Protestant Pacifist: War and Pacifism in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge

Review: <i>Civil Religion Today: Religion and the American Nation in Twenty-First Century</i>, edited by Rhys H. Williams, Raymond Haberski Jr., and Philip Goff

From the founding of the United States, Americans have understood loyalty to their country as a religious and not just a civic commitment. The idea of a 'civil religion' that defines the collective identity of a nation originates with Rousseau, and was adapted to the United States Robert Bellah, who suggested that a peculiarly American civil religion has underwritten government and civil society in the United States. Leaving aside the question whether civil religion has ever truly unified all or virtually all Americans, I argue that it excludes too many Americans to function as such a unifying force in the present. I discuss the general content of American civil religion, and then briefly examine how it has been deployed to sacralize four historical 'moments' in American history, the Founding, the Civil War, the Cold War, and the contemporary Culture Wars. I argue that religious pluralism and sectarian activism in the United States make a unifying civil religion improbable from a practical standpoint, and that the tendency of civil religion to devolve into idolatry, i.e., the sanctification of the government and its goals, makes it normatively unattractive, particularly for religious minorities. I close by suggesting that American civil religion can genuinely include and unify all Americans only if it drops its religious component, and that American society has sufficient cultural resources to inform a 'secular' civil religion.This paper was delivered at a symposium entitled 'Civil Religion in the United States and Europe: Four Comparative Perspectives,' held at Brigham Young University Law School on March 12-14, 2009.

This study aims to evaluate the theoretical claims of American Civil Religion (ACR) in the context of the sociological experiences of American Muslims. The lack of sufficient research on ACR’s potential to include minority groups underscores the significance of this study. The research examines how ACR’s core values—unity, inclusivity, equality, and diversity—are reflected in the experiences of American Muslims. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 American Muslims in Phoenix, Arizona. The findings reveal that while ACR theoretically presents itself as a unifying and inclusive narrative, it was often perceived to operate in ways that exclude certain religious and ethnic groups. Participants highlighted that ACR’s rhetoric is Christian-centric, weakening the sense of social belonging among American Muslims. Furthermore, ACR is perceived not only as exclusionary but also as a factor complicating social cohesion for minority groups. In conclusion, this study emphasizes the need to reassess ACR’s theoretical claims in light of American Muslims’ lived experiences. It contributes to ACR literature and broader sociological discussions on the relationship between minority groups and religious frameworks.

Civil religion in America has no church, denominations, or institutional center, and it cannot be traced to a single origin story. And yet, it operates as a religion in ways familiar to Americans—it has priests and pastors, altars and sacrifices, symbols, institutions, and liturgies. So, what, then, is civil religion? The term originates with the 18th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who proposed that the French nation needed a civil religion to replace the “unholy” alliance between the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Rousseau explained in book 4 of his Social Contract that he hoped a “purely civil profession of faith” would satisfy what he viewed as the popular need for something to believe in, to give one’s allegiance to, and even to give up one life’s for—a transcendent, unifying point of reference that existed beyond politics and in place of a denominational (most likely Christian) church. Thus, in philosophical terms, civil religion is the appropriation of religion for political ends. The American version of civil religion, though, differs from Rousseau’s idea by incorporating the nation’s Christian heritage more deeply into an understanding and judgment of America. In the American context, civil religion had to accommodate the country’s variety of faiths and Enlightenment rationalism, but was just as deeply influenced by the power of popular and elite religiosity to order American life. Thus, American civil religion has echoed Protestant values and assumptions, while enshrining the mythic nature of the Puritans, founding fathers, and common people who gave their lives in wars and conquest. Moreover, while Americans do not pray to their nation, they have no trouble praying for their nation; they see presidents and preachers as both serving in capacities that minister to the people in times of crisis, and they invest sacred meaning in events and documents to help them imagine that America is as much an idea as it is a place. Over time, American civil religion has also provided a narrative for a set of ideals, statements of purpose, and symbols to which all Americans, in theory, can appeal. Sociologist Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) explained in a famous and significant essay titled “Civil Religion in America,” for the winter 1967 issue of the journal Daedelus, “American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” He contended that Americans could call upon not only a common creed of ideals but also their civil religion to evaluate their nation’s actions. In parlance that became popular following World War II, the United States was a nation “under God,” meaning, as Bellah argued, “the will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong.”

Philip S. Gorski's “Barack Obama and Civil Religion” offers a number of important contributions to the study of American culture generally, and American Civil Religion (ACR) more specifically. Gorski's appreciation of the deep diversity in contemporary American society is a welcome development in ACR analysis. I ask whether the term “civil religion” remains most adequate for describing the sort of cultural phenomenon that Gorski, following Bellah, attempts to capture, and offer some methodological and interpretive comments on the promise and challenge of studying ACR in the twenty-first century United States. I close with some more particular remarks on Barack Obama and the contours of ACR as sketched by Gorski.

This paper puts theoretical assumptions about the rhetoric of American Civil Religion (ACR) to the empirical test by analyzing a sample of Presidential election speech from 1960 to 2020. First, we quantify 14 motifs theorized to be part of ACR. Second, we examine the claim that ACR is a non-sectarian religion distinct from Christianity. Third, we consider if ACR is a persistent rhetorical phenomenon. Fourth, we investigate whether ACR articulation transcends partisan ideologies. We find that ACR is a non-sectarian religion which is distinct from Christianity, that it is a persistent rhetorical phenomenon, and that it transcends partisan lines. Nevertheless, we also find that some motifs previously theorized to be core tenets of ACR are conspicuously scant in the data examined.

In 1967, Robert Bellah argued that America’s “founding myth”, what he called American civil religion, helps bind American society together by providing its citizens with a sense of origin, direction, and meaning. For evidence, Bellah primarily turned to the inaugural speeches of American presidents. This paper draws on semantic network analysis to empirically examine the inaugural addresses of Presidents Trump and Biden, looking for evidence of what some would consider aspects of American civil religion. As some believe American civil religion to be no more than a thinly veiled form of nationalism, it also considers the importance of words associated with nationalism. It finds that both Trump and Biden employed the language of nationalism and American civil religion in their respective addresses, and while it found no differences in their use of nationalist discourse, it did find that American civil religion figures more prominently in Biden’s address than in Trump’s.

This chapter suggests that civil religion can be better understood if more attention is paid to the state and its relations with other states. As such, the state will not be seen only as the government of the United States, for example. Instead, the political body of the state will be regarded as a complex collective agent that is comprised of the government, but also by those individuals with the right to access the political process, i.e., the citizens. The chapter also suggests that civil religion could be understood as a mythological/historical definition of the American state, apparent internally as well as externally. It proposes that civil religion can be analysed as a historical legitimation of the internal and external sovereignty of the state in question. From the present perspective, American civil religion is not primarily a narration of the relation between God and the American nation. Keywords: American civil religion; American political body; complex collective agent

World War I (1914–1918) was to motion pictures as the American Civil War (1861–1865) was to still photography. The Great War brought together many technological innovations foreshadowed in the American war. The moving picture was one such innovation. As Paul Virilio observed, in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989, cited under Critical Overviews and Reference Works), the synchronized frame-by-frame advance of film through a projector imitated the advance of the cartridge belt through a machine gun. Framing a scene or editing during postproduction became an integral part of strategy and tactics: the projector became a weapon and the movie theater a battlefield. Governments realized quickly how valuable the cinema could be in explaining the meaning and experience of the war to both soldiers and civilians by encouraging enlistments, defining the nation’s goals, and vilifying the enemy. Filmmaking became part of war-making through documentary films, newsreels, and film narratives produced by governments or by private film companies. During and after the war, documentary and narrative (fictional) films served to reflect and shape the collective memory of the war through the range of the war-film genre—combat films, propaganda films, antiwar films, gender-focused home-front films, war-based musicals, war comedies, and films focusing on the life of the war veteran. How do we assess these films as historical “documents”? Some film scholars look at historical accuracy to assess verisimilitude. Others look at the war film primarily as a metaphor, as more representative of the zeitgeist of the period in which they are made than the war in fact. How do films influence national self-identity and individual, collective, and contested memory? For example: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) reflects the antiwar spirit of the post-WWI era. Le Grande Illusion (1937) reveals the political climate of 1930s France. Sergeant York (1941) anticipates American participation in WWII. Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) says more about the anti-establishment movement of the Vietnam era than about the First World War. The Lighthorsemen (1987) is about defining Australian national identity. WWI films can also be assessed by viewing them in the context of two schools of historical interpretation: the orthodox view, reflected in Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), sees WWI as meaningless horror and stupidity; the revisionist view, as in Brian Bond’s lectures in The Unquiet Western Front (2002), challenges the Great War “myth” in an attempt to rescue the narrative from the mud and the muck.

American civil religion (ACR) burst on to the scholarly scene in 1967, and has been periodically revived as a source of analytic insight and normative hope since that time. It posited a universalist, prophetic, nonsectarian faith, referenced on the nation, that served as both a source of unity for the American people and a discursive resource for political leaders and protest movements. Using recent political events as illustrative cases, I argue that ACR is not only a universalist, prophetic creed, it is also an expression of tribal identity that ascribes a particular character and purpose to the American people. In particular, this “tribal” civil religion has an often‐unstated assumption about the inseparability of religion, race, and national identity—that is, white, Christian, and American. Recent events have disrupted those implicit connections, leading to a vociferous reemphasis of their centrality to the national story. I maintain that neither ACR, nor recent politics involving immigration and Barack Obama's presidency, can be understood fully without considering the religion‐race‐national identity nexus.

The year 1987 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Robert N. Bellah's provocative essay Civil Religion in America. Because of that anniversary and because we have read less about civil religion lately, an assessment of the status of American civil religion, especially during the 1980s, is in order. This article has three purposes. The first is a bibliographic review of the American civil religion literature, with emphasis upon the 1980s. The second is an argument for four phases in, or a periodicity of, discussion about American civil religion since 1967. The third purpose is a brief explanation for the waning of discussion and the current state of American civil religion. Thirteen years ago, Phillip Hammond attempted a sociology of American civil

The American president is the pontifex maximus of the American Civil Religion (ACR). While each U.S. president has their own ‘take’ on ACR, they all endorse democratic values and serve as national pastors. All until Donald J. Trump. This article argues that Donald Trump is the first pontifex minimus in American history: the first leader to self-consciously endorse an anti-democratic civil religion as president. After providing the necessary background in ACR studies and the presidency, it explores Trump's religious values (derived from Norman Vincent Peale's power of positive thinking) and his political beliefs (especially his deep hostility toward democratic governance). It documents both throughout his presidency, but argues that they mature in the waning days of his term. Trump's decision to strike at the heart of the election ritual—the time during which American politics is at its most vulnerable—establishes him as the pontifex minimus of the civil religion of the Big Lie (CRBL).

The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. The God of the civil religion is not only rather Unitarian, he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Until the Civil War, the American civil religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. Fortunately, since the American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality, the reorganization entailed by such a new situation need not disrupt the American civil religion's continuity.

This study explores how the Hulu streaming series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-) extends Margaret Atwood’s novel by depicting the aftermath of the transformation of the United States by the fake theocracy of Gilead through visual cues that evoke American civil religion, a performative system of symbols and rituals that reifies national values and unites a pluralistic society. A textual analysis of the episode “Household,” set in Gilead’s capital of a reimaged Washington, D.C., found four main themes regarding the onscreen depiction of Gileadean theocracy and its surface victory over the United States and its accompanying symbols of American civil religion: (a) religion used as a façade, (b) desecration of sacred sites in American civil religion, (c) silencing, and (d) surveillance. This study adds a unique contribution to the study of American civil religion through its examination of visual images in a fictional televisual text.

2020 was a year defined by disaster and unrest, from impeachment to war to wildfires to a global pandemic to protest movements arising in the United States in response to police violence. This brief article reflects on Robert Bellah's concept of American Civil Religion, particularly his focus on three times of trial. I argue that the nation's second time of trial, the Civil War and the struggle over whether American democracy would truly include all Americans, is not truly in the past. American Civil Religion is undergirded by a system of white supremacy, and the systems which exist to supposedly instill norms of equality and justice are broken. A host of issues exists on the periphery, while the pressing need is an acceptance of the fact that American Civil Religion is rotten at its core. The historical narrative on which American Civil Religion rests fails to unite because it fails to truly be a history of the American people writ large. Whether we are in fact living through a new time of trial or not, it is nonetheless the case that the United States has arrived at a moment which demands a national and civil religious reckoning.