensibility. The work of a civil religion happens in the medium of feeling, so it is felt-life that we must study.

When we step away from theology, the matter of belief in a deity seems less important. What matters for the deployment of a national imaginary, we might say, are shared interests, common apprehensions, equal rights, a pervading set of practices and symbols that are publicly, ritually observed. Although Bellah noted that the idea of God “has clearly been a central symbol in the civil religion from the beginning and remains so today,” he was aware that things were changing, that “the meaning of the word God is by no means so clear or so obvious” anymore. He therefore concluded his essay with language that avoided theism when it proscribed nationalistic idolatry: “the American civil religion,” he asserted, “is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” Whether or not it is God, the transcendent in civil religion is more than nationhood; it is what grounds the nation. This transcendent is given; it is not constructed by American civil religion. Civil religion without transcendence, Bellah warned, is in danger of becoming state religion, the religion of established authority, and therefore inclined to become no more than a nation’s self-worship.

So if we focus on the aesthetic dimension, we are considering how public theatre or ritual is able to check the assertion of particular or sectarian belief and redirect shared consciousness or imagination to the nation as enacted. When scholars turn predominantly to events like speeches, it is not because nationhood is, in essence, discourse, but because speeches are oratorical conjurations, quasi or even robustly magical speech-acts in which the nation is summoned together, collectively imagined. The power of the prophetic moment is the power of making a future imaginable in the midst of a present failure or in the face of a looming menace. The vision wasn’t there a moment ago, but now it looms, still unrealized, but birthed in possibility, wrapped in hope. It is the moment of communal gathering that constitutes its embodiment, a moment of pausing, of stepping outside the normal time of work or leisure, into a moment of shared imagination, a special and necessarily temporary consciousness. Which means that the being of national imagination is iterative, sustained by repetition, re-visitation, commemoration. These places of ritual evocation are not the places Americans live ordinarily, but the reality toward which they are sometimes urged by their civil religion. It is what Daniel Boorstin described in The Image: A Guide to the Pseudo-Event in America (1961) as an ideal rather than an image, something one never attains in contrast to the idol or delusion one holds and manipulates. The ideal, set in the future, but called on and experienced as calling citizens toward it, is a utopian place accessed as a moment aside, caught up in memory, ritual performance, and oratory. Such liminal moments occur at graveside, while visiting monuments, in concerts, perhaps in passing instants at parades, and quite evocatively in the grand theatre of oratory, that is, in the social and imaginative space of performed words. It’s not the intellectual analysis of content that makes the nation or calls forth commitment. It is the speech-acts and gestures and images and music and symbols that citizens collectively pause to attend to. They are the still moment around which the multitude pivots as a social body. I’d like to suggest that this utopian moment in which ideals urge citizens beyond the present—inspiring them with a compelling impatience, with longing for something better, with a sense of the imperfect present that drives them toward improvement—involves a kind of transcendence, and one that may operate without invocation of, or belief in, a deity.

Rather than think of transcendence in the sense that Christian belief commonly conceives of it, that is, as a place or person or power that stands outside of time and breaks into it in eruptions called the sacred, I am thinking of transcendence in horizontal terms. There remains a dynamic of liminality inasmuch as time slows or stops and being shifts from what is to what ought to be or might become. But this reality is not god or eternity. It is the future, it is the space of hope that calls forth those who long for this future together and accept its claim on them, on their collective or social body. Civil transcendence is the turn felt together, imagined together, in the aesthetic practices of a civil religion.

Civil religion is a religion because it evokes and directs forms of transcendence that bind citizens as a social group, as a social body, moving them toward certain aims or ideals. If we dismiss god as the necessary engine of civil religion, and put in the deity’s place a collectively desired future, one that enables citizens to imagine themselves beyond a troubling present, we may have before us a mode of transcendence that is strictly horizontal.

It is possible to imagine a civil religion without god, but not without transcendence. In what was, as far as I know, the first presidential inaugural to include non-believers in the national covenant alongside a plurality of believers, President Obama prompted Americans to wonder about the flexibility of American civil religion on the issue of belief in god when he proclaimed, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers.” By observing rites and participating in the social body of the nation, citizens seek the larger, never fully present, never fully embodied nation, which remains an ideal, something they can never fully live up to, yet feel a deep calling to instantiate as best they can. It may be helpful to register different kinds of civil religion. There are those that amount to religious nationalism, by which I mean civil religions that accord a sacred status to the nation itself as the ongoing concern and special blessing of a deity. The term “religious nationalism” comes from Catherine Albanese’s America: Religions and Religion (1981), and which she uses as a synonym of civil religion. I use the term “nationalism” to designate a particular form of civil religion. The nation is understood as the deity’s chosen instrument or favored project, a nation set aside and charged with power and purpose. Accordingly, such a nation nurtures a national identity that turns on its exceptional or unique favor, and a nation that is therefore divinely privileged over all others to host god’s presence and will in time and national history. Such civil religions are strongly inclined to chauvinism and conceptions of providence that justify violence as a sacred means and explain disasters as divine retribution. This nationalistic variety of civil religion is driven by an arch concern for unity and cohesion. Such forms of nationalism back into the future, training the public eye on a past norm, which they both invent and seek to enforce as the enduring standard—the way things were and to which they ought to return in order to stave off or reverse the ‘infection’ or ‘invasion’ of the body politic. Nationalism’s cure is to reverse the decline of the present by returning to a lost origin. Loyalty to that lost unity is absolute, as suggested by slogans like “America—Love it or leave it” and “My country, right or wrong.”

By contrast, another version of civil religion, characterized by a civic patriotism, argues that the best lies ahead, that original principles are yet to be fully realized. Rather than enthroning them in a golden age to be worshiped, this patriotism venerates civil liberty as the surest means for bringing democracy to fruition. The aim is not cohesiveness, but devotion to the ideal. The past is where the nation began, not where it is supposed to end. If patriotism is forever remembering the sacrifices of the fathers and mothers, it steadfastly looks to the future to recognize the consequences of those sacrifices. Bellah contrasted what he called “an American-Legion type of ideology that fuses God, country, and flag” with “the American civil religion,” a distinction which corresponds to my differentiation of civic patriotism and nationalism. To this distinction we might add more, as the literature demonstrates. But it may suffice for the moment to signal the limits of each. If nationalism is prone to chauvinism, civic patriotism easily succumbs to a divisive libertarianism. Some manner of balance is salutary since a measure of national solidarity is an important condition for righting injustices. On the other hand, too much solidarity may service a fear-driven concern for homogeneity and flatten the difference and self-determination that democracy ought to protect. Transcendence is something to achieve together in civil religion if a society is to benefit from the collective ideal that stands as the aim and moral measure of the social body. A larger project would investigate how the varieties of American civil religion might accommodate or resist non-theism, although I suspect we would still agree with Bellah after all these years that an atheist is still not likely to end up in the White House very soon.