Preliminary Programme

On the face of it, by fusing God and country, civil religion – described by the Robert N. Bellah as the transcendent dimension in U.S.-American political life – seems to overcome the believers’ conflicting loyalties to both, a dilemma already stated in the Bible. Yet, as the proposed paper argues, debates within the evangelical community testify to the continuing problem of conflicting loyalties – culminating in the question whether civil religion proves that America is “God’s own country” or if evangelicals are the last bastion of true believers in a country ruled by false religion. Civil religion thus became a source of conflict for evangelicals.

While evangelicals like Carl F. H. Henry – theologian and former editor of Christianity Today – emphasized the Christian heritage and values in US-American history by pointing to the Christian values inherent in political documents and the undergirding of the American way of life by Christian ideas and morality, dissenting voices saw the interweaving of religion and politics more critical, calling it a watered-down religion at best, and idolatry and false religion at worst. Some saw themselves on a slippery-slope from emperor worship to persecution, conjuring up drastic examples from the past: “Much of today’s civil religion […] is the same religion against which the Christian’s fought when they refused to burn incense to the emperor’s statue, and which the German evangelicals resisted when Hitler formed his state-controlled German church” (W. Stanford Reid, Eternity, 1973). Others, yet, warned against civil religion because it drew on religious authority to justify political goals thus abusing both religion and democratic principles, and tricking people to support wars and “un-Christian” policies. As evangelical senator Mark Hatfield warned: “The more I observe contemporary America, the more I read about the history of the Church, and the more I study the Scriptures, the more I sense how dangerous it is to merge piety with our patriotism” (Hatfield, Post American, 1973).

Starting with the appropriation of the term civil religion in the 1970s, the analysis of the fervent discussions within the evangelical community voiced in evangelical magazines indicates a growing concern over the use and abuse of religious language in political settings reflecting an overall struggle over who gets to speak with the authority of religion. Discussion ensued about the meaning and consequences of civil religion, especially in regard to questions of separation of church and state, religious freedom, the US-American national character, and evangelical religious identity. This paper focuses on evangelical reactions to civil religion, highlighting the conflict it caused within the evangelical community. (Show less)

One of civil religion’s primary functions is to unify and overcome conflict. This is especially striking in national anniversaries. The proposed paper will look at the 350th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America in Jamestown in 1957 and at the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims and Plymouth and Provincetown in 1970/71. It will argue that especially in times of conflict, like the Cold War and the Vietnam War, anniversaries of “sacred” national events concerning the founding of the U.S. nation drew heavily on civil religion as an instrument of appeasement. The anniversaries were meant to overcome internal strife – “some of the hatreds that drove the Pilgrims to strike out into a vast and hostile wilderness have come ashore” (Plymouth-Provincetown Celebration Commission, Hearings, 11) – and to (re)unify local, regional, ethnic, and religious groups, men and women, different generations, and all classes. At Plymouth, a special effort was made to include Native Americans. In both anniversaries, all participants were to rededicate themselves to the founding principles of the United States, not least among them “liberty, under the Christian law” (Significant Addresses of the Jamestown Festival, 1957, 8). Thus, both festivals celebrated religious and political freedom. Both contained an element of Thanksgiving, but also included appeals to live up to the courage and faith of the forefathers in times of tribulations and conflict. Both anniversaries equally served to strengthen ties with Europe in the Cold War, especially with the Netherlands and Great Britain, with the latter participating in both festivals.
This paper therefore focuses on the following questions: How and in which ways was civil religion used in the national anniversaries as an instrument of appeasement? Which groups were included, which refused to participate? Were there also conflicts? How do the two similar events compare? (Show less)

My paper explores the US Peace Corps as an institutionalized part of American Civil Religion that is at least partly geared towards character formation. The virtues that the Peace Corps was initially intended to inscribe fit well with American values of independence, self-initiative, sacrifice and pragmatism, but a closer look reveals a common attitude of ambivalence among Volunteers. Ultimately this ambivalence gives Returned Volunteers a critical perspective on American power.

The US Peace Corps started in 1961 and since that time has sent over 200,000 Americans overseas to serve as volunteers in developing countries. The organization was started by President John F. Kennedy and was indelibly stamped his New Frontier program, a campaign dedicated to reinvigorating America at home and abroad by providing new challenges once the country’s own western frontier had closed. Yet the roots of the Peace Corps are deeper than Kennedy, perhaps traceable to William James’ classic essay “The moral equivalent of war.” In this essay, James argues that in order to inculcate in young men the positive moral values of war (such as sacrifice, manliness and toughness) without the moral consequences of war, young men ought to be sent out into the world to perform voluntary service. James’ idea was paralleled by other visions of moral formation, and from the early 1900s through the 1940s we see the development of many organizations devoted to such moral formation. The Peace Corps can be seen as a governmental institutionalization of this view of character formation, one which upheld the moral virtues of the military but without war.

The contemporary study of American Civil Religion can be traced back to a variety of writings in the 1950s about what constitutes “Americanness” or the “American way of life.” In a 1967 Daedalus article, Robert Bellah provided us with the term “American civil religion,” a phenomenon he claimed “required the same care in understanding as any other religion does.” One area of American Civil Religion that has not been sufficiently explored is how it inscribes in its citizenry certain moral virtues, a process that has traditionally been called religious formation. I argue that the US Peace Corps can be fruitfully analyzed as an institutionalized locus of American character formation that has its roots in particular transcendent ideals of American identity. To put it another way, the Peace Corps attempts to incarnate and show to the world a particular vision of Americanness.

But Peace Corps autobiographies show that the experience actually produces a pronounced ambivalence that is rooted in ironic experiences of reversal: time and again these autobiographies show ostesively useful volunteers finding themselves to be isolated and in need of assistance from the very people they mean to help. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr’s description of irony in The Irony of American History, I argue that this sense of irony can usefully serve as a brake on American jingoism. (Show less)

The proposed paper argues that the analysis of Memorial Day – one of the major U.S.-American public holidays – with respect to its civil-religious dimension is highly suitable for explaining the interfaces and transformations of religion and politics in the United States and in particular the use of civil religion as a rhetorical instrument of appeasement and/or conflict. Whereas the integrative forces of the holiday’s civil-religious rhetoric were actively sought and used by both, political elites and various interest groups during World War II, the legitimation of political actions, especially in the Cold War years, often met with critical responses by its addressees. Notably the civil religion’s critical-prophetic function – serving as a moral backdrop against which the actions and goals of the prevailing national and local interest groups are measured – became particularly apparent in the 1960s and 1970s leading to a critical evaluation and transvaluation of the predominant elements of civil religion. Exemplified by the analysis of the Memorial Day celebrations, this has led to an inter-denominational discourse over the legitimation of war via civil-religious rhetoric.
As the transcendental meaning of war and sacrifice for the nation gradually lost its relevance and acceptance during the Vietnam War era, the celebrations on Memorial Day were not met with apathy (Catherine Albanese 1974), but rather became an ideological battleground of civil-religious rhetoric. Using the same civil-religious symbols, their interpretations and implications were ambiguous. For instance, while political elites tried to legitimize the war in their proclamations and speeches, anti-war groups used the same civil-religious language to protest against it when on Memorial Day 1971 the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched from Concord to Boston, reversing the ride of Paul Revere, and explicitly reactivating the spirit of the American Revolution – the holy war, interpreted as the final act of the American Exodus from Egypt and the sacred origin of the nation.
Thus, the paper addresses the following questions: How and in which ways is civil-religious rhetoric used as an instrument of appeasement and when has it led to conflict? In how far did political elites and protesters use and reinterpret civil-religious language to fit their corresponding political ends? Can there be several civil religions in a society – drawing upon the same civil-religious elements but differing in terms of their religio-political interpretations and consequences? In turn, is civil religion losing its political power as a rhetorical tool of appeasement? (Show less)