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In the mid–nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two European visitors to the United States observed an unfamiliar relationship between American religion and its cultural and political surroundings. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1846):

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country. . . . I am certain that [all Americans] hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.

Later G. K. Chesterton noted in What I Saw in America (1922) that

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . . Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church . . . [but] that the Americans are doing something heroic or doing something insane.

Because religion was dissimilarly related to both nineteenth-century French society and twentieth-century British life, both Tocqueville and Chesterton had little immediate precedent for evaluating the American “civil religion.” Although civil religion predates both of them, it is hardly a consistent cultural universal, and both French Catholicism and British Anglicanism precluded the strange admixture of American religion and culture now recognized as civil religion.

Among modern intellectuals, however, the French seem most sensitive to the possibility of a nation’s history and traditions or a culture’s significant symbols and values being elevated to a level of theological meaning and explanation. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762) was the first to use the term “civil religion” in a sense not inconsistent with its modern application. To Rousseau, religious diversity and pluralism threatened to undermine the likelihood of a civil peace and commitment to society. What was needed, therefore, was a civil faith that would alleviate religious differences and also form the basis of a civil solidarity. Following the French Revolution, visionaries such as Auguste Comte contemplated the cultural utility of a “New Religion of Humanity,” stripped of the substance of orthodox Christian beliefs, and built around a new thirteen-month calendar that highlighted secular holidays. Rousseau and Comte’s countryman Emile Durkheim, author of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), later implied that civil religions are nearly inevitable because of the interrelatedness of religion and society. For Durkheim, all social institutions derive from religion, while religion is little other than a society worshiping itself—exalting its beliefs and normative order to a transcendent significance. When a people gather and reaffirm their beliefs and traditions, their ritual acts and shared creed are intrinsically religious. In this sense civil religion provides a nonsectarian pattern of symbols, myths, and practices acting as a sort of cultural glue that binds together a people and provides them with a shared vision of their place in the world.

Although one might trace the origins of civil religious thinking back to Plato (The Republic) and the practices of citizens of the Greek city-states, and although the basis for conceiving of modern civil religion has mostly French influence, the links to what most Americans now embody as civil religious tenets and practices probably come through England and the seventeenth-century Puritans. As much as the Puritans were guided by evangelical religion, they also shared a common civil purpose of building “God’s new Israel” in America.

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, the main Puritan colony, was representative of civil religious thinking among the early Puritans. With America as the “Promised Land” and with the prospect of building a “City on a Hill,” the Puritans sought to apply the principal tenets of the Hebrew scriptures to the new society of Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop quoted frequently from Moses’ farewell address in Deuteronomy 30 in support of his understanding of the divine covenant that God was making with the chosen people in establishing the kingdom of God in the new world. God was providing them a second opportunity to bring the Reformation to its political fulfillment.

Because they saw themselves as God’s people with a special calling, the Puritans sought to expand their spiritual responsibilities beyond church life. If all of life including one’s work is a sacred trust, then Sacvan Bercovitch is also correct in his assessment in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) that Puritan themes, tensions, and literary strategies had a persisting influence on “the American self as the embodiment of a prophetic universal design.”

That the more narrow Puritan vision of America as God’s covenanted “Promised Land” was not realized as they had wished was obvious 150 years later when the writers of the Declaration of Independence sought to express a less sectarian and more diffused version of the Puritan ideal. Their vision also was permeated with rational, Enlightenment notions of the place of God, so that civil religious rhetoric took a Deistic turn that still holds today. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in particular articulated the revised, syncretistic civil religion.

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 approach, either prophetic or priestly. Prophetic religion afflicts the comforted, and priestly religion comforts the afflicted. In Marty’s scheme, Bellah’s description fits into the prophetic, nation-as-transcendent cell of the matrix.

The importance of the analytical schemes of Jones and Richey and of Marty is their sensing of the pluralistic tendencies inherent in the interaction between religion and culture. Bellah spent a great deal of time and energy, as did other commentators, in explaining the similarities and differences among versions of civil religion. Both Jones and Richey and Marty alert all to the difficulties, both in definition and also in comparison of civil religions, partly arising from different assumptions and functional criteria employed by different scholars.

Similar differences arose when critics explored the normative implications of Bellah’s work. In the original essay, he used the example of the Vietnam War to posit the possibility of transcending a nationalistic civil religion. He asked: Could American civil religion become merely one part of a new civil religion of the world that Americans could accept as a fulfillment of the eschatological hope of American civil religion? Bellah also pointed out the divisive aspects, alongside the functionally integrative qualities, of any civil religion. Others would emphasize that civil religion existed as the vision of the establishment, while minority and marginal views tended not to be incorporated. Still others questioned Bellah’s basic assumption that civil religion had ever become institutionalized to the degree that he assumed, particularly in a society characterized by religious sectarianism and committed to the ideal of the separation of church and state.

One of the best responses to Bellah and a recent evaluation of civil religion has come from Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988). Just as Bellah had allowed that civil religion does have differing relationships to the republican and liberal civil heritages in America, and as Marty distinguished priestly from prophetic civil religion, so Wuthnow notes that two visions of civil religion exist—“one conservative, one liberal, [which] have, by virtue of their very tendency to dispute one another, become less capable of providing the broad, consensual underpinnings of societal legitimation that have usually been associated with the idea of civil religion.”

For most of American life, the conservative, priestly version of civil religion has dominated, especially during episodes seeking American solidarity. But the possibility of interpreting that understanding prophetically, especially for an international community, is a persisting reality. Whether the various visions within civil religion can ever be joined is not likely, but in the meantime, civil religion is a powerful reality offering differing meanings to its adherents.

JAMES A. MATHISEN