‘God bless America’. Prayer as a political ritual in the USA

Abstract

The article is an attempt to analyze the relation between religion and politics in the American culture of last few decades. Liberals of western civilization very often look on the religion as an anachronism – something connected with a personal wishful thinking or with the prayers of monks closed in a congregation rather than with the modern political life. But the religion is an important component of the present‑day culture in America. A good example of this is the modern use of prayer as a form of political action. The research concentrates on two different forms of religious prayer – ‘the civil prayer’ and ‘the imprecatory prayer’. As we will see, these two forms of confessional practice differ in almost everything, but they share a common political context.