The social and cultural anthropologist, sociologist, and moralist Émile Durkheim argued, both descriptively and normatively, that societies, mechanical or organic, simple and complex, did have and had to have a common culture or a common set of what he called collective representations. In 1967 in his seminal essay “Civil Religion in America” in the journal Daedalus, Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Durkheim, argued that the United States and other complex societies had what he called a civil or civic religion. All these societies had, in other words, a common set of myths, symbols, and rituals that were not tied to any particular church, denomination, sect, or cult, and which arose to provide a common set of mythic, symbolic, and ritualistic meanings for the citizens of a complex societies including relatively new modern societies like the US. All of them had, in other words, a common culture or meaning system, at least on some level.
This American civil religion with its emphasis on, according to Bellah, America as the “chosen nation”, Americans as a “chosen people”, and America as the “promised land”, drew historically, Bellah argues, on Judeo-Christian themes that had been prominent in Judaism and Christianity in general and Protestant Christianity in particular, for thousands of years. According to Bellah, America’s civil religion was, just as Durkheim claimed societies were in general, a celebration or worship of society itself. Like any collective representation in complex modern societies, claims Bellah, American civil religion turns historical accidents of American history into transcendental or universal achievements of global significance, legitimating, in the process, in this specific instance, the American state, the American nation, the American political system, the American economic system, and American technological achievements turning them in the process of universalisation into venerated objects of national worship.
American civil religion, notes Bellah, functions much like what we commonly think of when we think of religion in many ways. It has its holy or sacred days—Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. It has its great and almost saintly men—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. It has its holy writ—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It has its pilgrimage sites—the Congress, the White House, Independence Hall, and Gettysburg, to pick a few examples. It has its symbols—the flag the defamation of which is for many an act of profane heretical sacrilege. It has its myths—Daniel Boone on the frontier, Davy Crockett at the Alamo, the log cabin origins of its presidents, the notion that in America anyone can become president, the notion that America is the most equal of nations, the notion that the US has the highest equality of opportunity of any nation on the earth, the notion that America has the highest standard of living on earth, the notion that the US is the most generous nation on earth, the notion that America and its people have a divine destiny, and so on. It has its calls for national repentance, its generalised jeremiads, such as Lincoln’s Civil War era speeches emphasising the evils of slavery and the need to repent of the sin of slavery.
Since the seminal work of Bellah other social scientists have noted other sacred aspects of the American civil religion. Some note that music, and particularly “America the Beautiful”, “God Bless America”, and “God Bless the USA”, with their generalised notions of American goodness and American choseness, have become part of the American civil religion over the years and, something that shows how important they are to the American civil religion, are often played at ritual events like sporting contests in the United States these days, sporting contests that increasingly, in the wake of the “war on terror”, celebrate the American military and American militarism. Others suggest that Super Bowl Sunday, with its celebration and worship of consumption as reflected in its advertisements, which have become for many as important as the Super Bowl itself, has become part of the American civil religion. Both of these point up the fact that American civil religion is dynamic and that it has and will continue to change to meet the changing needs of the changing times.
One of the latest social scientists to engage the issue of civil religion, civic religion, public religion, or political theology is University of Haifa historian Eran Shalev. In his important monograph American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text From the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) Shalev compellingly argues that the United States was characterised not only by a ideology of Roman republicanism, an ideology that situated the origins of America’s new republican government after the Revolution in the Roman Republic, but an Old Testament, Biblical, or Hebrew republicanism which situated the origins of America’s republic, the “new Canaan”, typologically, metaphorically, and sometimes literarily, in the era of Ancient Israel’s “republican” judges.
In this Old Testament republicanism America was seen, as is evident from its material and oral culture including newspaper articles, sermons, orations, and pseudo-biblical writings, notes Shalev, as a chosen nation of chosen people with a millennial purpose led by new Moses’s and new Joshua’s like George Washington. This restorationist culture of choseness and mission played, according to Shalev, an important role in the creation of an American identity for the new American nation.
According to Shalev, this Old Testament republicanism declined, from its zenith in the 1820s and 1830s as the less intellectual and more emotionally grounded evangelical Great Awakening swept the United States leading to a decline in Calvinist denominations like New England’s Congregationalists, the embodiment of New England covenantal and later American Biblical republicanism, and the Presbyterians, and the rise of the evangelically oriented Baptists and Methodists, after the 1830s. Modernity with its market economy and democratisation in the Jackson years of the early American republic also, notes Shalev, played central roles in the decline of American Biblical republicanism as both were more compatible with the Christ centred evangelicalism that came to dominate American equally sacralised political theology in the wake of the decline of Roman republicanism and Hebraic republicanism.
Shalev’s American Zion should be a must read for anyone interested in culture, American history, American culture, ideology, the history of American civil religion, the history of the early American republic, and even the history of Mormonism since it situates the Book of Mormon in the context of Tanakh style pseudo-biblicism and it contextualises the very Hebraic Mormonism in the culture of American Old Testament republicanism. Highly recommended.
One note: Shalev claims on page 222, note 14 that Berkeley historian Charles Sellers first used the term "market revolution" in his book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). However, the first use of the term "market revolution" and the first use of that term by Charles Sellers that I know of (I may be ignorant of earlier uses of the phrase) was in the textbook he co-wrote with fellow Berkeley historian Henry May entitled A Synopsis of American History published by Rand McNally in Chicago in 1961. I have not seen the first edition of this text but the second, published in 1969, does contain the phrase "market revolution" on, for example, page 107.
No comments:
Post a Comment