In “The Soul of a Nation,” Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga notes that September 11 caused some persons to conclude that religion, and especially monotheism, is a dangerous residue of mankind’s infancy. If people worshiped, as some once did, collections of gods that varied over time, would they crash planes into buildings for religious reasons? Religion, say those who recoiled from it after September 11, celebrates irrationality and demonizes others in implacable conflicts over unsplittable differences.
A more widespread reaction to terrorism was a religious reflex–a revitalization of America’s “civil religion” that envelops civic institutions with quasi-religious sentiment. That can be social glue for a pluralistic society. But at various times, as in America’s professedly altruistic imperialism at the end of the 19th century, this civil religion has fostered a sense of “chosenness”–Americans as a “covenanted people,” America as a New Israel.
The idea of America as redeemer nation, with a “calling” for world regeneration, has perhaps never had such sway over U.S. policy as it has today. President George W. Bush, says McClay, “is, arguably, the most evangelical president in American history” and “puts forward the civil-religious vision of America with the greatest energy of any president since Woodrow Wilson.”
Bush says: “The advance of freedom… is the calling of our country.” It is Haiti’s turn.
McClay says a civil religion is practical because the state is “more than just a secular institution.” The state “must sometimes call upon its citizens for acts of sacrifice and self-overcoming” and so “must be able to draw on spiritual resources” and “visions of the direction of history.”
All this makes for much “God-talk,” and helps explain why President Bush, with his providential sense of history, is so polarizing. But Clifford Orwin of the University of Toronto notes that with America awash in so much religion–and so many religions–the God-talk is thin, homogenized gruel: “In order to be ever more inclusive, official pieties must become ever more vapid.”
In “The Unraveling of Christianity in America,” Orwin says the mainline Protestant churches, which seem to regard Christianity “primarily as a buttress for progressive morality,” have responded to secularism by capitulating to it and the discourse of psychotherapy and personal fulfillment. Today’s mainline Christians are quasi-relativists, nonjudgmental–militantly so–regarding everything except departures from progressivism.
Evangelicals are responding to both secularism and mainline Protestantism’s accommodation of it. But although they have one of their own in the White House, Orwin believes they might not understand the following: “By its deeds, not merely its words, this administration has exceeded all previous ones in rejecting the dependence of democracy on Christianity.”
By promoting civil religion, conservatives are investing the state with dignity, duties and pretensions–something “more than just a secular institution”–beyond the dreams of the most statist liberals. But Bush, the most evangelical of presidents, is severing a connection some evangelicals fervently believe in. It is the connection between Christianity and democracy, and especially American democracy.
Can both McClay, and what he says about this presidency, and Orwin, and what he says about this severance, be right? They can.
Orwin says that conservative Christians worry that the “naked public square”– the expunging of Christianity from public culture (school prayer, etc.)–is inimical to democracy. But Orwin says this worry implies that “naked democracy”–democracy stripped of its Christian nourishment–is a commodity that cannot be exported. What, then, of America’s “calling”?
Orwin believes there is a foreign-policy variation on the theme of “inclusiveness” that produces, in domestic life, what McClay considers watery, sterile God-talk. Orwin says “that in the most important policy and riskiest gamble of his presidency, Bush has embraced willy-nilly the view that liberal democracy is one thing, Protestant Christianity (or Christianity of any sort, or even Judeo-Christianity) entirely another.”
Bush is presenting America to the world–and, inescapably, to itself–not defined as a Judeo-Christian nation but as an exemplar and exporter of a universal good. The good is liberal democracy, and Bush believes it can be exported to Afghanistan, the Middle East, Haiti–everywhere. Bush says “liberty is the direction of history” and “the right and capacity of all mankind,” and that it is “cultural condescension” to think that any culture–of whatever faith, or none–is ineligible for democracy. From the very religious president of a nation much preoccupied with religion, this is a strikingly secular message.
