Abstract
Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what Robert Bellah called “national goals.” This article argues that a renewed focus on the relationship between civil religion and organized religion can help fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I draw attention to three mainline Protestant institutions that for much of the twentieth-century were instrumental both in cultivating respect for the national civic faith and in connecting its abstract ideals to concrete reform programs: namely, the clergy, the state and local church councils, and the policy-oriented departments of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Finally, I argue that a fresh look at the relationship between civil religion and “church religion” sheds new light on the (arguably) diminished role of civil religious appeals in the present. If, as Bellah claimed in his later writings, ACR appeals have lost much of their power to motivate support for shared national goals, it is at least in part because the formal religious networks through which they once were transmitted and interpreted have largely collapsed.
Highlights
Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior
For all that has been written about the substance and merits of the American civil religion, scholars have had relatively little to say about how ACR appeals operate at the micro level
We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans; nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which the abstract ideas at the heart of the ACR are transmitted to average citizens or connected to concrete policy goals
Summary
States could not have developed a robust civic faith absent high rates of formal religious participation. Bellah’s conception of what he called “church religion” remained, even in these later essays, largely detached from actual churches It was not the authority of particular clergymen or denominational leaders that had compelled slavery opponents and other nineteenth-century Americans to extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of ambitious national goals. The paucity of work in this area is both curious and unfortunate, since much of the civil religion debate—from 1967 to today—has centered on the empirical question of whether civil religious appeals have played a meaningful role in American political development Bellah, for his part, was insistent that the ACR had frequently been instrumental in shaping national policy, and that its impact was felt most keenly in campaigns to advance landmark egalitarian reforms, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
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