Upon the Altar of the Nation (3 page)

Ever since Robert Bellah’s seminal essay on civil religion, published in 1967, American scholars have awakened to a “religion” of American patriotism that exists alongside traditional religious faiths. American civil religion, Bellah observed, is “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality ... at its best [it] is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people.” The historian of religion Rowland Sherrill defined civil religion this way: “American civil religion is a form of devotion, outlook, and commitment that deeply and widely binds the citizens of the nation together with ideas they possess and express about the sacred nature, the sacred ideals, the sacred character, and sacred meanings of their country.”
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Though lacking transcendent revelations akin to the Abrahamic faiths, the religion of a sacralized patriotism enjoys a complete repository of sacred rituals and myths.

In fact, American civil religion borrows so heavily from the language and cadences of traditional faiths, many Americans see no conflict or distinction between the two. Many Americans equate dying for their country with dying for their faith. In America’s civil religion, serving country can be coequal with serving God.

The evidences for an ongoing American civil religion are ubiquitous. The Bible prevails as America’s most popular book, and often patriotism draws on familiar biblical themes to refer not to the church and its believers but to the nation and its citizens: “Exodus,” “chosen people,” “promised land,” and “New Israel” all represent staple metaphors in American speech and letters that express America’s messianic “mission” to be a “redeemer nation.”

The rites and rituals of civil religion are discovered less in the laws of the nation than in more informal folkways and traditions. These include a myriad of sacred monuments, chief among them the Mall in Washington, D.C., with recent monuments to the Vietnam War and World War II, and, above all else, the majestic Lincoln Memorial, bracketed by the transforming phrases of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Key places evoke religious significance for many American tourists and patriots: Bunker Hill and Concord, Independence Hall, the Alamo, Gettysburg, and the Statue of Liberty all elicit reverential awe.

Though lacking a formal creed American civil religion does contain sacred texts, including most importantly the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the two Lincoln orations. Patriotic songs identify America with the sacred. “God Bless America” was sung repeatedly after 9/11, not the “Star-Spangled Banner,” generally viewed as lacking sacred gravitas. “My Country “Tis of Thee” reminds Americans that the transcendent smiles on their cause in unique and self-empowering ways.

America’s civil religion enjoys no weekly Sabbaths, but it does have its sacred days. For the first three centuries of America’s existence, fast and thanksgiving days, called by civic authorities (rather than churches) and observed on weekdays to judge or celebrate the nation, predominated, especially in the North. They would later be joined by Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day, Presidents’ Day, and Martin Luther King Day. Nonsectarian prayers sacralize political events, including inaugurals and opening sessions of Congress. Historically these have often been expressed in schools in conjunction with the Pledge of Allegiance.

The American flag stands as America’s totem. Schoolchildren routinely pledge their allegiance
to the flag
—and the republic for which it stands, one nation under God. Until the late twentieth century, this pledge would be accompanied by prayers asking for God’s blessing on “His” American people. Soldiers killed in battle are buried in flags. America at war is a nation festooned with flags in 2005 no less than in 1861. American patriots reflexively invoke the “Stars and Stripes” or “Old Glory” as the object they are willing to kill and be killed for. Critics of America, at home and abroad, who burn the flag are accused of “desecration”—literally a trampling on the divine.

American presidents have traditionally been viewed as the prophets and priests of American civil religion.
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The presidency is the only “office” that cannot be left empty—even for one day. Laws are established to ensure instantaneous succession.
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As commander in chief of the armed services, presidents launch wars and the warrior generals who command them. The United States Military Academy at West Point became, in effect, the first seminary of America’s civil religion, later joined by the other service academies.

The locus of American civil religion is not the church or the synagogue or the mosque. Rather, it is the state, which uses sacred symbols of the nation for its own purposes and perpetuation. The appeal proves so powerful and all-encompassing that some contemporary religious critics identify civil religion with idolatry.
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In a positive sense, scholarly analysts see in civil religion the social and cultural glue that binds a diverse people together and invests them with a collective sense of spiritual unity capable of withstanding internal disintegration.
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Civil religion is often associated with, but not identical to, “messianism”—the attribution of sacred status to the place North America.
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New World messianism, unlike American civil religion, stretches all the way back to the Puritans. Indeed, historians point to John Winthrop’s speech aboard the
Arbella,
“A Modell of Christian Charity,” as the first instance of American civil religion, when Winthrop identified New England with Christ’s “city upon a hill.”
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And scholars of eighteenth-century colonial society document a pervasive “civil millennialism” in colonial wars.

The rhetoric of messianism or “exceptionalism” is often summarized by the term “jeremiad,” which literally refers to a literary work or speech modeled on the Hebrew Bible books of Jeremiah and Lamentations that expresses a bitter lament or prophecy of doom. But because such prophetic warnings were only issued to God’s “covenanted” people, the lament actually reinforced their identity as God’s chosen people.

In colonial New England, jeremiads were “occasional,” or political, sermons, preached during special weekday services of fasting or thanksgiving, or at other times such as on election day. The typical jeremiad began with a paean to the founders’ piety as they embarked on an American “errand into the wilderness” and then turned to current sins that imperiled the mission. If unchecked, the sins could lead to doom and defeat. But if the people’s sins were reformed, then all could hope to complete the mission of the founders with God’s blessing and deliverance. In this rhetoric, defeats and disappointments were never seen as signs of divine desertion but as loving chastisements employed by God to renew His special covenant with His chosen people.
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This rhetoric would continue to inform the deepest national identities of the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War.

More meaningful than the rhetorical similarities, however, is a profound distance that separates New England Puritanism from the United States of America. “America” quite simply did not exist. Something decisive happened in 1776 that set American civil religion apart from such earlier outbursts of religious millennialism as Puritan New England or Cromwellian England. After 1776, the new nation inherited the mantle of destiny, and with it, for the first time on American shores, a national patriotism. That patriotism, however, was restrained by pervasive localism and state sovereignty. Only with civil war and a reunified nation-state would “United States of America” enjoy the national significance that it assumes today.

Scholars of civil religion sometimes disagree about whether America’s civil religion is understood as “religious” or “ideological,” or whether it is defined as “cultural” or “theological.” Such debates miss the extent to which it exists in ways that incorporate all the dichotomies. American civil religion is religious
and
ideological, cultural
and
theological. For that reason it exerts enormous power on the loyalties and perceptions of its citizens: a power that can be even greater than traditional theistic beliefs and rituals.

Yet one yawning question remains unanswered: given the existence of an American civil religion that everybody recognizes,
how was it incarnated?
How do we capture the transformation “in the beginning”? Surely the words and some of the symbols appeared with the Revolution. But rhetoric alone cannot create a religion. Neither Puritans’ talk of a “city upon a hill” or Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of “inalienable rights” is adequate to create a religious loyalty sufficiently powerful to claim the lives of its adherents. In 1860 no coherent nation commanded the sacred allegiance of all Americans over and against their states and regions. For the citizenry to embrace the idea of a nation-state that
must
have a messianic destiny and command one’s highest loyalty would require a massive sacrifice—a blood sacrifice.

As I was writing this book and sifting through the enormous body of moral and sermonic literature generated by the Civil War, it became apparent to me (as it had to some of the participants) that something mystical and even religious was taking place through the sheer blood sacrifice generated by the battles. The Revolutionary War, though liberating, had never really shaped a coherent sense of the
nation
as the prevailing object of fealty, over and against local communities and regions. Apart from federal election days and trips to the post office, most antebellum Americans had no real sense of belonging to a vast nation-state whose central government acted directly on its citizens. Their imagined community could not easily stretch beyond their local boundaries. Before the Civil War, Americans would routinely say “the United States
are
a republic.” After the war they would instinctively come to say “the United States is a republic.”

As the war descended into a killing horror, the grounds of justification underwent a transformation from a just defensive war fought out of sheer necessity to preserve home and nation to a moral crusade for “freedom” that would involve nothing less than a national “rebirth,” a spiritual “revival.” And in that blood and transformation a national religion was born.

Only as casualties rose to unimaginable levels did it dawn on some people that something mystically religious was taking place, a sort of massive sacrifice on the national altar. The Civil War taught Americans that they really were a Union, and it absolutely required a baptism of blood to unveil transcendent dimensions of that union.

As the war progressed, there appeared increasing contemporary references to Union and Confederate casualties as “martyrs.” The language of martyrs stands out as religious language. In the case of the Civil War, it is religious language dedicated to political religion rather than to Christianity. By the war’s most devastating years in 1863 and 1864, no Americans were said to be dying for their Christian faith, but plenty of “martyrs” were dying for their country. No Christian minister, in the North or South, could self-consciously invoke a civil religion equal to or superior to Christianity for its hold on the American people’s hearts and minds. Yet the language of martyrdom reveals how, at least subconsciously, this war was generating through sheer quantity of blood sacrifice a living and vibrant civil religion. By linking patriotism to Christianity and paying lip service to the superiority of the eternal over the temporal, ministers and people could embrace the new faith without fully acknowledging exactly what they were doing.
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Tragically, America’s civil religion would not include the very freedmen and women so many thousands died to liberate. And here we come to the ultimate moral failure of the war. The historian David Blight marks this as the central “tragedy” of the Civil War: “The sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage. This is the tragedy lingering on the margins and infesting the heart of American history.”
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Upon the Altar of the Nation
tells difficult stories of unjust conduct on both sides of the struggle. Understandably, most Americans prefer not to face the evidence of an immoral war, especially when the war in question is the American Civil War. But I believe that if we are to understand the meaning of America today, then face it we must. The conclusions I reached at the end were not the assumptions I made at the start, just as for the participants the war meant one thing at the beginning and something entirely different at the end. The Civil War was not a static event, but rather dynamic with ever-changing meanings and transformations as one bloody year moved into the next. Only after vicariously fighting at the battlefronts and imaginatively living on the home fronts did I arrive at the positions I present here. This is the experience I wish for the reader as well: to follow me and fight the battles as they escalate, and as the generals rise or fall to the occasion; to suffer through the prisons as starving men die in lonely and uncelebrated isolation; to witness the sight of once-proud women whose homes and husbands have been destroyed begging for lowly employment; to imagine women and children being physically removed from their homes and placed in prisons; to recapture the faces of farmers helpless before unchallenged armies massed on defenseless populations, in both the North and the South, with the goal of root-and-branch destruction. Only when the reader hears the anguished cries of the suffering—My God, why have you forsaken us?—will the full moral dimensions of “America’s costliest war” be revealed for him or her to judge and, in judging, to learn timely lessons for today.