Tracing Un/Civil Religion
People who study the relationship between religion and politics in American history saw, from as early as Trump’s 2016 campaign, something very interesting about the religious dimension of his support. Much of his support was attributed to a transactional relationship: Here’s a guy who’s going to give us the judges or policy we want, so we’ll support him. But it became clear that there was something deeper, something stranger going on.
Part of it was tonality, the desire for a strong man, a champion who would fight their battles and defeat (or at least vex) their enemies. This may explain why a group that had historically been looking for a level of (professed) piety from its leaders was able to support the boorishness of Trump — because he was “our fighter rather than our pastor.” As the Trump Administration went on, and particularly as Covid and the election increased pressure, the religious and spiritual warfare rhetoric also heightened. So I don’t think we were surprised, as we watched what was happening on January 6, to see so much “religion” being a part of it. That was, we might say, par for the course. But, to fully understand these events, we have to frame them in the larger narrative of American civil religion.
We have a funny situation in the United States. The Constitution set up a secular government in which Congress “can make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So on the one hand, ostensibly, we’re a secular government, but on the other hand, American politics has always been infused with religion — dominantly, but not exclusively, shaped by Protestant Christianities. And that infusion of religious rhetoric, symbols, and narratives into the American political imagination creates what scholars like Robert Bellah called “civil religion.”
Bellah, who was writing during the Vietnam War period, opened his famous article “Civil Religion in America” with an analysis of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Here you have the first Roman Catholic president, speaking in the midst of the Cold War, using vague, capacious God-language that really all monotheists could assent to, suggesting that American freedom and the nation’s activity in the world are set within a larger moral frame. This is not the same as the establishment of Christianity. For Bellah, religious and political rhetoric are combined to legitimize the state and condition its purposes. In the case of Kennedy’s inauguration, the ritual provided stability in the transition from a Republican to Democratic administration. As Bellah said, “it reaffirms … the religious legitimation of the highest political authority.”
Civil religion has this functional dimension: It binds citizens who may not have other things in common. But it also had, for Bellah, a normative dimension, which is that it held American aspirations and projects in the light of divine judgment. It’s important to note that Bellah was writing about American civil religion at a time he believed it was breaking down. e don’t have to accept Bellah’s interpretation, but he’s on to something that, even though we are constitutionally a secular state, politicians, both on the right and on the left, rely on religious rhetoric. Civil religion is supposed to undergird the American democratic political project.
So why did we use the phrase “Uncivil Religion” for this project?” On the one hand, what was going on was, on the face of it, uncivil. It was a riot, an attack on the Capitol. But, on the other hand, many of those religious tropes and symbols that had in the past been deployed for other political purposes were now being deployed in this attack, the purpose of which was to disrupt a particular political ritual, to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, to “stop the steal” under the banner of Heaven. Was it a political rally turned riot, a religious revival, or both?
Religion in Response to January 06
We don’t have established religion in the US, but one of the things that was interesting about Trump is that he literally positioned himself as a defender of the faith, even as it was obvious to his evangelical supporters that he was not of them. Over and again Trump said things like, They’re trying to destroy your Christianity, and I am going to protect your religious liberty. He was not a protector of religious freedom as such, but of a particular kind of Judeo-Christian conservatism. Trump defended their faith and they in turn came to Washington to defend him.
The great image for this, of course, is Trump standing in front of the parish house of St. John’s Episcopalian Church with a Bible, right after protestors had been violently cleared out of Lafayette Square. Why was he going for a photo-op there, in front of a church? Why was he holding a Bible? And not, say, the Constitution? It was a signal to his base. Interestingly, St. John’s is an Episcopalian Church, the daughter denomination of the Church of England, which is, of course, the established church of England — and was the established church of the southern colonies during the colonial period.
Should we consider MAGA as a new civil religion? We know what its symbols are, we know what it’s icons and its totems are. But what is the theology or the motivating spirit of MAGA? It is a kind of nostalgia for an America that never was, and a cultural dominance that has long been receding.
On the other hand, if we listen to the statements of political leaders about the events — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dick Durbin, for example — we hear the language of desecration: These people who came in and attacked the Capitol desecrated the temple of our democracy. That leans on religious language. The Capitol building is a sacred space, and by entering it in this violent way — and also by breaking things and smearing feces on the walls — the rioters were infidels desecrating the temple. Yet many people who participated in the insurrection did not see themselves as desecrators; they saw themselves as attempting to liberate the temple of their democracy from the infidels.
So many people involved were deploying religious language. What does the rhetoric of religion do but serve to legitimate one’s activity? It brings it to that heightened level. That’s what Bellah was talking about, that the religious language does something other forms of language, other symbols, aren’t necessarily capable of doing. It’s one thing to say you are involved in a political act. It’s another to give that political act a spiritual motivation and a divine sanction.
Jerome Copulsky is a scholar in residence at American University and a Berkley Center research fellow. He specializes in modern Western religious thought, political theory, and church/state issues. He is currently working on a project on American civil religion (“Uncivil Religion”) in collaboration with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
