But I think this goes to what I was saying in another thread about control, sometimes people argue for the sake of winning the argument, rather than a genuine investment into the topic. I know I do :).

So I’m intrigued by this post. Because I’ve always felt a little stupid not having an opinion. But I didn’t care enough to study it out. I guess that’s an opinion. I could have God in my life even if I can’t pray in school.

…thinking about this.

The way this topic is cast is unfortuante. I think that were we to view the concept of God in more expansive terms rather than limiting it to a Protestant conception we’d avoid the problems and also be more in harmony with the positions of the 18th century in America. Instead the opposite has happened, which is why conservative Protestants (and some Mormons) are undermining their own position. (I also think that the Deist conception of God offers unbelievers a good step to come to a more Christian conception of God)

“I think it has a shameful history. Various aspects of religion in the schools started their lives as a self-conscious attempt to use the power of the state to undermine minority religious communities by indoctrinating their children.”

I didn’t know that the fact that something has, in some cases, a shameful history, constitutes an argument against it in all cases. I can see it constituting an argument for prudence, but I don’t see why I should take it seriously as a critique of the thing itself.

“In the scriptures, the Lord warns us against those who have ‘a form of godliness but deny the power thereof.’ I think that this is a rather perfect description of civic religion. Most of it has little if any real theological content….it reduces religion to a kind of vague social place holder, a symbol of some imagined community, but certainly nothing so impolite as a God that might actually make demands upon us or pass judgment on any of our doings.”

But wait–how can I possibly reconcile your second criticism with your first? If civic religion is an empty place-holder, a bankrupt symbol of a vacuous presence, how could it possibly have the power to “indoctrinate,” as you say it does in your first criticism? On the other hand, if civic religion really can, through the agency of the state, “undermine” certain forms of life and belief, well then, it must have some real “theological content,” right? Indeed, you admit this when you write that “these religious rituals are not as non-demononational as we tend to think.” Exactly–the elements of civic religion have some real denominational impact! So what exactly does your second complaint boil down to, except the (very legitimate, but not, I think, insurmountable) concern that you may, in certain communities, happen to find yourself implicated, in a civic sense, in a demonination you don’t like? But that then is no longer an argument against civic religion; rather, it’s just an argument to be (again) careful and prudent with it.

I’m sure you have larger complaints with civic religion, but I’m not seeing them here.

There are terms that are well defined and used to mean fairly specific things. Then there are terms whose strength is their ambiguity and indeterminacy. They provide themselves as objects of contemplation to lead to other conceptions. To narrow their definition too much is to rob them of their power. I think the term “God” is like that.

That’s why, I think, in Mormonism we tend to use more specific names for God. We move in specificity of meaning depending upon the name we utilize. “God,” as a term, has its power in the opposite direction. It is the first place our conception starts. It is the beginning of our movement to determine the meaning of God and shouldn’t be seen as the end.

As such, I think the criticism of the Civic Religion as “denying the power therein” is misplaced. Its ambiguity and indeterminacy is specifically the opposite of a denial. It is rather what makes both denials and affirmations possible. To say that ambiguity denies the specific is to simply miss how we arrive at determinate conceptions of reality.

That we have the tools to provide a common religion for all, but deny it because we want specificity is the problem. As such Nate’s first comments certainly due undermine his second. The problem with the Protestant approach to civic religion is that it attempts to make Protestant that which is more fundamental.

I too prefer real religion to the banal variety.

But if you’re dissatisfied with the lowest-common-denominator religion that’s survived, so far, the attacks of the elites and professoriate, what do you propose in its place?

Sure, God was harsh with the Protestants in 1820, but I can’t imagine he prefers the modern religion police, who treat the bible as obscenity, forbidding Protestant teachers from having a bible on their desk, or a Protestant child from reading a bible story when invited to share his favorite book.

It’s not fair to address the abuses or biased motives regarding religion in schools or government, and at the same time ignore the abuses and biases of those chasing religion from the public sphere.

Clark: Two points. First, many founders were less deist that one might think. Jefferson and Franklin clearly were. Adams, clearly, was not. (He was a denominational Unitarian who maintained a strikingly Calvinist view of human nature.) Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any patience with pietistic, Cleon Skousen-esque history. I just think that the 18th century deism claim tends to be overstated. Second, most of the current manifestations of civic religion are not 18th century creations. Rather they come from the post-Second Great Awakening 19th century.

My criticism is narrower. I am not opposed to the public presence of religion. I am simply opposed to attempts of the government to promulgate some kind of lowest-common denominator civic religious creed. I am all in favor of religion in the public square. I just don’t see “In God We Trust” on the currence as a significant or even positive presance. I see school prayer as affirmatively bad. Russell thinks that the shameful history provides only an argument for caution. I am not so sure. There may be issues of complicity. Even if history only provides grounds for caution, I think that the substantive message of such prayers is an independent ground for objection. I think that they say precisely the wrong thing about religion, and in so doing I think they serve a view of religion basically at odds with the message of the prophets. Religion is not suppose to exist to as a non-threatening crutch for the status quo. It is supposed to be a challenge and a call to a radically different way of life. School prayer is not a call to repentence. It is not a call to any meaningful kind of religious life. I think of it as a blasphemy.

My point is that it was the early nation’s ability to have a religion that fit all people that was its power. It enabled a basically agnostic Deist to be just as religious in civic terms as a Calvinist. Further it enabled radically different conceptions of things such as natural law to be brought into an understanding that laid the foundations for a kind of manifest destiny. (Without supporting the abuses that “chosen” view enabled)

While I recognize that *current* civic religious ideas arise from the 19th century, my point is that the approach this brings denies the power that the earlier conception enabled. That earlier civic religion allowed a figure like Ben Franklin to work with Puritans and maintain a common view of national religion.

It is just that which has been lost. And it has been lost in the very abuses by Protestants you mentioned. The danger is simply removing civic religion entirely, as many liberals wish to do. It is the fallacy of a false dichotomy.

I strongly suspect that your vision of “civic religion” is much too influenced by Cambridge, MA. To write that “the point [of civic religion] is to indoctrinate children in a view of religion that sees it as being a non-substantive social place holder precisely because more substantive forms of religion are seen as being socially dangerous, subversive, etc.,” is, I respectfully submit, to have assumed that anyone who argues for civic religion is doing it in the same vaguely nostalgic way New England Unitarians do so. If you stick around Arkansas long enough to send Jacob to school here, you will quickly realize that simply isn’t the case. In my experience, when people talk about civic religion, they very plainly mean EXACTLY what Lincoln and King meant: namely, that the civitas (at least insofar this war, or this racial crisis, is concerned) needs to get some religion.

That’s not an argument for civic religion, of course: you may hate the religion you find in Arkansas, after all, and feel strongly that it shouldn’t be joined to the state whatsoever. But either way, such is completely beside your point about civic religion being problematic because it’s fundamentally just a bunch of WASPy leftovers. There may be strong arguments against the promulgation of religion–or at least some elements thereof–within the context of some kind of state orthodoxy, but the complaint that it is, as you put it in a subsequent comment, “a non-threatening crutch for the status quo,” simply doesn’t fit what most of its advocates believe. (Come visit some of Arkansas’s “dry” counties sometimes, and see what our local preachers say in their prayers at the beginning of city council meetings about those drunkards down in Little Rock.)

The “shameful” history of which you speak applies only to public education. America’s tradition of civic religion goes much broader and deeper. Abraham Lincoln spoke before public education had much vogue, but no one was particularly suprised to hear him refer to God.

I too prefer real religion to some Protestant distillation. I even hope someday to have a religion more full of truth and light than my current understanding allows. But I prefer the Protestant distillation to nothing.

As I said before, I’d rather my children grew up in an environment where they saw God and faith taken seriously, even if that faith was hostile to their own. Great souls have grown up in conflict. Few have thrived in solitary wandering on the excluded margins.

Finally, I think the few basic truths of the Protestant distillation–call it the “form of Godliness” if you will–better prepare the good-hearted to accept the power thereof. I think it’s no accident that the great age of conversions has dwindled off in those countries that have relegated religion to the rapidly shrinking private sphere.

As it happens, I think it is a good idea to pray for the civitas and to call for the greater involvment of faith in community and public debate. ON THE OTHER HAND, I buy into the liberal distinction between state and society. I am suspicious of communitarian thinking that attacks that distinction and encourages us to think of the government as some expression of the collective, we. In particular, when we committ our children to the care of the state, I DON’T want that power harnessed to religious views that I find mistaken or blasphemous. I would rather that the state kept its mouth shut and let me take kids to church.

I confess that I don’t get Clark’s argument. So we want some fuzzy public conception of God a starting place for the question for authentic Christian faith? Or is it that the fuzzy conception is supposed to provide us with some kind of social glue? And it is necessary for the state to perform these functions why? How am I to differentiate between fuzzy concept of God as religious or philosophical starting place, and fuzzy conception of God as affirmative attack on more concrete conceptions of God?

I agree completely Adam. Focusing on the contradictions that seemed to be built into Nate’s definition of civic religion led me to ignore what was, really, the more important response: namely, in what sense can we be so certain that a “lowest-common denominator civic religious creed” is without spiritual substance? Even if it doesn’t, as Nate alleges, have any real denominational force (which I doubt), it still instantiates a communal order; it orients us, however minimally, towards the divine. Even if a prayer given before a legislature meets truly is an exercise in empty rhetoric (and it may not be!), is not the simple FACT of its civic presence potentially of great religious import?