The result of the Revolutionary War also validated the civil religious assumptions of many. With George Washington as a Moses figure who separated the young nation from the Egypt of Europe and established it securely as a “Promised Land,” future presidents would incorporate civil religious rhetoric into their pronouncements, especially their Inaugural Addresses, so that they functioned as the high priests of this religion that effectively combined popularly understood theology, history, and political theory. Clearly, by the time of the Civil War, the outline of a civil religion was in place and included five components identified by Richard Pierard and Robert Linder (Civil Religion and the Presidency, 1988): (1) the “chosen nation” theme devised by the Puritans; (2) a civil millennialism that secularized ideas resulting from the First Great Awakening; (3) a broad national religious consensus that merged evangelical Protestantism with democratic ideals; (4) the rational Deistic influence, especially in matters political and intellectual; and (5) the self-authenticating history of the American experience.
Civil religious rhetoric and understanding ebbed and flowed in the decades after the Civil War, becoming particularly visible in times of national conflict and duress. In the modern era, its themes reemerged in the 1940s and 1950s in the setting of World War II and the resulting cold war against godless international communism. One oft-quoted (and misquoted) statement came from President-elect Dwight Eisenhower in an address to the Freedoms Foundation prior to Christmas, 1952. Eisenhower said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Eisenhower’s invocation of a deeply felt religion of apparently little substance inadvertently captured what for many is the intrinsically elusive nature of the idea of civil religion when contrasted with more orthodox religious expressions.
About the same time, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner was in the midst of research for his famous “Yankee City” series of ethnographic studies. One of these included an examination of an “American sacred ceremony,” that of Memorial Day observance. Warner’s brilliant description, making use of a Durkheimian interpretation of the functional significance of such ceremonies, still stands as a successful early effort at a systematic analysis of how civil religion works. In American Life: Dream and Reality (1953), he concluded,
The Memorial Day rite is a cult . . . not just of the dead as such, since by symbolically elaborating sacrifice of human life for the country through, or identifying it with, the Christian church’s sacred sacrifice of their god, the deaths of such men also become powerful sacred symbols which organize, direct, and constantly revive the collective ideals of the community and the nation.
With the advantage of hindsight, one can now understand Eisenhower and Warner as providing the basis of popular and academic reflection for what culminated in Robert Bellah’s provocative essay “Civil Religion in America” (Daedalus) in 1967. Although Bellah puzzled in a footnote, “why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention,” Martin Marty would later demonstrate in A Nation of Behavers (1976) that, in fact, between the late-1940s and the mid-1960s, numerous scholarly attempts had appeared. Some, such as Will Herberg’s explanation of the religion of “the American way of life” in Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) and J. Paul Williams’s encouragement of democracy as religion in What Americans Believe and How They Worship (1952), even received serious scrutiny among scholars. Bellah’s essay provided the focal point around which all subsequent discussion of civil religion would be conducted.
First, Bellah’s choice of the term “civil religion” seems to have captured the fancy of academics. Civil religion has never been discussed widely by “persons in the street,” but as a label, it has communicated a reality to intellectuals that earlier terms such as “American Shinto” or “religion in general” did not. Although the “reality” of civil religion was not new, Bellah was correct in insisting that as a social construction, it “existed from the moment the winter 1967 issue of Daedalus was printed.”
Second, civil religion captured the attention of intellectuals from a broad spectrum of academic life. Initially, sociologists and anthropologists and then historians, rhetoricians, theologians, and political theorists responded to the term and its underlying reality from discipline-specific perspectives in a way that earlier terms had not elicited. Perhaps intellectual historians were most perplexed, for they knew “something” like civil religion had been a topic of discussion for longer than Bellah conceded.
Third, Bellah himself remained a part of the discussion for nearly fifteen years (see Varieties of Civil Religion, 1980), and his own rhetoric contributed to debate over both the descriptive validity and normative significance of what he sought to explain. The responses to Bellah’s The Broken Covenant (1975), which revised and elaborated several of his earlier views, were then heightened by America’s excitement with the 1976 Bicentennial celebration.
Finally, by his linking civil religion to a “third time of trial,” that of the Vietnam War, Bellah stirred the imagination of those seeking a normative understanding of the public debate over the war, while he also offered a fascinating case study by which to contrast the American experience of the foregoing twenty years. Thus he provided a selective context in which Americans would locate a collective understanding of themselves.
Bellah’s definition of civil religion seemed simple enough: “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity” and “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” He buttressed his descriptive explanation with conceptual and historical examples not unlike those cited above, but he focused upon the role of the president and the place of the rhetoric in presidential inaugural addresses. For Bellah, John Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address was merely the latest to state the “obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.” Both Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” were restatements of the “American Israel” theme. Bellah also picked up on Warner’s use of Memorial Day to provide further examples constituting an annual calendar for civil religion—the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington, the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving. And he specified several symbols, both rhetorical and historical, including Exodus, New Jerusalem, and Arlington National Cemetery.
Two important contributions to the debate about civil religion that sought to clarify the descriptive utility of Bellah’s article came from Donald Jones and Russell Richey and from Martin Marty in American Civil Religion (1974), still the best secondary source.
Jones and Richey argue that civil religion has five interrelated meanings, or five “sub-types,” with Bellah’s own explanation being only one of them. The five are: (1) folk religion—a common religion emerging from the ethos and history of all Americans; Herberg’s “American way of life” fits here; (2) transcendent universal religion of the nation—historian Sidney Mead had offered “religion of the Republic” as a cosmopolitan faith, and Bellah also fits here; (3) religious nationalism—the nation becomes an object of adoration and takes on a sovereign character; (4) democratic faith—Williams’s democracy as religion fits here, as various humane ideals are elevated to become a national faith; and (5) Protestant civic piety—a fusion of Protestantism and nationalism that pervades the national ethos.
Configuring the map of civil religion somewhat differently, Marty wrote of “two kinds of two kinds of civil religion,” and he constructed a conceptual 2 × 2 matrix. One variable is that of transcendence. Here the choices are between including a transcendent deity, so that the nation is “under God,” or making references to an “other” God minimal, with the nation itself possibly assuming godlike qualities. The second variable is that of style or