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Part Six

National Holy Days and Holy Places

Robert Bellah recognized the important place of national holidays in the cultus of American civil religion and the ways that “the public school serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals.” It is not only that the public school year moves along the cycle of national holidays, but that the classroom and hallways are decorated and the entire school environment infused with the symbols of national holidays which necessitates considerable attention when assessing the nature of civil catechesis in the American context . Gamoran comments:

Because the holidays are expressed in the same way in school, they carry a common message: being American means celebrating these festive occasions. Consequently, I consider all these holidays as part of a civil religious ceremonial calendar. Although they clearly vary in the extent of their spirituality and in the centrality of American themes, taken as a whole they represent a yearly cycle of collective celebrations that define and organize the American calendar.

While purely secular holidays have entered into the national public school calendar (Labor Day, Memorial Day, and others) and achieved the necessary public observance to receive vacation time, other holidays (Valentine’s, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day) which have a more explicit religious heritage have all but lost that heritage and now consists of detached symbols alone, thus not receiving vacation day status. Yet other holidays, which have not lost their explicit religious history (Thanksgiving and Christmas), provide the most controversial instances of perceived “establishment” by a host of national observers. Long before George Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation, and long before Pilgrim harvests and Governor William Bradford, there were traditions of agricultural festivals in the Hebrew and Christian traditions with which the earliest colonists would have been familiar. And unlike the observance of more secular holidays in the school calendar, Thanksgiving is an event which is celebrated at home though it is more likely that the educational framework and meaning of the holiday is provided by the public school.

Still, there is the threat that an overtly and true religious message might overshadow the secularized civil religious message when characteristically sectarian holidays are observed, to any degree, in the public schools—the democratic creed could be robbed of the universal priority it is afforded in public education by those confessions whose creed’s transcendent themes incline the hearts of men with more persuasive force. Nevertheless, the pattern of the American calendar with respect to public education demonstrates that the national “holy days” are of at least equal significance with those true holy days whose traditions, festivals, and rites they parallel. They are sanctified and hallowed in the classrooms, and children are taught to respect the men and events which they commemorate with solemnity and pride.

Closely related to national holy days are those holy places where the observance of these days is commemorated in the American public consciousness. Places like the Washington Monument, as well as the Lincoln and the Jefferson Memorials occupy hallowed ground along the most sacred landscaped corridor of American public life—the Capitol Mall. The architectural frames of these sacred monuments are built to resemble obelisks of ancient Egyptian religions or temples of the Greek and Roman pantheon. Inside the Lincoln Memorial the high priest of American civil religion is seated on a great, white throne—presumably in judgment—as his gaze is fixed eternal toward the other end of the mall where the nation’s laws are enacted. All who enter the memorial are invited to enter a “temple,” and many remove their hats and speak quietly in due reverence.

Behind the Lincoln Memorial and across a land bridge is the Arlington National Cemetery, where thousands of the nation’s sons and daughters are buried, their blood sacrifice commemorated by endless and sime simple, white headstones dotting a sloped, green lawn. There are the generals and the common soldiers, the Jew, the Christian, and the Muslim. There are the presidents and governors and the unknown soldiers who died in defense of the national faith at home, or seeking to advance it in opposition to tyranny abroad. Every year, the sitting president makes his obligatory visit to the national cemetery to pay his tribute, place a wreath, and bow his head in momentary, prayerful reflection. America, indeed, needs to see its highest leader at such ceremonies and on such occasions in order to reinforce perennially the deep and democratic faith.

But the national holy days are not only commemorated at the temples of American public life, but at city centers, town squares and county seats all across the country. Mayors and councilmen, judges and clerks gather on momentous and nationalized occasions of public life to pay, each in his turn, their respects. July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and Christmas parades are marked with equal interest, usually ending or passing at some point the town hall, the county courthouse, or the civic center. And while these occasions are not universally observed in the public school, it is there that the nation’s children inevitably receive their indoctrination into the meaning and significance of these events. Without the public school, appreciation for and allegiance to the national faith could rob the holy days and shrines of their privileged place in hearts and minds of the body politic within one generation. The need for regular reinforcement is necessary to preserve the “shining city on a hill” that is the United States of America with such frequent reference that many Christians hardly recognize the particular biblical reference to the followers of Christ and the body he left empowered for prophetic witness of the resurrection life.

In one of the more articulate and compelling speeches he ever delivered, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo addressed the students and faculty of Notre Dame in 1984. At the time, Cuomo was a leading Democrat with presidential possibilities and a strong chance of becoming a United States Supreme Court Justice. In earlier days, I would have dismissed anything spoken from the lips of any New York liberal as unworthy of any substantive interaction or intellectual engagement on my part. Something about higher education, however, triggers within any aspiring scholar the desire to read honestly, critique fairly, and integrate cautiously the ideas of your ideological counterparts.

This search for an exposition of moderate and liberal political philosophy has led me to believe that Mario Cuomo is one of the more careful exegetes of the modern Democratic Party — both the philosphical commitments and practical legislative agenda thereof. In fact, compared to the likes of Howard Dean, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and John Murtha, Mario Cuomo stands head and shoulders above the rest. He is, to be sure, a moderate/conservative Democrat rather unlike the brand of social tinkerers and legislative amateurs who have seized the Democratic Party by the throat and lost the ability to understand or sustain the core values of the American Republic. Reading Cuomo makes political thinkers — both liberal and conservative — pine for earlier days when Kennedys and Moynihans and Humphreys steered the course of the Democratic Party.

I commend to you heartily Cuomo’s Notre Dame speech, entitled “Religious Belief and Public Morality.” I trust that its reading will reassure or introduce you to the fact that you that were days long ago in a land not so far away when Democrats had a coherent — albeit quasi-utopian — political philosophy. And now, for two of the many money quotes:

Politics as an improper use of ecclesial authority:

Now, of course the bishops will teach — they must teach — more and more vigorously, and more and more extensively. But they have said they will not use the power of their position, and the great respect it receives from all Catholics, to give an imprimatur to individual politicians or parties. Not that they couldn’t do it if they wished to — some religious leaders, as you know, do it. Some are doing it at this very moment. And not that it would be a sin if they did. God does not insist on political neutrality. But because it is the judgment of the bishops, and most of us Catholic laypeople, that it is not wise for prelates and politicians to be too closely tied together.

Religion as an improper basis for political discourse

I’m free to argue for a governmental policy for a nuclear freeze not just to avoid sin, but because I think my democracy should regard it as a desirable goal. I can, if I wish, argue that the state should not fund the use of contraceptive devices not because the Pope demands it, but because I think that the whole community — for the good of the whole community — should not sever sex from an openness to the creation of life. And surely I can, if I am so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion, not because my bishops say it is wrong, but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life — including life in the womb, which is at the very least potentially human and should not be extinguished casually.

Now, no law prevents us from advocating any of these things. I am free to do so. So are the bishops. So is Reverend Falwell. In fact, the Constitution guarantees my right to try. And theirs. And his.

But should I? Is it helpful? Is it essential to human dignity? Would it promote harmony and understanding? Or does it divide us so fundamentally that it threatens our ability to function as a pluralistic community? When should I argue to make my religious value your morality? My rule of conduct your limitation? What are the rules and policies that should influence the exercise of this right to argue and to promote?

To download the entirety of Cuomo’s speech, click here.

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Part Five

The National Hymns

Closely associated with the pledge of allegiance is the singing of national hymns and anthems that further nurture the inculcation of an American civil religion. Gamoran observes: “The pledge is often followed by a song [which] carries the theme of the pledge, and when sung immediately following, must be seen as a part of the civil religious rite. Though they lack mention to God, they refer either to a sacred object or to the death sacrifice of the nation’s founders.” On a profound and fundamental level, the national hymns serve to inspire, challenge and unite the American people. The most hotly contested sports event is preceded, in most cases, by the national anthem, during which both fans and contestants remove their hats, emblazoned with symbols of cultural partisanship, cover their hearts, and with authentic reverence join voices in solemn pause. During moments of national crisis, the bitterest of political opponents can join hands and sing more explicitly theistic national hymns, entreating divine blessing upon the land and its citizens. We all remember Democrats and Republicans alike standing on the Capitol steps — much to the chagrin of the ACLU — and singing “God Bless America” during the 9/11 crisis.  These are not holdovers from a day gone by where Americans believed that God was superintending the affairs of men, but rather reflect the enduring ability of a childhood catechism to unite the nation’s citizens throughout their entire lives even if it takes 19 terrorists and a few airplanes to forge that bond of citizenship.

The Saints and the Martyrs

Tertullian of Carthage is credited with having observed that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” Alongside those whose death-sacrifice warranted special attention in the life of the church are saints whose lives exemplified the religious ideal, and an essential part of catechism is the telling and re-telling of the lives and deaths of the saints and martyrs so that the abstract nature of faith does not eclipse the practical potential that the faith actually works to embolden the church’s witness.

It is no different with the structure of America’s civil catechism. When democracy is taught in public schools, it is taught most frequently by chronological and biographical narratives surrounding the personalities whose lives inform the civil catechism: presidents like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan; military leaders like Lee and Grant and Patton and MacArthur; intellectual elites and innovators like Benjamin Franklin, Edison and Einstein; women like Betsy Ross, Dolly Madison and Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the saints of American civil religion, it is noteworthy that the presidents play a supreme role, even to the degree that the veneration of these men (the building of monuments and memorials, the carving of their likenesses into mountainsides, the marking of their birthplaces and burial grounds, the naming of public schools and the renaming of airports) can approach deification. All other players on the national stage must, in some part, derive their respective identities from the personalities who comprise this pantheon of former presidents. Charles Henderson is especially insightful in this regard:

Presidential politics is clearly the arena in which the implicit religion of the people is made explicit. While leaders of the established churches are virtually ignored by the general public, all eyes turn toward the president. This is the context in which the root symbols, beliefs and attitudes have their most dynamic relationship to everyday life. (The only religious leaders who are significant on the national scene are those who manage to place themselves, in one way or another, near the presidential power.) But the presidency is the stage on which the nation’s leaders play their parts, acting out their priestly and prophetic functions, piecing together those constellations of meaning which become the precarious vision of their various constituencies. It is not the nation which is the focal point of civil religion, but the presidency.

So while men like Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, and other religious leaders have a place in America’s civic faith, their place is not so much grounded in a contribution to the theologies of their respective denominational loyalties as much as a proximity to and influence upon the men who have occupied the Oval Office. Martin Luther King, in particular, will be an interesting addition to the roster of national saints, and the degree to which “MLK Day” will be celebrated like other national holidays is dependant on the attention it receives in the festal calendar of American public schools.

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Part Four

Public education in modern America serves as the primary venue for overtly democratic catechesis. When assessing the way that civil religion has taken shape within our contemporary political milieu, the work of sociologist Adam Gamoran of the University of Wisconsin is helpful. Public schools, Gamoran argues, play a key role in producing and transmitting American civil religion and in teaching appreciation for the symbols and practices that accompany a robust nationalistic faith.

Among Gamoran’s more useful studies is one conducted over a calendar year in a public school located in a Chicago working-class neighborhood. Supplementing his research about the recitation of the pledge, the singing of national hymns, and the instruction regarding national holidays and heroes, Gamoran provides both his own memories from a public elementary and secondary education as well as the insights from profiles and reflections written by his students in an undergraduate sociology course taught at the University of Wisconsin. Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that there exists a distinctly religious tone to the structure of public education, and Gamoran provides a critical analysis of that evidence.

The Creed

It has been nearly sixty years since a case of any magnitude involving the pledge of allegiance was granted certiorari by America’s high court, but cases are forever under appeal challenging the words ‘under God’ in the national creed. And while it is improbable that the Supreme Court will remove the “offending” prepositional phrase, the legal precedence regarding the pledge should serve as a sobering reminder of how quickly the gears of American jurisprudence can be reversed.

Continue reading “Civil Catechesis and the Democratic Creed, Pt. 5…” →

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When Your Children Shall Ask, “What Mean These Things?”

More than a quarter century ago, Gladys Wiggins observed that the mere existence of a public school in society indicates that some degree of enculturative responsibility has been usurped from the family and absorbed into existing governmental structures. In this way, “the modern state, unlike earlier kingdoms and feudal manors, is kept alive either by an actively participant people or by an acquiescent people.” Mass education, Wiggins suggests, “ushered in by Protestantism for religious reasons, is made imperative by nationalism because of a new kind of political—some would say religious—faith.” Education, both civil and political, is the most efficient impetus for societal cohesion. Perhaps no better explanation of the precise way that a public school system functions as the locus of civil catechesis and parallels the sectarian interests regarding indoctrination of the young has been offered than by Durkheim, who demonstrates persuasively that all societies, religious or otherwise, share a common need for regular assembly and creedal reaffirmation:

There can be no society which does not feel the need for upholding and reaffirming, at regular intervals, the collective sentiments and ideas which animate both its unity and individuality. Now this moral reconstruction cannot be achieved except by means of reunions, assemblies, and congregations, in which individuals, being brought together, reaffirm their common sentiments. From this source arise ceremonies which do not differ from properly religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the primary holidays associated with the life of Christ, or Jews remembering the Exodus from Egypt or the reception of the Decalogue, and a gathering of citizens commemorating the institution of a new moral or legal system or some other significant event in the nation’s history?

The public schoolhouse, it seems, is the place wherein the nation’s children assemble to learn about the rituals and rites associated with the founding and perpetuation of the American republic. Like true religion, the civil religion that receives pedagogical entitlement is accompanied by forms, festivals, rituals and offices, which, while meaningful in their own right, enjoy heightened curricular interest on account of their quasi-religious, and sometimes overtly religious, character. Like true religion, American civil religion has its creeds, hymns, saints, martyrs, temples, holy days and clergy; and while any one of them cannot justify the opprobrious epithet ‘religious,’ together they nonetheless create the environment whereby the public school comes to resemble a church and its teachers, catechists.

Continue reading “Civil Catechesis and the Democratic Creed, Pt. 4…” →

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These Things You Shall Teach Diligently Unto Your Children

If the lessons of history taught ancient Israel anything, it was that failure to impress profound appreciation for and obedience to the laws of God upon the minds of their children wrought disastrous consequences both in terms of cultic dissolution and national instability. In the same way, the enduring Puritan strain of American civil religion and its underlying thesis regarding the perceived inviolability of the United States as a covenanted, millennial and chosen nation has guided the development of a sophisticated system of catechesis for the nation’s young. By the same logic, failure to educate future generations of democratic citizens will result in disasters similarly suffered by previous ‘chosen’ nations. Even those who cannot embrace this Puritan strain readily emphasize that the future economic, political, and military stability of the United States depend upon the strength of American public schools.

Inherent in the democratic faith is an evangelistic and catechistic principle by which the nation simultaneously exports democracy abroad and expounds it at home. As Jacques Maritain has succinctly observed, “the body politic has the right and the duty to promote among its citizens, mainly through education, the human and temporal—and essentially practical—creed on which depend national communion and civil peace.” Moreover, “the educational system and the State have a duty to see to the teaching of that charter of common life, and thus to defend and promote the common good and the fundamental statute of the body politic even up to the common secular faith involved.” If it can be shown that an American civil religion parallels a true religion with respect to its accoutrements, structures, and offices, then it follows that the means by which that civil religion is transmitted might also parallel its symbiotic churchly forms.

The nation that seeks to inculcate its civic faith must establish for itself the instrumentality by which its catechistic purposes are achieved. For the nation that has anchored its soul firmly upon the vigilant refusal to allow the establishment of a national church, let alone the excessive entanglement or admixture of church and state, there arises no insignificant constitutional impediment from the very article it seeks to inculcate—in this case, the First Amendment. It cannot require that the nation’s free churches expound the democratic charter; neither can it establish for itself a true church wherein its own prophets reinforce the national creed. Even if the organized churches could be forced to teach the democratic charter, as Robert Michaelsen has noted, they would only garner limited returns, “not because the churches disagreed with the democratic proposition but because they disagreed among themselves.” What is required, therefore, and what some of the constitutional framers sought from the beginning, is “a system of public or common education, open to all, financed by taxation and under the direction of no particular sectarian group.”

Continue reading “Civil Catechesis and the Democratic Creed, Pt. 3…” →

Civil Catechesis, Pt. 1… 

University of Chicago Professor Martin Marty has noted that “Americans had civic faiths from the time of Columbus or the Mayflower; Native Americans had tribal equivalents before that, [and] the founding fathers expressly advocated what has since been called ‘the religion of the Republic.” This civic faith, according to Marty, has taken various forms throughout the nation’s history either as a folk religion, a transcendent universal national religion (not to be confused with religious nationalism), a democratic faith, or many times as Protestant civic piety. Nevertheless, in every instance whereby the American body politic has coalesced, particularly in times of war and societal conflict, a civil religion has emerged as the “real religion of the American people by mere fact of their being American people.” Americans have not, however, developed without antecedent the notion of civil religion; that credit belongs in large measure to the 18th century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his seminal work, The Social Contract.

In Rousseau’s thought, it is of little consequence what the dogmas of any particular constituent religion are so long as they make a citizen love his duties and fulfill his responsibilities to his fellow man. Each citizen is granted license, therefore, to hold any religious opinion he chooses, and those opinions are far beyond the sovereign’s competence so long as they provide for good citizens in the present life. But there will inevitably exist in any given national framework a “purely civil profession of faith whose articles the sovereign is competent to determine, not precisely as religious dogmas, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be either a good citizen or a faithful subject.” The dogmas of this civil religion should be “simple, few, and precisely formulated, without explanations or commentaries,” and Rousseau suggested both positive and negative articles of such a civic faith: the existence of a powerful, intelligent, benevolent, foreseeing and providential God, the continuance of life after death, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, and finally, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. As for the negative articles, Rousseau limited them to one, namely intolerance.

Americans seem to be perfectly suited to fit Rousseau’s model of civil religion, as recent analysis of American religious beliefs confirms. For instance, belief in God is nearly universal at ninety-four percent, while seventy-one percent believe in the reality of heavenly reward in an afterlife. Moreover, eight in ten Americans agree that “Depending on how much strength and character a person has, he can pretty well control what happens to him,” and seventy-nine percent subscribe to the belief that universal moral absolutes exist and should be applied regardless of the situation. Finally, with respect to Rousseau’s negative article, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that every individual should have the right to formulate and possess his own religious beliefs independent of coercive institutional indoctrination on the part of any church or synagogue. These widespread affirmations of the American body politic, while not rising to the level of a systematic metaphysic, nevertheless constitute an unscripted creed which exerts palpable influence on the ways that citizens live their lives, raise their children and relate to their neighbors. And while the American experiment has long since eschewed the explicit theological content of Rousseau’s formula, this public creed, or democratic charter, retains adequate theistic avowals necessary to provide an adequate basis for social unity which “links the social order to a higher, truer realm [by providing] religious motivation and sanction for civic virtue.” In this way an American civil religion may resemble a true religion, albeit a doctrinally minimalist and utilitarian one sufficient only to engineer the good society.

Hence, democracy alone is the faith once delivered to the state and for which every citizen is obliged to contend. And while America may champion the separation of church and state by insisting on the separation of denominational religion from the apparatus of government, there is not, nor can there be a separation of religion and state so long as the national democratic creed remains the uniquely sacrosanct theme of public discourse. So important, in fact, is this democratic faith that some have argued it must be taught in churches and synagogues in addition to taxpayer supported agencies and institutions. It should come as no surprise, therefore, when those same voices call for democracy to be taught “as religion” in the public schools, which themselves must become “veritable temple[s] for the indoctrination of democracy.”

To Be Continued…

Reflecting upon his second and final visit among the American churches in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote prophetically of his frustration with the shape of Protestantism in the United States, assessing the influence that religious and ethnic pluralism had in the genesis of an anti-confessional, anti-creedal public life. American Christianity, Bonhoeffer observed, had “no central organization, no common creed, no common cultus, no common church history and no common ethical, social or political principles.” This ecclesiastic phenomenon had profound political implications owing largely to the “concept of tolerance among the Congregationalist-Baptist enthusiasts, particularly as it was developed by Roger Williams in Maryland.” In such an environment of absolute religious tolerance, Bonhoeffer continued, “the dominion of God becomes synonymous with the freedom of the individual to follow by himself the inner voice and the inner light.” Moreover, the path is paved wide for the formation of denominations without creeds wherein “the concept of tolerance becomes the basic principle of everything Christian.”

But perhaps Bonhoeffer unwittingly stumbled across the very religious and very nationalistic faith which binds together the ethnically and culturally diverse constituencies of America’s disparate faith traditions. Perhaps, indeed, there exists “alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.” And perhaps, with democracy as its creed and tolerance as its virtue, such an American public faith serves the purpose in the United States that a nationalized, confessional church served in Bonhoeffer’s Germany. And just perhaps, in an otherwise astute critique, Bonhoeffer missed both the existence and authenticity of America’s idiosyncratic “legitimating myth.”

If Bonhoeffer failed to recognize the presence and power of an American nationalistic faith, it is certain that many of his contemporaries in the United States did not. Among them, none other than the famed Harry Emerson Fosdick thundered from the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church against the encroaching and seductive influence of what many have termed “civic idolatry”:

Millions today, some in this country and many elsewhere, are taking that attitude toward the absolute, nationalistic state. It is a substitute religion. It has its dogmas, its rituals, its symbols and its sacraments. At the heart of it is this tremendous matter: the utter devotion of millions of souls to the nationalistic god. Where do you think that substitute god will bring us out? He will tear our world into bloody pieces and make our children’s earth a hell.

Notwithstanding the perennial controversy about whether or not civil religion is truly an idolatrous counter-religion or merely a term employed euphemistically to describe the near-euphoric confidence of the American people in the democratic ideal, there is almost universal recognition that something exists which serves to unite the American people in spite of religious pluralism. That something is itself, to some extent, religious, if not a religion altogether.

Assuming that Emile Durkheim is correct in his insistence that wherever religious life is observed there exists a definite group at its foundation to adhere to and practice the rites connected with common religious beliefs, and that such beliefs are not “received individually by all members of the group” but are rather that which “give[s] the group its unity,” the question remains as to whether, as Durkheim implies, the civil religion of a nation necessarily results in the creation of a national church. If, then, America is run through with civic piety, and if these religious notions inform every citizen about his place in society and responsibility in the world, where then is the church by which the nation is united and in which its young catechumens receive their instruction in timeless truths held self-evident?

With this question providing the framework for the present inquiry, we shall explore the existence of a national, civil religion in the American context, giving specific attention to the role of public education in the cultivation of a “confessional” citizenry. The discussion will involve both the content of civil catechesis and the ways in which American catechumens are shielded from the “heresies” of compromised religious freedom, excessive governmental entanglement and improper religious coercion. In the end, we will argue that if American civil religion is not a truly established religion and therefore inconsistent with First Amendment guarantees, then it surely looks, sounds, and acts like one in spite of copious jurisprudential objection.

To be continued…