Sociology

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Civil Religion in America Author(s): Robert N. Bellah Source: Daedalus, Vol. 134, No. 4, 50 Years (Fall, 2005), pp. 40-55 Published by: on behalf of MIT Press American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20028013 Accessed: 29-01-2016 22:37 UTC

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Robert N. Bellah

Civil religion in America

While some have argued that Chris

tianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate

only the generalized religion of "the American Way of Life," few have real ized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-in stitutionalized civil religion in America.

This article argues not only that there is such a thing, but also that this religion

-

or perhaps better, this religious dimen sion - has its own seriousness and in

tegrity and requires the same care in

understanding that any other religion does.1

JXennedy's inaugural address of Janu ary 20,1961 serves as an example and

a

clue with which to introduce this com

plex subject. That address began :

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom

- symboliz

ing an end as well as a beginning -

signi fying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears pre scribed nearly

a century and three quar ters ago.

i Why something so obvious should have es

caped serious analytical attention is in itself an interesting problem. Part of the reason is

probably the controversial nature of the sub

ject. From the earliest years of the nineteenth

century, conservative religious and political groups have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. Some of them have from time to time and as recently as the 1950s pro

posed constitutional amendments that would

explicitly recognize the sovereignty of Christ. In defending the doctrine of separation of church and state, opponents of such groups have denied that the national polity has, in

trinsically, anything to do with religion at all. The moderates on this issue have insisted that the American state has taken a permissive and

indeed supportive attitude toward religious groups (tax exemption, etc.), thus favoring reli

gion but still missing the positive institutional ization with which I am concerned. But part of

the reason this issue has been left in obscurity is certainly due to the peculiarly Western con

cept of religion as denoting a single type of col

lectivity of which an individual can be a mem

ber of one and only one at a time. The Durk heimian notion that every group has a religious dimension, which would be seen as obvious in

southern or eastern Asia, is foreign to us. This obscures the recognition of such dimensions in our society.

Robert N. Bellah, Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berke

ley, has been a Fellow of the American Acade

my since 1967. This essay appeared in the Winter

1967 issue of uD dalus. "At the time of its publi cation, Bellah was professor of sociology at Har vard University.

? 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the pow er to abolish all forms of human poverty and to abolish all forms of human life.

And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe

- the belief that the

rights of man come not from the generosi

ty of the state but from the hand of God.

And it concluded :

Finally, whether you are citizens of Ameri

ca or of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice that we shall ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the fi nal judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be

our own.

These are the three places in this brief address in which Kennedy mentioned the name of God. If we could under stand why he mentioned God, the way in which he did it, and what he meant to

say in those three references, we would understand much about American civil

religion. But this is not a simple or obvi ous task, and American students of reli

gion would probably differ widely in their interpretation of these passages.

Let us consider first the placing of the three references. They occur in the two

opening paragraphs and in the closing paragraph, thus providing a sort of frame for the more concrete remarks that form the middle part of the speech.

Looking beyond this particular speech, we would find that similar references to God are almost invariably to be found in the pronouncements of American presi dents on solemn occasions, though usu

ally not in the working messages that the

president sends to Congress on various concrete issues. How, then, are we to in

terpret this placing of references to God?

It might be argued that the passages

quoted reveal the essentially irrelevant role of religion in the very secular soci

ety that is America. The placing of the references in this speech as well as in

public life generally indicates that re

ligion has "only a ceremonial signifi cance" ; it gets only a sentimental nod

which serves largely to placate the more

unenlightened members of the commu

nity, before a discussion of the really serious business with which religion has nothing whatever to do. A cynical observer might even say that an Ameri can president has to mention God or risk losing votes. A semblance of piety is merely one of the unwritten qualifi cations for the office, a bit more tradi tional than but not essentially different from the present-day requirement of a

pleasing television personality. But we know enough about the func

tion of ceremony and ritual in various societies to make us suspicious of dis

missing something as unimportant be cause it is "only a ritual." What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indica tive of deep-seated values and commit

ments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life. Following this line of argument, it is worth considering

whether the very special placing of the references to God in Kennedy's address

may not reveal something rather impor tant and serious about religion in Ameri can life.

It might be countered that the very way in which Kennedy made his refer ences reveals the essentially vestigial place of religion today. He did not refer to any religion in particular. He did not refer to Jesus Christ, or to Moses, or to the Christian church ; certainly he did not refer to the Catholic church. In fact, his only reference was to the concept of

God, a word which almost all Americans

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Robert N Bellah

can accept but which means so many different things to so many different

people that it is almost an empty sign. Is this not just another indication that in

America religion is considered vaguely to be a good thing, but that people care so little about it that it has lost any con tent whatever? Isn't Eisenhower report ed to have said, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith

- and I don't care what it is,"2 and isn't that a complete negation of any real religion ?

These questions are worth pursuing because they raise the issue of how civil

religion relates to the political society, on the one hand, and to private religious organization, on the other. President

Kennedy was a Christian, more specifi cally a Catholic Christian. Thus, his gen eral references to God do not mean that he lacked a specific religious commit

ment. But why, then, did he not include some remark to the effect that Christ is the Lord of the world or some indication of respect for the Catholic church? He did not because these are matters of his own private religious belief and of his relation to his own particular church ;

they are not matters relevant in any di rect way to the conduct of his public office. Others with different religious views and commitments to different churches or denominations are equally qualified participants in the political process. The principle of separation of church and state guarantees the freedom of religious belief and association but at the same time clearly segregates the reli

gious sphere, which is considered to be

essentially private, from the political one.

Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in

using the word God at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although mat ters of personal religious belief, wor

ship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common ele

ments of religious orientation that the

great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the

development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life,

including the political sphere. This pub lic religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling the American civil religion.

The inauguration of a president is an

important ceremonial event in this reli

gion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the lightest political authority.

Let us look more closely at what Ken

nedy actually said. First he said, "I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears pre scribed nearly a century and three quar ters ago." The oath is the oath of office,

including the acceptance of the obliga tion to uphold the Constitution. He swears it before the people (you) and

God. Beyond the Constitution, then, the

president's obligation extends not only to the people but to God. In American

political theory, sovereignty rests, of course, with the people, but implicitly, and often explicitly, the ultimate sover

eignty has been attributed to God. This is the meaning of the motto "In God we

trust," as well as the inclusion of the

phrase "under God" in the pledge to the

flag. What difference does it make that

sovereignty belongs to God? Though the will of the people as expressed in majori ty vote is carefully institutionalized as the operative source of political authori

2 Quoted in Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic

Jew (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1955), 97.

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ty, it is deprived of an ultimate signifi cance. The will of the people is not it self the criterion of right and wrong.

There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged ; it is pos sible that the people may be wrong. The

president's obligation extends to the

higher criterion. When Kennedy says that "the rights

of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God," he is stressing this point again. It does not

matter whether the state is the expres sion of the will of an autocratic monarch or of the "people" ; the rights of man are

more basic than any political structure and provide a point of revolutionary le

verage from which any state structure

may be radically altered. That is the ba sis for his reassertion of the revolution

ary significance of America. But the religious dimension in political

life as recognized by Kennedy not only provides a grounding for the rights of

man which makes any form of political absolutism illegitimate ; it also provides a transcendent goal for the political pro cess. This is implied in his final words that "here on earth God's work must

truly be our own." What he means here

is, I think, more clearly spelled out in a previous paragraph, the wording of

which, incidentally, has a distinctly bib lical ring:

Now the trumpet summons us again -

not as a call to bear arms, though arms

we need - not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"

- a struggle against the com

mon enemies of man : tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

The whole address can be understood as only the most recent statement of a theme that lies very deep in the Ameri

can tradition, namely the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God's will on earth. This was the

motivating spirit of those who founded

America, and it has been present in

every generation since. Just below the surface throughout Kennedy's inaugural address, it becomes explicit in the clos

ing statement that God's work must be our own. That this very activist and non

contemplative conception of the funda mental religious obligation, which has been historically associated with the Protestant position, should be enunciat ed so clearly in the first major statement of the first Catholic president seems to underline how deeply established it is in the American outlook. Let us now con sider the form and history of the civil re

ligious tradition in which Kennedy was

speaking.

JLhe phrase civil religion is, of course, Rousseau's. In Chapter 8, Book 4, of The Social Contract, he outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion : the exis tence of God, the life to come, the re

ward of virtue and the punishment of

vice, and the exclusion of religious intol erance. All other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and

may be freely held by citizens. While the

phrase civil religion was not used, to the best of my knowledge, by the founding fathers, and I am certainly not arguing for the particular influence of Rousseau, it is clear that similar ideas, as part of the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, were to be found among the

Americans. For example, Franklin writes in his autobiography:

I never was without some religious prin

ciples. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the

world and govern'd it by his Providence ; that the most acceptable service of God

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Robert N. Bellah

was the doing of good to men ; that our souls are immortal ; and that all crime will

be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the essentials of every religion ; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, I respected them all, tho' with different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mix'd with oth er articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote or confirm morality, serv'd principally to divide us, and make

us unfriendly to one another.

It is easy to dispose of this sort of posi tion as essentially utilitarian in relation to religion. In Washington's Farewell

Address (though the words may be

Hamilton's) the utilitarian aspect is

quite explicit:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and

Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of

Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men

and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and

cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the

security for property, for reputation, for

life, if the sense of religious obligation des ert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of justice?

And let us with caution indulge the sup

position, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be con

ceded to the influence of refined educa tion on minds of peculiar structure,

rea

son and experience both forbid us to ex

pect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

But there is every reason to believe that

religion, particularly the idea of God,

played a constitutive role in the thought of the early American statesmen.

Kennedy's inaugural pointed to the

religious aspect of the Declaration of

Independence, and it might be well to look at that document a bit more close

ly. There are four references to God. The first speaks of the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" which entitle any peo

ple to be independent. The second is the famous statement that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights." Here Jefferson is

locating the fundamental legitimacy of the new nation in a conception of "high er law" that is itself based on both clas sical natural law and biblical religion.

The third is an appeal to "the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions," and the last indicates "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." In these last two

references, a biblical God of history who stands in judgment over the world

is indicated. The intimate relation of these reli

gious notions with the self-conception of the new republic is indicated by the

frequency of their appearance in early official documents. For example, we find in Washington's first inaugural address of April 30,1789:

It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent suppli cations to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providen tial aids can supply every defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liber ties and happiness of the people of the

United States a Government instituted

by themselves for these essential purpos es, and may enable every instrument em

ployed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his

charge.

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No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which con ducts the affairs of man more than those of the United States. Every step by which

we have advanced to the character of an

independent nation seems to have been

distinguished by some token of providen tial agency....

The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected

on a nation that disre

gards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained_The

preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, per haps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the ex

periment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

Nor did these religious sentiments re main merely the personal expression of the president. At the request of both houses of Congress, Washington pro claimed on October 3 of that same first

year as president that November 26 should be "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer,

" the first Thanksgiving Day

under the Constitution. The words and acts of the founding

fathers, especially the first few presi dents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one

thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his in

augural address ; nor do any of the sub

sequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God.3 The God of

the civil religion is not only rather "uni tarian" ; he is also on the austere side,

much more related to order, law, and

right than to salvation and love. Even

though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmak er God. He is actively interested and in volved in history, with a special concern for America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America

with Israel in the idea of the "American Israel" is not infrequent.4 What was im

plicit in the words of Washington al

ready quoted becomes explicit in Jeffer son's second inaugural when he said, "I shall need, too, the favor ofthat Being

"that Almighty Being who rules the universe," "Great Author of every public and private

good," "Invisible Hand," and "benign Parent

of the Human Race." John Adams refers to

God as "Providence," "Being who is supreme over all," "Patron of Order," "Fountain of Jus tice," and "Protector in all ages of the world

of virtuous liberty." Jefferson speaks of "that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the

universe," and "that Being in whose hands we

are." Madison speaks of "that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations," and "Heaven." Monroe uses "Providence" and "the Almighty" in his first inaugural and final

ly "Almighty God" in his second. See Inaugu ral Addresses of the Presidents of the United States

from George Washington 1789 to Harry S. Truman

1949, 82d Congress, 2d Session, House Docu ment No. 540,1952.

3 God is mentioned or referred to in all inaugu ral addresses but Washington's second, which is a very brief (two paragraphs) and perfuncto ry acknowledgment. It is not without interest

that the actual word God does not appear until

Monroe's second inaugural, March 5,1821. In

his first inaugural, Washington refers to God as

4 For example, Abiel Abbot, pastor of the First Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts, delivered a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799, Traits of Resem

blance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel, in which he said, "It has been

often remarked that the people of the United

States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient

Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence OUR AMERICAN ISRAEL is a term fre

quently used ; and common consent allows it

apt and proper." Cited in Hans Kohn, The Idea

of Nationalism (New York : Macmillian Publishing Co., 1961), 665.

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Robert N. Bellah

in whose hands we are, who led our fa

thers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country

flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life." Europe is Egypt;

America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all the nations.5

This theme, too, has been a continu ous one in the civil religion. We have al

ready alluded to it in the case of the Ken

nedy inaugural. We find it again in Presi dent Johnson's inaugural address :

They came here - the exile and the strang

er, brave but frightened - to find a place

where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Con

ceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.

What we have, then, from the earliest

years of the republic is a collection of be

liefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a

collectivity. This religion - there seems

no other word for it - while not antithet ical to and indeed sharing much in com

mon with Christianity, was neither sec

tarian nor in any specific sense Christ ian. At a time when the society was over

whelmingly Christian, it seems unlike

ly that this lack of Christian reference was meant to spare the feelings of the

tiny non-Christian minority. Rather, the civil religion expressed what those

who set the precedents felt was appro priate under the circumstances. It re flected their private as well as public views. Nor was the civil religion sim

ply "religion in general." While gener ality was undoubtedly seen as a virtue

by some, as in the quotation from Frank lin above, the civil religion was specific enough when it came to the topic of

America. Precisely because of this spec ificity, the civil religion was saved from

empty formalism and served as a gen uine vehicle of national religious self

understanding. But the civil religion was not, in the

minds of Franklin, Washington, Jeffer son, or other leaders, with the exception of a few radicals like Tom Paine, ever felt to be a substitute for Christianity. There

was an implicit but quite clear division of function between the civil religion and Christianity. Under the doctrine of

religious liberty, an exceptionally wide

sphere of personal piety and voluntary social action was left to the churches. But the churches were neither to control the state nor to be controlled by it. The national magistrate, whatever his private religious views, operates under the ru brics of the civil religion as long as he is in his official capacity, as we have al

ready seen in the case of Kennedy. This accommodation was undoubtedly the

product of a particular historical mo ment and of a cultural background dom

inated by Protestantism of several vari eties and by the Enlightenment, but it has survived despite subsequent changes in the cultural and religious climate.

5 That the Mosaic analogy was present in the

minds of leaders at the very moment of the

birth of the republic is indicated in the designs proposed by Franklin and Jefferson for

a seal

of the United States of America. Together with

Adams, they formed a committee of three dele

gated by the Continental Congress on July 4,

1776, to draw up the new device. "Franklin pro

posed as the device Moses lifting up his wand and dividing the Red Sea while Pharaoh was overwhelmed by its waters, with the motto 'Re

bellion to tyrants is obedience to God.' Jeffer son proposed the children of Israel in the wil

derness led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night."' Anson Phelps Stokes, Church

and State in the United States, vol. 1 (New York :

Harper, 1950), 467-468.

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U ntil the Civil War, the American civil

religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the fi nal act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The Declaration of

Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny. The Civil War, which Sidney Mead calls "the center of American history,"6 was the second great event that involved the national self-understanding so deeply as to require expression in the civil reli

gion. In 1835, Tocqueville wrote that the American republic had never really been

tried, that victory in the Revolutionary War was more the result of British pre

occupation elsewhere and the presence of a powerful ally than of any great mil

itary success of the Americans. But in 1861 the time of testing had indeed come. Not only did the Civil War have the tragic intensity of fratricidal strife, but it was one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century; the loss of life

was far greater than any previously suf fered by Americans.

The Civil War raised the deepest ques tions of national meaning. The man who not only formulated but in his own per son embodied its meaning for Ameri cans was Abraham Lincoln. For him the issue was not in the first instance slavery

but "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure." He had said in Independence

Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861:

All the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which

originated in and were given to the world from this Hall. I have never had a feeling,

politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.7

The phrases of Jefferson constantly echo in Lincoln's speeches. His task was, first of all, to save the Union

- not for Amer ica alone but for the meaning of Ameri ca to the whole world so unforgettably etched in the last phrase of the Gettys burg Address.

But inevitably the issue of slavery as the deeper cause of the conflict had to be faced. In the second inaugural, Lincoln related slavery and the war in an ulti

mate perspective :

If we shall suppose that American slav

ery is one of those offenses which, in the

providence of God, must needs come, but

which, having continued through His ap pointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives both to the North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by

whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living

God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this

mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue un til all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said

three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But he closes on a note if not of redemp tion then of reconciliation - "With mal ice toward none, with charity for all." With the Civil War, a new theme of

death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the

6 Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 12.

7 Quoted by Arthur Lehman Goodhart in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address

(Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1964), 39.

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Robert N Bellah

civil religion. It is symbolized in the life and death of Lincoln. Nowhere is it stat ed more vividly than in the Gettysburg

Address, itself part of the Lincolnian "New Testament" among the civil scrip tures. Robert Lowell has recently point ed out the "insistent use of birth im

ages" in this speech explicitly devoted to "these honored dead" : "brought forth," "conceived," "created," "a new birth of freedom." He goes on to say:

The Gettysburg Address is a symbolic and sacramental act. Its verbal quality is reso

nance combined with a logical, matter of

fact, prosaic brevity.... In his words, Lin

coln symbolically died, just as the Union soldiers really died

- and as he himself was soon ready to die. By his words, he gave the field of battle a symbolic significance that it had lacked. For us and our country, he left Jefferson's ideals of freedom and

equality joined to the Christian sacrificial act of death and rebirth. I believe this is a

meaning that goes beyond sect or religion and beyond peace and war, and is now

part of our lives as a challenge, obstacle and hope.8

Lowell is certainly right in pointing out the Christian quality of the symbolism here, but he is also right in quickly dis

avowing any sectarian implication. The earlier symbolism of the civil religion had been Hebraic without being in any specific sense Jewish. The Gettysburg symbolism ("

... those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live") is Christian without having anything to do with the Christian church.

The symbolic equation of Lincoln with Jesus was made relatively early. Herndon, who had been Lincoln's law

partner, wrote :

For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lin coln through his fiery furnace. He did it

to try Abraham and to purify him for his

purposes. This made Mr. Lincoln humble,

tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffer

ing, kind, sensitive, tolerant; broadening,

deepening and widening his whole na ture ; making him the noblest and loveli est character since Jesus Christ.... I be

lieve that Lincoln was God's chosen one.9

With the Christian archetype in the

background, Lincoln, "our martyred president," was linked to the war dead, those who "gave the last full measure of devotion." The theme of sacrifice was

indelibly written into the civil religion. The new symbolism soon found both

physical and ritualistic expression. The

great number of the war dead required the establishment of a number of na tional cemeteries. Of these, the Gettys burg National Cemetery, which Lin coln's famous address served to dedi cate, has been overshadowed only by the Arlington National Cemetery. Be

gun somewhat vindictively on the Lee estate across the river from Washing ton, partly with the end that the Lee

family could never reclaim it,10 it has

subsequently become the most hallowed monument of the civil religion. Not only was a section set aside for the Confeder ate dead, but it has received the dead of each succeeding American war. It is the site of the one important new symbol to come out of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; more recently it has become the site of the tomb of an other martyred president and its sym bolic eternal flame.

Memorial Day, which grew out of the Civil War, gave ritual expression to the

8 Ibid., 88-89.

9 Quoted in Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream (New York : Harper & Brothers, 1941), 162.

10 Karl Decker and Angus McSween, Historic

Arlington (Washington, D.C. : Decker and Mc Sween Publishing Co., 1892), 60

- 67.

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themes we have been discussing. As

Lloyd Warner has so brilliantly analyzed it, the Memorial Day observance, espe cially in the towns and smaller cities of

America, is a major event for the whole

community involving a rededication to the martyred dead, to the spirit of sacri

fice, and to the American vision.11 Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidental

ly was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the

presidency of Lincoln, serves to inte

grate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the

local community into the national cult.

Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor cele brations of Veterans Day and the birth

days of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual

calendar for the civil religion. The pub lic school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebra tion of the civil rituals.

In reifying and giving a name to some

thing that, though pervasive enough when you look at it, has gone on only semiconsciously, there is risk of severe

ly distorting the data. But the reification and the naming have already begun. The

religious critics of "religion in general," or of the "religion of the 'American Way of Life,'" or of "American Shinto" have

really been talking about the civil reli

gion. As usual in religious polemic, they take as criteria the best in their own re

ligious tradition and as typical the worst in the tradition of the civil religion.

Against these critics, I would argue that the civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcen dent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people.

Like all religions, it has suffered various deformations and demonic distortions.

At its best, it has neither been so gener al that it has lacked incisive relevance to the American scene nor so particu lar that it has placed American society above universal human values. I am not at all convinced that the leaders of the churches have consistently represented a

higher level of religious insight than the

spokesmen of the civil religion. Rein hold Niebuhr has this to say of Lincoln, who never joined a church and who cer

tainly represents civil religion at its best :

An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional

religion of his time and place and of its

polemical use on the slavery issue, which

corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln's religious convie

Civil religion in

America

il How extensive the activity associated with Memorial Day can be is indicated by Warner :

"The sacred symbolic behavior of Memorial

Day, in which scores of the town's organiza tions are involved, is ordinarily divided into four periods. During the year separate rituals are held by many of the associations for their

dead, and many of these activities are connect ed with later Memorial Day events. In the sec

ond phase, preparations are made during the last three or four weeks for the ceremony it

self, and some of the associations perform pub lic rituals. The third phase consists of scores of rituals held in all the cemeteries, churches, and halls of the associations. These rituals consist of speeches and highly ritualized behavior.

They last for two days and are climaxed by the fourth and last phase, in which all the separate celebrants gather in the center of the business district on the afternoon of Memorial Day. The

separate organizations, with their members in

uniform or with fitting insignia, march through the town, visit the shrines and monuments of the hero dead, and, finally, enter the cemetery.

Here dozens of ceremonies are held, most of them highly symbolic and formalized." During these various ceremonies Lincoln is continually referred to and the Gettysburg Address recited

many times. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 8-9.

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Robert N Bellah

tions were superior in depth and purity to

those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.12

Perhaps the real animus of the reli

gious critics has been not so much

against the civil religion in itself but

against its pervasive and dominating influence within the sphere of church

religion. As S. M. Lipset has recently shown, American religion at least since the early nineteenth century has been

predominantly activist, moralistic, and social rather than contemplative, theo

logical, or innerly spiritual.13 Tocque ville spoke of American church religion as "a political institution which power fully contributes to the maintenance of a democratic republic among the Amer icans"14 by supplying a strong moral consensus amidst continuous political change. Henry Bargy in 1902 spoke of

American church religion as la po?sie du civisme."15

It is certainly true that the relation be tween religion and politics in America has been singularly smooth. This is in

large part due to the dominant tradition. As Tocqueville wrote :

The greatest part of British America was

peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowl

edged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot bet ter describe than by styling it a democrat ic and republican religion.16

The churches opposed neither the Rev olution nor the establishment of demo cratic institutions. Even when some of them opposed the full institutionaliza tion of religious liberty, they accepted the final outcome with good grace and

without nostalgia for an ancien r?gime. The American civil religion was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a

way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. In this way, the civil religion was able to build up

without any bitter struggle with the church powerful symbols of national

solidarity and to mobilize deep levels of

personal motivation for the attainment of national goals.

Such an achievement is by no means to be taken for granted. It would seem that the problem of a civil religion is

quite general in modern societies and

12 Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Religion of Abra ham Lincoln," in Nevins, Lincoln and the Gettys

burg Address, 72. William J. Wolfe of the Epis copal Theological School in Cambridge, Mas

sachusetts, has written : "Lincoln is one of the

greatest theologians of America - not in the

technical meaning of producing a system of

doctrine, certainly not as the defender of some

one denomination, but in the sense of seeing the hand of God intimately in the affairs of na

tions. Just so the prophets of Israel criticized

the events of their day from the perspective of

the God who is concerned for history and who

reveals His will within it. Lincoln now stands

among God's latter-day prophets." The Religion

of Abraham Lincoln (New York: n.p., 1963), 24.

13 Seymour Martin Lipset, "Religion and

American Values," in The First New Nation

(New York: Basic Books, 1963).

14 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 310.

15 Henry Bargy, La Religion dans la soci?t? aux

Etats-Unis (Paris: A. Colin, 1902), 31.

i6 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 311. Later

he says, "In the United States even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it

submits the truths of the other world to private

judgment, as in politics the care of their tempo ral interests is abandoned to the good sense of

the people. Thus every man is allowed freely to

take that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven, just as the law permits every citizen to

have the right of choosing his own govern ment" (436).

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that the way it is solved or not solved will have repercussions in many spheres. One needs only to think of France to see how differently things can go. The French Revolution was anticlerical to the core and attempted to set up an anti

Christian civil religion. Throughout modern French history, the chasm be tween traditional Catholic symbols and the symbolism of 1789 has been immense.

American civil religion is still very much alive. Just three years ago we par ticipated in a vivid reenactment of the sacrifice theme in connection with the funeral of our assassinated president.

The American Israel theme is clearly be hind both Kennedy's New Frontier and

Johnson's Great Society. Let me give just one recent illustration of how the civil

religion serves to mobilize support for the attainment of national goals. On

March 15,1965 President Johnson went before Congress to ask for a strong vot

ing-rights bill. Early in the speech he said:

Rarely are we met with the challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our wel

fare or our security -

but rather to the val

ues and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation.

The issue of equal rights for American

Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall

gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

And in conclusion he said:

Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin, "God has favored our undertaking.

"

God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine his will. I cannot help but believe that He truly un derstands and that He really favors the

undertaking that we begin here tonight.*?

The civil religion has not always been invoked in favor of worthy causes. On the domestic scene, an American Legion type of ideology that fuses God, country, and flag has been used to attack noncon formist and liberal ideas and groups of all kinds. Still, it has been difficult to use the words of Jefferson and Lincoln to

support special interests and undermine

personal freedom. The defenders of slav

ery before the Civil War came to reject the thinking of the Declaration of Inde

pendence. Some of the most consistent of them turned against not only Jeffer sonian democracy but Reformation reli

gion ; they dreamed of a South dominat ed by medieval chivalry and divine-right

monarchy.18 For all the overt religiosity of the radical right today, their relation to the civil religious consensus is tenu

ous, as when the John Birch Society at tacks the central American symbol of

democracy itself. With respect to America's role in

the world, the dangers of distortion are

greater and the built-in safeguards of the tradition weaker. The theme of the

American Israel was used, almost from the beginning, as a justification for the shameful treatment of the Indians so characteristic of our history. It can be

overtly or implicitly linked to the idea of manifest destiny which has been used to

legitimate several adventures in imperi alism since the early nineteenth century.

Civil religion in

America

17 House, 17.5. Congressional Record, March 15, 1965, 4924, 4926.

18 See Louis Hartz, "The Feudal Dream of the

South," in The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

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Robert N Bellah

Never has the danger been greater than

today. The issue is not so much one of

imperial expansion, of which we are

accused, as of the tendency to assimilate all governments or parties in the world

which support our immediate policies or call upon our help by invoking the no tion of free institutions and democratic values. Those nations that are for the

moment "on our side" become "the free world." A repressive and unstable mili

tary dictatorship in South Vietnam be comes "the free people of South Viet nam and their government." It is then

part of the role of America as the New

Jerusalem and "the last hope of earth" to defend such governments with treas ure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it be comes possible to consecrate the strug gle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the

American people who are unable to

judge whether the people in South Viet nam (or wherever) are "free like us," such arguments are convincing. Fortu

nately, President Johnson has been less

ready to assert that "God has favored our undertakings" in the case of Viet nam than with respect to civil rights. But others are not so hesitant. The civ il religion has exercised long-term pres sure for the humane solution of our

greatest domestic problem, the treat ment of the Negro American. It remains to be seen how relevant it can become for our role in the world at large, and

whether we can effectually stand for "the revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought," in John F. Kennedy's

words.

The civil religion is obviously involved in the most pressing moral and political issues of the day. But it is also caught in another kind of crisis, theoretical and

theological, of which it is at the moment

largely unaware. "God" has clearly been

a central symbol in the civil religion from the beginning and remains so to

day. This symbol is just as central to the civil religion as it is to Judaism or Chris

tianity. In the late eighteenth century this posed no problem ; even Tom Paine, contrary to his detractors, was not an atheist. From left to right and regardless of church or sect, all could accept the idea of God. But today, as even Time has

recognized, the meaning of the word God is by no means so clear or so obvi ous. There is no formal creed in the civ il religion. We have had a Catholic pres ident; it is conceivable that we could

have a Jewish one. But could we have an

agnostic president? Could a man with conscientious scruples about using the

word God the way Kennedy and Johnson have used it be elected chief magistrate of our country? If the whole God sym bolism requires reformulation, there will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification that have not so far been

prominent in this realm. The civil reli

gion has been a point of articulation be tween the profoundest commitments of the Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of or

dinary Americans. It is not too soon to consider how the deepening theological crisis may affect the future of this articu lation.

In conclusion it may be worthwhile to relate the civil religion to the most seri ous situation that we as Americans now

face, what I call the third time of trial. The first time of trial had to do with the question of independence, whether we should or could run our own affairs in our own way. The second time of trial

was over the issue of slavery, which in turn was only the most salient aspect of the more general problem of the full in

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stitutionalization of democracy within our country. This second problem we are still far from solving though we have some notable successes to our credit. But

we have been overtaken by a third great problem which has led to a third great crisis, in the midst of which we stand. This is the problem of responsible action in a revolutionary world, a world seeking to attain many of the things, material and spiritual, that we have already at tained. Americans have, from the begin ning, been aware of the responsibility and the significance our republican ex

periment has for the whole world. The first internal political polarization in the new nation had to do with our attitude toward the French Revolution. But we

were small and weak then, and "foreign entanglements" seemed to threaten our

very survival. During the last century, our relevance for the world was not for

gotten, but our role was seen as purely exemplary. Our democratic republic re buked tyranny by merely existing. Just after World War I we were on the brink of taking a different role in the world, but once again we turned our back.

Since World War II the old pattern has become impossible. Every president since Roosevelt has been groping toward a new pattern of action in the world, one that would be consonant with our pow er and our responsibilities. For Truman and for the period dominated by John Foster Dulles that pattern was seen to be the great Manichaean confrontation of

East and West, the confrontation of de

mocracy and "the false philosophy of communism" that provided the struc ture of Truman's inaugural address. But

with the last years of Eisenhower and with the successive two presidents, the

pattern began to shift. The great prob lems came to be seen as caused not sole

ly by the evil intent of any one group of men, but as stemming from much more

complex and multiple sources. For Ken

nedy, it was not so much a struggle against particular men as against "the common enemies of man : tyranny, pov erty, disease and war itself."

But in the midst of this trend toward a less primitive conception of ourselves and our world, we have somehow, with out anyone really intending it, stumbled into a military confrontation where we

have come to feel that our honor is at stake. We have in a moment of uncer

tainty been tempted to rely on our over

whelming physical power rather than on our intelligence, and we have, in part, succumbed to this temptation. Bewil dered and unnerved when our terrible

power fails to bring immediate success, we are at the edge of a chasm the depth of which no man knows.

I cannot help but think of Robinson

Jeffers, whose poetry seems more apt now than when it was written, when he said:

Unhappy country, what wings you have !...

Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible magnificence of

the means,

The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby

Pathos of the result.

But as so often before in similar times, we have a man of prophetic stature, without the bitterness or misanthropy of Jeffers, who, as Lincoln before him, calls this nation to its judgment :

When a nation is very powerful but lack

ing in self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner that is dangerous both to it self and to others.

Gradually but unmistakably, America is succumbing to that arrogance of power

which has afflicted weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past.

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Robert N. Bellah

If the war goes on and expands, if that fatal process continues to accelerate until

America becomes what it is not now and never has been, a seeker after unlimited

power and empire, then Vietnam will have had a mighty and tragic fallout indeed.

I do not believe that will happen. I am

very apprehensive but I still remain hope ful, and even confident, that America,

with its humane and democratic tradi

tions, will find the wisdom to match its

power.1 ^

Without an awareness that our nation stands under higher judgment, the tradi tion of the civil religion would be dan

gerous indeed. Fortunately, the prophet ic voices have never been lacking. Our

present situation brings to mind the Mexican-American war that Lincoln,

among so many others, opposed. The

spirit of civil disobedience that is alive

today in the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam war was

already clearly outlined by Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, "If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law." Thoreau's words "I would remind my countrymen that

they are men first, and Americans at a late and convenient hour"20 provide an essential standard for any adequate thought and action in our third time of trial. As Americans, we have been well favored in the world, but it is as men

that we will be judged. Out of the first and second times of

trial have come, as we have seen, the ma

jor symbols of the American civil reli

gion. There seems little doubt that a suc cessful negotiation of this third time of trial - the attainment of some kind of

viable and coherent world order - would

precipitate a major new set of symbolic forms. So far the flickering flame of the

United Nations burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a

genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this. It would necessitate the incorporation of vital international symbolism into our civil

religion, or, perhaps a better way of put ting it, it would result in American civil

religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the world. It is use less to speculate on the form such a civ il religion might take, though it obvious

ly would draw on religious traditions

beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone. Fortunately, since the American civil religion is not the worship of the

American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality, the re

organization entailed by such a new situ ation need not disrupt the American civ il religion's continuity. A world civil reli

gion could be accepted as a fulfillment and not a denial of American civil reli

gion. Indeed, such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civ il religion from the beginning. To deny such an outcome would be to deny the

meaning of America itself.

J?ehind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen

People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own

martyrs, its own sacred events and sa cred places, its own solemn rituals and

symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with

19 Speech of Senator J. William Fulbright of

April 28,1966, as reported in The New York

Times, April 29,1966.

20 Quoted in Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism

and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cam

bridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press,

1964), 274.

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the will of God as men can make it, and a

light to all the nations. It has often been used and is being

used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need

- as is any living faith

- of continual reformation, of being measured by universal stan dards. But it is not evident that it is in

capable of growth and new insight. It does not make any decision for us. It

does not remove us from moral ambigui ty, from being, in Lincoln's fine phrase, an "almost chosen people." But it is a

heritage of moral and religious experi ence from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.

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