American Civil Religion—and Others

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 13-19
Author(s):  
Frederick O. Bonkovsky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Martin Marty

A happy result of the Bicentennial can be increased self-knowledge. The danger, however, is that one may focus too exclusively on the United States, thus magnifying out of proportion both our virtues and our faults.Such distortion is evident in the current discussion of American civil religion. The turmoil of the late sixties and the self-examination of the seventies have encouraged consideration of the civil beliefs and practices widely shared by Americans. Robert Bellah, Will Herberg, Martin Marty, and Sidney Mead are among those who have recently written on the subject. Too often learned commentators have failed to note that American civil religion is an expression of general social patterns. It is therefore useful to take a look at non-American civil religions in several traditional and revolutionary societies.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Magee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Religious People ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Nations ◽  
In The Beginning

The United States has been uniquely God-centered among Western nations, and that includes its foreign policy. From George Washington to the present, all presidents and policymakers have had to consider God in varying degrees either for their domestic audience or because they believed in a version of Providential mission in the world. In the beginning, the new United States was filled with religious people whom the founders had to consider in crafting the founding documents. In time, the very idea of the United States became so entwined with the sense of the Divine that American civil religion dominated even the most secular acts of policymakers.

Israel as a Field of Study

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Troen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Israel Studies ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Distinct Field

This chapter charts the growth of Israel studies from 1985, when it emerged as as a distinct field of academic scholarship in the United States, to its present international position. From the self-examination of Zionist settlers to academic writings during the Mandate period and the early years of the state, the subject has taken root in the last three decades particularly in Israel and the United States. The development of what is legitimately considered Israel studies began decades earlier, primarily in Israel. During the formative period essential characteristics were established, especially a proclivity toward comparative perspectives that were first anchored in European academic culture but increasingly became American oriented after World Waw II and Israel’s independence. More recently the globalization of the field and its growing interest among non-Israelis and non-Jews promise innovative inquiries in a discourse that is often contentious, not only in relation to the Israeli-Arab conflict but also to many internal topics.

An American Sufism

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rory Dickson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sufi Order ◽  
Politically Active

The Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order is a transnational religious organization. Founded by Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani (b. 1922), the order spread throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, and then to Britain in the 1970s. In 1990, Nazim’s student Shaykh Hisham Kabbani moved to the United States and established a branch of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order there. The past fifteen years have seen the emergence of this order as one of the most widespread and politically active Sufi organizations in America. In this paper I ask: Why and how is it that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order effectively functions as a public religion in America? To answer this question, I will use José Casanova’s theory of public religion to understand why and how the order has developed and maintained a public profile in the United States. I contend that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order’s public activity is rooted in: (1) the Naqshbandi order’s history of public significance in Muslim societies; (2) the order’s theological and practical appreciation of religious and cultural pluralism; (3) the order’s transnational character; and (4) its adoption of certain elements of American civil religion.

Permission to Dissent: Civil Religion and the Radio Western, 1933–1960

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Kip Anthony Wedel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
God's Will ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Large Audience ◽  
Broadcast History ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractRadio drama gave Americans a new form of commercial entertainment in the 1930s, but the stories themselves contained time-honored elements. One of these was the rhetorical tradition scholars have identified as American civil religion. Radio Westerns were particularly well suited to promulgate familiar civil religion themes. They described the United States as an instrument of divine will in history, celebrated Americans as pious people, and associated national expansion with the implementation of God's will.The Lone Ranger was the most famous Western to articulate these themes. The show's writers consciously sought to create in their hero a “composite of all men who uphold the laws of God and man.” During its long broadcast history from 1933 to 1954, the show attracted a large audience and inspired publishing, film, and television ventures. By the late 1940s, however, owing in part to World War II and in part to the Cold War, some Americans on both sides of the microphone found the old formula unsatisfactory.Gunsmoke, which premiered in 1951, exemplified a second generation of radio Westerns. Though still civil religious, these Westerns located the United States' religious significance less in national triumph than in personal triumphs of its citizens. In doing so, they critiqued the earlier Westerns and shifted from what Martin E. Marty has called the “priestly” to the “prophetic” form of civil religion. Their impatience with the older Westerns' use of civil religion also paralleled theological critiques of the popular Christianity of the 1950s.

scholarly journals Postures of Piety and Protest: American Civil Religion and the Politics of Kneeling in the NFL

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 449
Author(s):  
Jeremy Sabella
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
American Football ◽  
Spectator Sports ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
American Values ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
Football Field

Over the past ten years, athletes Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick have become famous for kneeling on the NFL football field. However, public reactions to these gestures varied significantly: Tebow’s kneeling spawned a lightly mocking but overall flattering meme, while Kaepernick’s stoked public controversy and derailed his NFL career. In order to interrogate these divergent responses, this article places the work of sociologist Robert Bellah and philosopher Michel Foucault in dialogue. It argues that spectator sports are a crucial space for the negotiation and contestation of American identity, or, in Bellah’s terms, civil religion. It then draws on philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the docile body to explore the rationales behind and cultural reactions to the kneeling posture. I argue that Tebow and Kaepernick advance divergent civil religious visions within the “politics of the sacred” being negotiated in American life. In this process of negotiation, American football emerges as both a space for the public cultivation of docile bodies and a crucial forum for reassessing American values and practices.

scholarly journals Flags, Totem Bodies, and the Meanings of 9/11: A Durkheimian Tour of a September 11th Ceremony at the Flight 93 Chapel

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Riley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11Th ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
National Hero ◽  
American Flag

Some four miles as the crow flies from the site at which United 93, which was the fourth plane involved in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on the United States, struck ground, there sits a small chapel dedicated to the passengers and crew. The Thunder on the Mountain Chapel is considerably less well known than the Parks Department memorial a few hundred yards from the crash site, but it is, arguably at least, equally important in the cultural production of the Flight 93 myth. This article draws from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life as well as other theoretical sources to look closely at the chapel. I argue that what is going on at the Chapel contributes to a totemic myth that turns the American flag into a representation of the dead national hero and then places the totem object into the beliefs and rituals of an American civil religion.

scholarly journals Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 350
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
National Council ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
State And Local ◽  
National Council Of Churches ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Institutional Foundations

Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what Robert Bellah called “national goals.” This article argues that a renewed focus on the relationship between civil religion and organized religion can help fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I draw attention to three mainline Protestant institutions that for much of the twentieth-century were instrumental both in cultivating respect for the national civic faith and in connecting its abstract ideals to concrete reform programs: namely, the clergy, the state and local church councils, and the policy-oriented departments of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Finally, I argue that a fresh look at the relationship between civil religion and “church religion” sheds new light on the (arguably) diminished role of civil religious appeals in the present. If, as Bellah claimed in his later writings, ACR appeals have lost much of their power to motivate support for shared national goals, it is at least in part because the formal religious networks through which they once were transmitted and interpreted have largely collapsed.

scholarly journals From Civil Religion to Presidential Public Theology—A Re-evaluation of the American Civil Religion Phenomenon. The Case of George H. W. Bush

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Kjell O. Lejon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
American Presidency ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Public Papers ◽  
Empirical Material

Since the inauguration of the civil religion debate in the United States in 1967, it has been argued that the religious dimension of American presidency should be understood as a kind of civil religion, normally based upon the definition of Jean Jacque Rousseau, or variations of this his definition. However, in this article the author argues, based upon the empirical material presented in Public Papers of the President and elsewhere, that a more accurate description of the religion dimension of some modern presidencies is public theology. He uses the presidency of George H. W. Bush as a case study.

Soviet and American Civil Religion: A Comparison

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Brian M. Lowe ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Social Unity

The United States and the former Soviet Union offer pertinent case studies for an application of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of "civil religion." This essay demonstrates that in both societies phenomena akin to Rousseau's civil religion emerged, which included the generation of myths about the history and destiny of the nation, the celebration of historical dates and persons, the production of sacred writings, and the presence of civil Religious "virtuosos," Civil religion emerged in historically and culturally diverse contexts via two major dynamics: spontaneously by the population; and more consciously, promoted by various elites. The major difference between the Soviet and American models in this respect is that in the United States civil religion emerged with little input from the state. Despite important differences, Rousseau's conception of civil religion is helpful in that it enables us to recognize how modern states evolve forms of civil religion which serve to create some degree of social unity.

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