It is interesting to revisit civil religion discourse in the context of a new time and its discontents, and the consequent rethinking of the theme.  Three of the four posts in this discussion (Gorski, Moosa, Morgan) address the civic-religious complex in terms of Robert Bellah’s well-known concept of civil religion. The fourth (Kim) does not, but invokes Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson in ways that echo some of the dialogue of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Bellah thesis was fresh and new. Given this general ambiance, I would like to situate these rich and evocative posts by reviewing what, in that time, was called the civil religion debate.

Robert Bellah catalyzed that debate in terms of his compelling act of naming—his talk of civil religion. But as the debate over the concept grew between 1967—the date of Bellah’s famous Daedalus essay “Civil Religion in America”—and the 1970s, a number of things became clear:

1)  Bellah’s term of choice came trailing an ambiguous past and legacy, dating from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, with its chapter “Of Civil Religion.”
2)  Other American voices had noticed some things about collective American history and public identity that seemed to bear a family resemblance to what Bellah was talking about.  Of these, the two most salient expressions became those of Sidney Mead, the historian-turned-public-theologian, with his concept of the “Religion of the Republic,” and of Will Herberg, the sociologist-turned-moralist, with his “American Way of Life.”

Given this background, a discourse developed that was clearly moral in nature, but which, as in David Kim’s notion of the exhaustion of a myth, finally exhausted itself—not in poetry and elegy but in the failure, after a time, to produce anything new. The civil religion proposal collapsed into more circumspect observations about a waxing and waning public religion (cf. John Wilson). And it collapsed because the moral stances that were part of the discourse, once stated and argued, did not achieve sufficient ballast to catapult the debate into new knowledge and a clear agenda for action.

Briefly, Mead’s “Religion of the Republic” argued for an ideal and transcendent form of the nation—incarnated perhaps only once, in Abraham Lincoln. (In this light, it is surely interesting that Kim’s essay turns again to Lincoln—something that Mark Noll, on the evangelical Right, also does.) Meanwhile, Herberg’s “American Way of Life” offered a counterproposal of sorts. The “American Way of Life” was a meta-folk religion encompassing not only government but also, and especially, collective mores that included strong sanitation practices and a fondness for Coca-Cola. It earned from Herberg emphatic condemnation for its idolatry, and it prompted a call for return to the worship of the true Judeo-Christian God. Finally, Bellah’s ringing proclamation of civil religion celebrated a glorious past of Puritan covenant and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, both of which had been critically challenged and stood in danger of being undone in America’s “third time of trial,” the Vietnam War.

So, civil religion was good and to be praised (Mead); evil and to be condemned (Herberg); or once good, now evil, and thus in need of redemption and reform (Bellah). In the background hovered the forefather of the conversation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his original formulation that contrasted the religion of the state with the religion of Christianity. It was Rousseau who exposed in the process the twin brutality and necessity of a religious nationalism that demanded the citizen’s sacrifice, even the death of the self, on the altar of a nation’s wars. Rousseau’s civil religion offered such sacrifice by feeding lives to the state.

In this context, what resemblance is there between past and present civil religion discourse? Given this past discourse and its winding down, how do we explain the new interest at present in the civil religion proposal? How does the present discourse avoid the pitfalls of the past and take us to some place genuinely new?

It is clear that the present discourse, as the earlier one, is moral (or ethical) in nature. Moreover, two of the posts (Kim, Morgan) invoke myth in ways that echo Bellah. Two eschew religious nationalism explicitly (Gorski, Morgan), and two others surely imply non-acceptance of it (Kim, Moosa). Two posts turn to a past and, their authors hope, continuing tradition of rational discourse as the way to resolve the dilemmas of the present (Gorski, Moosa, with his South African comparison). Two make a cultural turn to aesthetics, thus seeing the ethical—which is about values and valuing—as an entrée into a register that conflates goodness with, in the broad sense, harmony and beauty (Kim, Morgan).

Significantly, given the Judeo-Christian character of most of the discourse from the past, all four of these posts seek to position civil religion outside an explicitly Jewish-Christian framework. As a historian, I cannot help noting this in light of the changed and still changing social reality of the American populace. Ours is a nation in which strong pluralism is a fact and is also the increasingly fertile ground for a rising new mythos of the American nation.  In the emerging mythos, arguably, the traditional Christianity of the Puritans and the Enlightenment ideology of the American Revolution are being folded into a new and different vision, perhaps signaled (as some of the posts note) by the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency. Here, I believe, lies the beginning of an explanation for the revisitation of the civil religion proposal by these authors in our time.

So what, then, can be said about the emerging renewed civil religion proposal and the clues that these posts give us about it?

1)  The old outlines are still there—good and to be praised, if we distinguish between left and right or reason and unreason (Gorski); bad and to be condemned, if we make the same distinctions (Moosa); once good (well, maybe), but now manifestly in need of redemption through reason, elegiac processes, good Emersonianism, and a better imaginary and consequent practice (Kim, Morgan).
2)  The present discussion is more chastened and circumspect, more complex and nuanced, more tentative than that of the past. Indeed, it is readier to release that past (pace Kim’s elegiac temperament) than the earlier debate ever was. That debate centered on return; this one turns on finding a way into a new imaginary that recoups some of the past—the most valued parts—in order to advance it to a new place and time.
3)  The introduction of an aesthetic dimension, along with its invocations of an American imaginary, provides a new jumping-off point for discourse. There is a sense, perhaps, of Adamic newness here, even in hard times; of a felt confidence in the human ability to re-create and co-create into a future that we shape to our liking and that might bring us some joy.

Finally, let me close with an anecdote that I hold near and dear.  A long time ago, in my last year in graduate school at the University of Chicago, we students held a conference on American religion, and Jonathan Z. Smith was a featured speaker.  “How do you dream America?” he challenged us.  The posts here presented are important beginning points for answering that question—a question that, at least in my imaginary, has echoed down through all these years.

Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, civil religion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Wilson, Robert Bellah, Sidney Mead, Will Herberg

[view academic citations] The new McCarthyism sweeping Israel

To disagree with the state is to 'delegitimise' the state: that is the increasingly strident response of the country's political and military establishment to those who dare to criticise its conduct

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
The Independent
Saturday, 13 February 2010


It's hard, sitting on the other side of the office table from which Naomi Chazan is picking at her modest hummus and salad snack lunch, to believe that the amiable 63-year-old university professor with a self-deprecating sense of humour has suddenly become the most discussed, not to say demonised, woman in Israel.

Ms Chazan is president of a long-established agency with large numbers of Jewish donors in the US and Britain, which is committed to fighting for "social justice and equality for all Israelis". The New Israel Fund has over the last 30 years disbursed some $200m to around 800 charitable, social and human rights groups, and justly claims much of the credit for building modern Israel's still vibrant civil society.

But in the last fortnight the former Knesset member who by her own account loves her native Israel "without reservation" has been sacked as a columnist on the Jerusalem Post after 14 years, had rowdy demonstrators outside her house brandishing a chilling caricature of her with a horn obtruding from her forehead, and most far-fetched of all, been accused, in a newspaper article circulated to foreign journalists by the Government Press Office, of "serving the agenda of Iran and Hamas".

The onslaught has prompted Nicholas Saphir, the Jewish businessman who runs the New Israel Fund in the UK, to warn that the "Jewish values of social justice and our duty to tikkun olam (repairing the world) have come under serious threat in the state of Israel".

The row has come to symbolise a new mood of establishment intolerance in Israel towards criticisms by Israeli human rights groups of such episodes as last year's military operation in Gaza. This harsh new mood has been fuelled by ministers, right-wing politicians and military figures who have closed ranks behind accusations that the UN-commissioned report into the war, led by Richard Goldstone, which accused both sides of war crimes, is being used to "delegitimise Israel".

The NIF's travails began when a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu provoked accusations of latterday McCarthyism by charging that "without the NIF there could be no Goldstone report and Israel would not be facing international accusations of war crimes". It is a charge which Abe Foxman, director of the US-based Anti- Defamation League and no great friend of the Israeli left, told New York Jewish Week was "absurd".

Ms Chazan does not herself talk about McCarthyism �though several of her agency's defenders, including Isaac Herzog, a Labour party minister in the governing coalition, have done so. But she told The Independent: "Every country has its own version of things but the general climate is very problematic. It's ugly." She said the mood reminded her of the hate-laced run-up to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995. "But it's different, because that was an avowedly political disagreement. This is the beginning of a rather systematic campaign against really the very essentials of Israeli democracy."

Ms Chazan cites the arrests of Israelis at demonstrations against the encroachment of Jewish settlers in the Arab East Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah. And the interrogation and fingerprinting last month of her friend Anat Hoffman, of the reform group Religious Action Centre, who for 20 years has challenged ultra-Orthodox control of the Western Wall by seeking to entrench the right of women to pray in shawls there.

"There is an assault on the basics of law and order but most important I see this as part of a very pernicious attempt to stifle alternative voices, and most seriously to equate criticism with betrayal. And there is a very strong political underpinning to that. I would go further ... behind this [is] a group of people who don't want a political settlement. They don't want peace, so they're trying to delegitimise the human rights movement."

She says that Im Tirtzu "expropriated" the term Zionism while "probably acting in the most anti-Zionist way I can imagine. They forgot to read the [1948] Declaration of Independence which talks of equality of all citizens of race, colour, creed, gender, nationality, etc. They also forgot the chapters in the Declaration where Israel extends its hand to its neighbours, they forgot basic democratic principles. They are hellbent to denounce anyone who dissents from the government line. Or dissents from their definition of what being a loyal Israeli is. That is ridiculous. Democracies are all about disagreements."

She herself is a Zionist? "Right now they debased the term. Am I someone who believes that Israel has the right to exist as a democratic state with a Jewish majority? My answer is a resounding yes. Just as the Palestinians have the right to a Palestinian state with a Palestinian majority alongside Israel. And I think in that regard I express the view of the vast majority of Israelis."

The NIF, excoriated by a series of right-wing columnists, has seen off- � for now � the prospect of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into its activities. And Ms Chazan welcomes the alternative prospect that a Knesset subcommittee will launch a probe of foreign funding of NGOs. But she adds: "We hope, are insisting, that they investigate the funding of all NGOs, including the NGOs of the right."

Indeed Im Tirtzu, whose chairman was a prominent opponent of Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of settlers from Gaza and has received funds from � among others � John Hagee Ministries, run by an ultra-conservative evangelical US pastor who has appeared to argue that the Holocaust was a good thing because it created the state of Israel.

The organisation's accusations were based on a curious reading of the footnotes of the Goldstone report claiming that 92 per cent of those citing "non-official" Israeli sources came from human rights organisations supported by the New Israel Fund.

In fact NIF-supported groups account for only 14 per cent of citations in Goldstone, and many of these do not deal with Gaza at all, and even include references that are not critical of Israeli policy. Moreover while the main human rights organisations, from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel to the army veterans' group Breaking the Silence, are supported by the NIF, as well as by European governments, they absorb less than 10 per cent of its funds, which also go to new Jewish immigrants, disabled, and women's groups, among many others.

Human rights groups funded by the NIF were early advocates of an independent Israeli operation. But the widely respected B'Tselem, for example, while tireless in highlighting Palestinian civilian deaths, has questioned the Goldstone conclusion that the Israeli military set out to target civilians. Ms Chazan strongly endorses the groups' calls for the independent investigation which the Israeli government has so far resisted. "Israel has investigated every war since 1973. This is the first war where we have not set up an investigation. That's hard to understand."

Had the Netanyahu government helped to create the space for the right-wing onslaught on the NIF? "Look, it hasn't denounced this vilification; and therefore draw your own conclusions."