The War, the Churches, and Civil Religion

Abstract

The opinion leadership of American religion has, since 1965, succeeded in making opposition to the Vietnam war respectable, to the effective exclusion of divergent viewpoints. Dissent from this new orthodoxy is exercised by small enclaves within a few scholarly centers and by larger church bodies that have remained aloof from the modern ecumenical dynamic in church co-operation and decision-making. The reasons for positions taken on the war by such different organizations as the National Council of Churches and the Southern Baptist Convention are, in large part, extrinsic to the merits or demerits of the war itself. The majority opposition to the war has, in a way similar to majority support for the civil rights movement, posed the problem of discontinuity with conventional Christian and Jewish piety. At the popular level, the relationship be tween religious devotion and specific social commitments has not been clarified effectively, resulting frequently in alienation of membership caused by "mixing politics with religion." Re ligious opposition to the war has more to do with what Robert Bellah has described as the American civil religion than it does with explicitly Jewish or Christian formulations of theology and ethics. The civil religion is, in turn, dependent upon the latter. The churches and synagogues face the challenge of enabling the civil religion to illuminate and guide the course of American power in the Third World. The question of American power and world revolution is central to the Vietnam debate, and, although organized religion's opposition to the war has been gratifying, little progress has been made on the required recon struction of American civil religion.