Religion and its clones


In the wee hours of the morning, I found myself suddenly waking up enough to not only read the entirety of Jack Heller’s very interesting piece in the latest New Pantagruel, but also read all the comments about it and post one of my own:

One thing that strikes me in reading the foregoing conversation is that this is probably a case of the blurred lines between “Christianity” and what we in religious studies like to call “American civil religion.”

It’s extremely difficult to govern a group of people without having some sort of unifying passion/identity/credo. Thus, appealing to and modifying a religious tradition that most of the constituents already adhere to works well. To the degree that the founding fathers were comprised both of “Christians” and “non-Christians,” they succeeded in developing a system of governance Christian enough to persuade people allegiance was part of their religious duty, and secular enough to satisfy the “non-Christians” it wasn’t a religious enterprise. (Sorry I’m not explaining this more clearly; at 2 a.m. the brain gets a little fuzzy.)

Although American life has obviously changed dramatically over the years since, the persistently Protestant character of its underpinings become obvious when non-Protestant candidates run for office. Why did it matter so much that Kennedy was a Catholic? Why will Joe Lieberman never have a real shot at running for the presidency? It all comes back to American civil religion.

Forgive me for all of you non-Web people out there, but the only way I can think of to explain this is by way of a coding analogy. Recently I’ve been making changes to my blogs that add to their sophistication. When I first created them, the basic code, template or “road map” for each was very simple. But as I’ve gone along, I’ve added new features: a hit counter, a commenting feature, etc. Each of these services gives me a little chunk of code (like a paragraph) that I have to insert into my blog template to track visitors, enable comments, or advertise B&N books. Once the code gets absorbed into the template, I kind of forget where I made the changes and what I’d have to delete to eliminate the feature.

In a lot of ways, I think that American civil religion is very similar. It’s like the governing authorities copied the common religious “template” of the day, inserted a little coding here and there that emphasized the things good citizens should pay attention to, and got people to replace the old template with the new, slightly modified one that mostly seemed to be theologically identical. Because so many people are unreflective and prefer to be told which worldview or creed or paradigm to adhere to, rather than working things out on their own, few have probably read through the Bible carefully and considered the implications it has for all the stuff their government, their church, or their Bible study leader is telling them to believe. Therefore, most people probably don’t notice the difference between American civil religion and the Christianity of the Bible. It’s in these blatantly political tensions, however, that the subtle differences make themselves more manifest.

In more caffeinated moments, I could probably say more on this. And once upon a time I took a couple classes very particular to this topic. Any who are interested in hearing more can pester me via email, and I’ll try to dig up the notes, book lists, etc.

posted @ 02:20 AM on Tue - August 17, 2004 remark! Email |  as quoted:
before I said ...  but more recently: 

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