Civil Thanks

The Reverend Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
November 20, 2002

Do you know what civil religion is? It is not religion organized in the usual sense; it is religion as practiced by the state. Civil religion is a concept used by Rousseau in his book, The Social Contract. In this book Rousseau outlined what he thought should be the basic religious faith the state should encourage among its citizens. The dogmas were simple: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance. According to Rousseau all other religious opinions should be outside the cognizance of the state and freely held by citizens; but the state properly should press these rudimentary dogmas on its citizens.

Rousseau wasn't talking about an abstraction or a theory. Civil religion really existed then and it really exists now, here, in the United States as around the world. Somehow its presence escaped notice for most of the history of this country but it was pointedly identified some 39 years ago by the then Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah. In 1966, in the literary magazine, Daedelus, Bellah demonstrated that civil religion was not a figment of Rouseau's imagination but actually exists -- taking different forms in different countries, but taking form nonetheless. As one example, he pointed to Japan where the Shinto worship of indigenous gods dramatizes the chief values of the peoples’ national group life. Here in America, he asserted, we have our own American Shinto, a civil religion with symbols, rituals, and beliefs that gives us an identity and a sense of destiny as a people.

This civil religion draws its imagery from Christianity; however, it is not identical with Christianity. It grew as our national experience grew. Early on, it compared Washington with Moses and the American Revolution with the Exodus of the Children of Israel. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the writings of Thomas Jefferson became holy writ. The great ideas that were written into these "scriptures" were Liberty and Justice. The President became the national high priest, a function almost every president has relished and of which our current president obviously is trying to make the most.

After the early days of our country, the Civil War gave the next great impetus to the development. Lincoln was added as a Christ-figure. The themes of suffering, reconciliation, and sacrifice were added. The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address were added to the scriptures. Arlington National Cemetery became a key national shrine. Memorial Day joined the Fourth of July as an important civil religious holiday. Because Lincoln made a big thing of it, Thanksgiving Day became a major national holiday. Shining through this development are the beliefs that the United States is the favored child of destiny, that it is rewarded for its accomplishments and punished for its injustices, and that it is the true cradle of democracy in this world -- i.e. we are the Chosen People.

Despite a growing awareness of our interdependence with the rest of the world, our civil religion has thrived. Some would say it has been expanded by a new “sacred economics” of capitalism, with Ronald Reagan as its patron saint. Civil religion certainly has been thriving with the current Bush administration appealing to a simplistic mush of religious and political sentiments to maintain support for war policies and the restructuring of the economy in favor of the rich.

Even despite a growing soberness and sophistication brought on by the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and this currently terrorized world, civil religion continues to thrive. And, why shouldn't it? It has more emotional power than most organized religion around us. In the flag it has one of the most emotional of symbols. Our country has countless national shrines and monuments reinforcing the citizen's faith (the Vietnam War Memorial, the Shrine of the Unknown Soldier, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, etc.). For a while Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Kennedy was assassinated, seemed to be a new Calvary. Our court system supplies a truly powerful high priesthood that interprets both laws and reality for us. The public school system is expected to propagate this civic faith, although of late it hasn’t been doing a particularly good job.

Actually, civil religion permeates the teaching and practices of most of the religious groups in our country, liberal religion included. Only those religious groups that try uncompromisingly to keep “the things of God” separate from “the things of the state” (such as certain Quakers, Mennonites, and Seventh Day Adventists) recognize when civil religion intrudes and attempt to keep it out. They know that national flags in sanctuaries, nationalistic hymns and prayers for national success that are in the service, etc. are intrusions of civil religion. Furthermore, the religious right seems to be trying to make their own religion into everybody’s civil religion. They are so sure that their way is the only way that we would all gain 50 pounds of pabulum and pap if we swallowed the religious conceit they would foist on us.

What about us religious liberals? Sometimes it seems as if we have no theology but the democratic method and no ethic but the effort to liberate others to political self determination. Sometimes justice, liberty, and duty loom so large in our thinking that our Sunday services sound like civics classes or political conventions. Whether we like it or not, this tends to put us in the same kind of bag with Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and that crew, who make their religion into politics. Where we differ is that it, usually, is our politics that we would make into religion.

We, then, are all witting or unwitting participants in a religion that we probably have not identified as such. Inasmuch as we subscribe to the view that the United States has the unique place among nations and inasmuch as we idolize the great leaders of this country and believe our democratic, capitalistic system has a manifest destiny to prevail in human affairs, civil religion exists and we are its adherents.

In a way, though, this only means that our political life (like all of our life) has a religious dimension and that this dimension has been systematized into a common body of beliefs, symbols, and rituals. I'm not suggesting that we expend much effort trying to destroy this religion, although I believe it to be one of the basic reasons we have such difficulty keeping church and state separated. We probably could not destroy it if we tried. I only suggest that we know it is there, that we understand it, and that we keep it in proper perspective. Unless we do, we can be misled into beliefs and behaviors our own religious integrity would have us avoid.

The problem that civil religion raises is that problem which occurs when a part is taken to equal the whole. If the truth be known, we have not just a civil religion alongside our usual religion but several other religions as well: an economic "religion" (such as capitalism, socialism, or communism), an academic "religion" (such as universities and their professor-priests build around freedom of speech and research), or a "religion" of psychotherapy or of sensitivity, or on and on -- until we've exhausted the secondary, less than ultimate pursuits on which people stake their identities.

The point is: most people are poly-"religionists" (in my definition, anything we sacrifice ourselves for has religious qualities) and, why shouldn't they be? Life is many faceted; it is one encompassing system made up of many smaller systems. Why should not we deal with its many facets and many systems on their own terms? Everything has a religious dimension and it is important that we have values and beliefs that help us feel part of whatever country, vocation, or subculture with which we identify. So life requires us to identify with the limited and sacrifice for the partial. On this level, flying flags and celebrating a national holy day of remembrance can be important concerns.

But this is the case on the level of multiplicity, of diversity. There is, also, a higher level of integration -- where things come together in the larger whole -- that ultimately is more important than these lesser "religions." On this level, if we uncritically allow civil religion (or any other partial way of defining ourselves) to intrude, we lose the possibility of understanding ourselves and our world in that inclusive way in which lesser understandings make sense. We lose the level of the spirit -- the level where only the greatest amount of openness, tolerance, reason, and goodwill will enable us to discover those fuller truths toward which the human spirit aspires. There, flags and holidays tend to block the larger meanings of human existence and growth in humanity and wisdom is crippled. There limited political and partisan concerns hinder an honest and disciplined search for ideas and values of the greatest relevance to life. Under those circumstances ideas and values cannot be accepted because of their intrinsic validity but have to be forced into dogma. To put it biblically, to allow civil religion uncritically into our midst is to render to Caesar that which is of God and to render to God nothing at all. And, you don't have to be a “theist” to see the meaning of this formula.

But we don't need to wax scriptural to understand that there are occasions when some things are appropriate and others are not. It's all determined by the level on which we are operating -- i.e. the pluralistic, partial level of the pursuit of causes, issues, and emergencies that do merit our personal loyalties and sacrifices or the level where we integrate knowledge into wisdom, religions into Religion, and our functioning parts into a spiritual whole. Are we building for ourselves alone or are we building for humankind? The latter is the level on which we hear the deepest truths life has to tell us -- the level where we stand on a continent not separated from, but connected morally and spiritually to, the rest of the world and to the human prospect. This is the level where something outside ourselves and outside our partisan convictions can confront us with a truth that transcends our lesser commitments and, thereby, can transform our lives. On this level the greatest openness and earnestness for truth must prevail.

Fundamentally, it is to bring us to grips with life on this level for which this or any religious group exists. We come here to perform the integrative function. This means that we must deal with causes, issues, and ideas; but not be misled by them. It is useful from time to time to have flags and banners and the like to stimulate us in our ideological commitments and it is, also, useful from time to time to immerse ourselves in solemn observance of national partisan occasions like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Thanksgiving. It is useful, when the President and Congress say to do so, to gather and give thanks. But truth is more than such holidays. We must never let civil religious demands stand in the way of the religious truths we seek. And, I, personally, believe that civil religion has no place within any religious walls. After all, ontologically, being our human selves takes precedence over being American! Ultimately, this is what the idea of the separation of church and state is intended to facilitate.

So, let us fly our flags and decorate our graves and say our national thanks in their appropriate public and civic places. But when we most need to know who and what we are, our flags must come down and our civil holidays stand aside so that we are freed to aspire to the larger truths that Life continually holds before us.