The American Civil Religion Debate: A Source for Theory Construction

1981 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Gehrig
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Theory Construction ◽  
American Civil Religion

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.

American Civil Religion: An Empirical Study

Social Forces ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. Thomas ◽  
C. C. Flippen
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
American Civil Religion

The American Founding, Civic Virtue and Religion

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Gerald De Maio ◽  
Douglas Muzzio ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
American Founding ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Early State ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Primary Focus

This essay focuses on the attempts to give institutional expression to religion. It surveys various solutions articulated by theorists, ancient and modem, to address the sometimes uneasy relationship between religion and the polity. The emphasis then shifts to the statesmen-theoreticians who gave constitutional form to the American regime. The experiments contained in the early state constitutions are the primary focus. Contemporary expositions of American civil religion are viewed in light of the founding experience.

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