The Joker's Wild: On the Ecology of Gun Violence in America

The Primate Diaries 

Notes on science, politics, and history from a primate in the human zoo.

The Joker's Wild: On the Ecology of Gun Violence in America

By Eric Michael Johnson | July 26, 2012 

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"Joker" by Nathaniel Gold

His tortured and sadistic grin beamed like a full moon on that dark night. "Madness, as you know, is like gravity," he cackled. "All it takes is a little push." But once the house lights rose, the terror was lifted for most of us. Few imagined that the fictive evil on screen back in 2008 would later inspire a depraved act of mass murder by a young man sitting with us in the audience, a student of neuroscience whose mind was teetering on the edge. What was it that pushed him over?

In the wake of the tragedy that struck Aurora, Colorado last Friday there remain more questions than answers. Just like last time--in January, 2011 when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot in Tucson, Arizona or before that in April, 2007 when a deranged gunman attacked students and staff at Virginia Tech--this senseless mass shooting has given rise to a national conversation as we struggle to find meaning in the madness.

While everyone agrees the blame should ultimately be placed on the perpetrator of this violence, the fact remains that the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. Of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. ranks fifth in homicides just behind Brazil (highest), Mexico, Russia, and Estonia. Our nation also holds the dubious honor of being responsible for half of the worst mass shootings in the last 30 years. How can we explain why the United States has nearly three times more murders per capita than neighboring Canada and ten times more than Japan? What makes the land of the free such a dangerous place to live?

Diagnosing Murder

There have been hundreds of thoughtful explorations of this problem in the last week, though three in particular have encapsulated the major issues. Could it be, as science writer David Dobbs argues at Wired, that "an American culture that fetishizes violence," such as the Batman franchise itself, has contributed to our fall? "Culture shapes the expression of mental dysfunction," Dobbs writes, "just as it does other traits."

Perhaps the push arrived with the collision of other factors, as veteran journalist Bill Moyers maintains, when the dark side of human nature encountered political allies who nurture our destructive impulses? "Violence is our alter ego, wired into our Stone Age brains," he says. "The NRA is the best friend a killer's instinct ever had."

But then again maybe there is an economic explanation, as my Scientific American colleague John Horgan believes, citing a hypothesis by McMaster University evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and his late wife Margo Wilson. "Daly and Wilson found a strong correlation between high Gini scores [a measure of inequality] and high homicide rates in Canadian provinces and U.S. counties," Horgan writes, "blaming homicides not on poverty per se but on the collision of poverty and affluence, the ancient tug-of-war between haves and have-nots."

In all three cases, as it was with other culprits such as the lack of religion in public schools or the popularity of violent video games (both of which are found in other wealthy countries and can be dismissed), commentators are looking at our society as a whole rather than specific details of the murderer's background. The hope is that, if we can isolate the factor which pushes some people to murder their fellow citizens, perhaps we can alter our social environment and reduce the likelihood that these terrible acts will be repeated in the future. The only problem is, which one could it be?

To Err is Non-Human

Just as it is with so many other issues in our species--infanticide, sexual coercion, or collective violence--I believe we can most successfully pinpoint the broad patterns in our behavior by thinking like a primate. In most social primates (including humans) males frequently engage in aggressive competition over status with other males in their group, maiming and sometimes even killing in the process. Naturally, there is a good reason for this: sex.

In chimpanzees, for example, Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch have documented that the two most common reasons females will choose to have sex with a male is if that male had shared meat with them in the past or if they were high-ranking. In some species, such as hamadryas baboons, the male obsession with status has taken an extreme form. Males of this species are nearly twice the size of females because, over evolutionary time, those males that were slightly larger than others had a competitive advantage and passed on more copies of their genes as a result. Of course, all of this male-male aggression comes at a price.

"The social life of a male baboon can be pretty stressful," writes Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, "you get beaten up as a victim of displaced aggression; you carefully search for some tuber to eat and clean it off, only to have it stolen by someone of higher rank; and so on." Over time the build up of stress hormones, known as glucocorticoids, can cause serious physiological damage and the development of stress-related illnesses. But the most common result whenever a male loses a fight, or is harassed by a higher-ranking male, is to displace that aggression elsewhere (typically on someone smaller). "Stress-induced displacement of aggression," Sapolsky writes, "works wonders at minimizing the stressfulness of a stressor. It's a real primate specialty as well."

There are distinct personality styles in baboons that influence how they will react to this form of social stress. Some males are what are called "high-reactors" and see potential threats everywhere whereas others, even if they lose a struggle over status, are able to shake it off and contentedly groom another member in their troop. High-reactors can further be divided into those who externalize this stress by attacking at every opportunity and those who internalize, nervously withdrawing from others or even displaying behaviors that, if they were human, would be indications of neuropathology.

Similar results have been found in rhesus macaques by Stephen Suomi at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who determined that approximately 20 percent of these monkeys were high-reactors. What's more, he found that infant monkeys were likely to share this trait with their fathers even when the father wasn't around to influence their behavior, suggesting a genetic component to highly reactive personalities. But there was an equally strong case to be made for environmental factors. When the sons of highly reactive males were placed with unusually nurturant mothers this personality trait was completely prevented. This means that borderline personalities in primates are formed by a combination of nature as well as nurture.

Figure 1. Stress-Related Physiology and Behavior in Forest Troop. A) Before the tuberculosis outbreak low-ranking males had significantly higher levels of stress hormone. B) The number of stress-related behaviors was significantly lower among low-ranking males in Forest Troop than Talek troop. Reproduced from Sapolsky and Share (2004). Click image to enlarge.

This influence that the social environment can have on primate behavior was dramatically demonstrated by Sapolsky in his 2004 paper co-authored with Lisa Share in the journal PLoS Biology. In a unique natural experiment a group of baboons known as Forest Troop began feeding at the contaminated dump site of a Western safari lodge. As had occurred elsewhere, the largest and most aggressive males dominated the food source. But this time their despotic behavior resulted in untimely death after they all contracted tuberculosis. In the intervening years Forest Troop developed a culture in which cooperation was rewarded more than aggression and adolescent males who migrated into the troop adopted this culture themselves. Remarkably, the level of stress and stress-related behaviors in low-ranking males were dramatically reduced after the outbreak (and remained significantly lower than the nearby Talek Troop that retained its most aggressive males).

"Males had high rates of affiliative behaviors, and low-ranking males were subject to low rates of aggressive attack and subordination by high-ranking males," wrote the authors. "Precedent for this unexpected implication comes from the social epidemiology literature concerning 'social capital,' in which health and life expectancy increase in a community as a function of communitywide attributes that transcend the level of the individual or individual social networks."

In other words, a culture emphasizing less aggression and with closer bonds between individuals throughout the community formed the basis for a more egalitarian society.

The Exceptionalism of American Violence

As it turns out, the "social capital" Sapolsky found that made the Forest Troop baboons so peaceful is an important missing factor that can explain our high homicide rate in the United States. In 1999 Ichiro Kawachi at the Harvard School of Public Health led a studyinvestigating the factors in American homicide for the journal Social Science and Medicine(pdf here). His diagnosis was dire.

"If the level of crime is an indicator of the health of society," Kawachi wrote, "then the US provides an illustrative case study as one of the most unhealthy of modern industrialized nations." The paper outlined what the most significant causal factors were for this exaggerated level of violence by developing what was called "an ecological theory of crime." Whereas many other analyses of homicide take a criminal justice approach to the problem--such as the number of cops on the beat, harshness of prison sentences, or adoption of the death penalty--Kawachi used a public health perspective that emphasized social relations.

In all 50 states and the District of Columbia data were collected using the General Social Survey that measured social capital (defined as interpersonal trust that promotes cooperation between citizens for mutual benefit), along with measures of poverty and relative income inequality, homicide rates, incidence of other crimes--rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft--unemployment, percentage of high school graduates, and average alcohol consumption. By using a statistical method known as principal component analysis Kawachi was then able to identify which ecologic variables were most associated with particular types of crime.

Figure 2. Homicide and Global Inequality. Greater income inequality is associated with increased homicide rates around the world. Reproduced from Fajnzylber et al. (2002). Click image to enlarge.

The results were unambiguous: when income inequality was higher, so was the rate of homicide. Income inequality alone explained 74% of the variance in murder rates and half of the aggravated assaults. However, social capital had an even stronger association and, by itself, accounted for 82% of homicides and 61% of assaults. Other factors such as unemployment, poverty, or number of high school graduates were only weakly associated and alcohol consumption had no connection to violent crime at all. AWorld Bank sponsored study subsequently confirmed these results on income inequality concluding that, worldwide, homicide and the unequal distribution of resources are inextricably tied. (see Figure 2). However, the World Bank study didn't measure social capital. According to Kawachi it is this factor that should be considered primary; when the ties that bind a community together are severed inequality is allowed to run free, and with deadly consequences.

But what about guns? Multiple studies have shown a direct correlation between the number of guns and the number of homicides. The United States is the most heavily armed country in the world with 90 guns for every 100 citizens. Doesn't this over-saturation of American firepower explain our exaggerated homicide rate? Maybe not. In a follow-up study in 2001 Kawachi looked specifically at firearm prevalence and social capital among U.S. states. The results showed that when social capital and community involvement declined, gun ownership increased (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Social Capital and Gun Ownership. Between 48 US states, gun ownership increases as community involvement goes down. Reproduced from Hemenway et al. (2001). Click image to enlarge.

Kawachi points out that it is impossible to prove whether one factor caused the other, but the most reasonable interpretation is that people who don't trust their neighbors are more likely to think guns will provide security. In this way the number of guns and the number of homicides both stem from the same root, suggesting that guns don't cause murders anymore than cars cause fatal accidents. This was also the conclusion of apolicy paper conducted by the London-basedCentre for Economic Policy Research in 2005 that found no support for the argument that more guns cause more homicides. "The appearance of such an effect in past research," wrote the authors, "appears to be the product of methodological flaws." Unfortunately, gun control may not save us after all.

The same can also be said for violent movies as a cause of violence, according to Texas A&M University psychologist Christopher Ferguson in his 2009 book Violent Crime: Clinical and Social Implications. "Does violent media availability and exposure in a culture relate to levels of violence in that culture?" he asks. "If so, then removing violent media would appear to be an easy way to reduce societal violence. Disappointingly, the answer is clearly no."

University of California economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna go even further and conclude that violent movies actually decrease the amount of violent crime. Because those who are more violence prone are more likely to seek out violent entertainment as a substitute, "violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend." Furthermore, since Hollywood films make up to three times more money internationally than they do at home, it's hard to understand how these movies would only influence violence in the United States. Anyway, despite the clear increase in violent entertainment during the last forty years, the level of violent crime in the United States has decreased (though it still remains high compared to other countries). It would appear that Batman is not to blame either.

Rebuilding Gotham

The clear implication is that social capital followed by income inequality are the primary factors that influence the rate of homicidal aggression. Does this mean that John Horgan's"modest proposal" of state-sponsored socialism is the answer? Is aggression caused by inequality, and can we reduce its prevalence by imposing a level playing field?

"My tendency would be to reverse the causality," said Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, via e-mail. "In order to have a highly skewed distribution of resources or reproductive privileges you will need a lot of aggression to maintain it. So, it's not the inequality that causes aggression, but the other way around." As primates we don't simply respond to our environment; we actively build it through our interactions with others and the shared culture we create in a process known as niche construction, to use the technical jargon. And, as any baboon can tell you, what we construct isn't always good for the least among us. Fortunately, as Forest Troop has demonstrated, there is no law of nature forcing things to stay that way.

The high level of inequality, both within the United States as well as between countries globally, was constructed through a process of social interactions. It can be deconstructed the same way. If the interpretation from social capital is correct, it suggests that building relationships through our schools, labor unions, farmers' markets, and gun ranges, at City Hall and the State House, or active participation in our churches, temples, and mosques, can ultimately make us all more secure. But at the same time it means collectively challenging thepolicies of those high-ranking members in our society whose obsession with status leaves the rest of us completely stressed out.

Remarkably, this kind of social activism is the single most important factor associated with reduced violence for any neighborhood in the world. According to University of Washington sociologists Blaine Robbins and David Pettinicchio, in the first global study to examine social capital and homicide, only social activism consistently predicts homicide at the national, neighborhood, and individual levels.

This is because politically oriented individuals are also more likely to serve the needs of their community and assist in collective endeavors aimed at reducing crime. All of which follows the classic Tocquevillian premise: a willingness to take part in political affairs generates a willingness to contribute to the common good, including the production and maintenance of a safe and secure society.

Are we up to the challenge? In case anyone doubts it just consider the selfless acts of heroismthat were on display at around 12:20am Friday morning. With smoke filling the air and bullets flying, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves all sacrificed their lives to protect the people who were most important to them. Each reacted instantly by covering their loved ones with their own bodies and taking the bullets that were otherwise intended for the person beneath.

It is this capacity for altruism that distinguishes us from nearly all other primates. How many of these lone and deranged gunmen, quietly secluded from the world like brutalized baboons, could have been redirected along a different path if there had been a community that made them feel secure? Our species is uniquely qualified to engage in activities that promote the public good; all we need is a little push.

PhotoDisc/ Getty Images (MARS)

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Thought Control for the Free?

Thought Control for the Free?

by James Hoover / September 27th, 2015

To presuppose is to assume truth without any proof. In this way, you can establish your own orthodoxy. Even in 1943, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, recognized this in countries under the protection of freedom, like England. In a proposed forward to Animal Farm he noted that “censorship in England is largely voluntary,” further explaining that a “genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

Open societies must practice more subtle and sophisticated mechanisms to establish and maintain what Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”  The doctrine to be instilled in such a target audience should not be expressed or debated as doctrine. Then it would be open to reflection, inquiry and probably ridicule.  If doctrine is presupposed as established truth and repeated often enough (rote learning is the grist of Fox News, for example), no proof need be offered and none is demanded by your audience or by a corporate media.

In the U. S. this is a strategy implemented by conservatives through a surreptitious mind control plan. It was hatched after LBJ’s War on Poverty, the civil rights movement, and the advent of Medicare scared the conservatives into a think tank operation, thereby bringing social scientists into a conservative strategy that would wrestle political, even cultural control, from society’s progressive leanings. Dominant sectors were coming to recognize that to maintain their control they would have to shift from force to other means, primarily control of attitudes and opinion.

Defending First Amendment rights by liberal courts in the 1960s helped to push the civil rights movement. However, proof of vast conservative inroads, such as Occupy Wall Street activism didn’t go very far in the last few years under a now-established conservative-based orthodoxy that presupposes conservative values.

The orthodoxy conservatives wanted to begin establishing by the early 1980s was that of laissez-faire capitalism, weakened unions, a demonized government, and establishment of a fear factor of crime and drugs, the latter emanating from the implied other, mostly black minorities.

Of course, in democratic societies, conservative elites must first win elections, which they did with Ronald Reagan, president from 1981 to 1989. Then establish an infrastructure to implement it, which combine effective indoctrination with the impression that society is really free and open. According to Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and social activist, doctrine should not be articulated but presupposed as though orthodox truth.

So since the 1980s we have had a steady stream of presuppositions, some of which are only now being dispelled:

• Big government is the problem.
• Supply-side economics is the only answer to growth.
• Unions are led by the corrupt and are stealing our livelihood.
• Crime and drugs are undermining our society.
• We are a society of makers and takers.
• Americans are overtaxed.
• America is exceptional.

We must remember that new institutions have been built as this infrastructure friendly to corporate elites has become a bulwark of their power: corporate monoliths in media, energy, finance, and trade; propaganda disbursed 24/7 by hard-core media sources like Fox; weakened unions; elections controlled by money; minority voters disenfranchised in Republican states; a Supreme Court captured by right wing justices; and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

This established infrastructure can further dispense a conservative orthodoxy, and function to effectively distribute the pre-suppositions that the conservative elite planned decades ago. For example, it is presupposed that the free market is the superior, if not the only, preferred character of political economy. Those who say otherwise are immediately on the defensive and out of the mainstream.

We all know about the pre-formed consciousness garnered by the Bush administration to establish orthodoxy of war against terrorism and specifically a war against Iraq, also accomplished with a knee-jerk fear sustained with color-coded terrorism threat indexes. Add to that claimed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that elite media like the New York Times helped the administration spread to clueless citizens, along with the “with-us-or-against-us” xenophobia generated by Bush public pronouncements.

In today’s world, pre-suppositions take the form of oft-recited racial rants or negative images portrayed by all conservatives, especially headlined by Republican candidates for president. Donald Trump characterizes all undocumented immigrants as castaways from other countries, mostly rapists and murderers, an image already vociferously built for the Republican base. Citing one example of murder by an undocumented perpetrator – out of some 11 million – is Trump’s proof.

The current Republican focus is to kill the Planned Parenthood organization. Ninety-seven percent of its function is birth control, regular checkups, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy care, usually for the poor.  The remaining three percent involves abortions. The elaborate media hoax ginned up by the Center for Medical Progress means to defund and discredit Planned Parenthood, much as a conservative selectively-edited video did to an advocacy group for the poor called ACORN.

Too many Democrats, being slow learners, are still in defensive modes in reaction to conservative alternate universe truths. At the second Republican debate, when Carly Fiorina vividly describes baby body parts being crassly sold on the open market by Planned Parenthood officials, neither the media nor Democrats reveal how fabricated these accounts are. When Donald Trump suggests that vaccinations caused autism in an acquaintance’s baby, no proof was offered and no truth was pursued by any mainstream source.

Perhaps we are all frozen like deer in the headlights of presupposition: lies are truth because a leading candidate said so, with authority. As long as we are swept up by this misinformation, conservatives will continue to dispense it, and it will continue to debase our country.

Some seventy years after George Orwell’s novel about “thought police,” 1984, democratic citizens are still susceptible to thinking controlled by the elite who in the 1970s marshaled their money and their energy to reduce the “threat of democracy.”The population must be returned to apathy and passivity, many declared.

And it became so.

James Hoover is a recently retired systems engineer. He has advanced degrees in Economics and English. Prior to his aerospace career, he taught high school, and he has also taught college courses. He recently published a science fiction novel called Extraordinary Visitors and writes political columns on several websites. Read other articles by James.

This article was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2015 at 7:22pm and is filed under Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Culture, GWB, Media, Propaganda, Right Wing Jerks.

Victory For Education: State Supreme Court Rules Charter Schools Unconstitutional

Victory For Education: State Supreme Court Rules Charter Schools Unconstitutional

By: Rmusemore from Rmuse

Wednesday, September, 9th, 2015, 9:30 am

Washington Supreme Court Rules Charter Schools Are Unconstitutional

Of all the treachery and danger posed by Koch Republicans to America, and there are many, it is doubtless that their devotion to corporations and churches ranks near the top of a very long list. If the GOP is not using despicable machinations to turn every aspect of government over to privatization, they are using equally dubious ploys to abolish the Constitution and replace it with the Christian bible for America’s slow walk toward Iran-like theocratic rule.

One of the areas where the Kochs, Republicans, and evangelical Dominionists have had raging success with some assistance from the Obama Education Department is turning public schools into corporate religious madrasas with little attention or pushback from the public who are being forced to fund them. It is curious, too, that more Americans were unaware that the government is forbidden by the United States Constitution from forcing taxpayers to fund religious instruction, and that public education was not created to be a reliable source of corporate profit funded by taxpayers.

Now, at long, long last, the Washington state Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional; something many semi-informed Americans knew was the case all along. The Washington Supreme Court case languished for a year before delivering the very one-sided decision, 6 – 3, that put a damper on the Kochs’ and the religious right’s plans to create highly-profitable religious corporate schools funded by taxpayers in every state in the nation. What seemed to irk the Justices most of all was something that should enrage every American; the charter schools were unaccountable to anyone, including the taxpayers who were forced to fund them.

Apparently, the state’s Supreme Court has had just about enough stonewalling from the state legislature on two counts. First, a part of the law that allowed charter schools to take taxpayer funding for construction was struck down two years ago with no results, and the High Court levied fines against the legislature for not investing in basic K-12 public education; likely because the money was stolen and sent directly to charter schools. The Supreme Court fined the state $100,000 a day for failing to adequately fund basic education according to its constitutional duty. It is a very similar situation that led the Kansas Supreme Court to order Republican Governor Sam Brownback to reinstate public school funding lost to tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

The Supreme Court’s decision was aptly put in perspective by the president of the Washington Education Association, Kim Mead, who stated what many education advocates have claimed was blatantly obvious to any semi-sane human being. She said, “The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along – charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding. Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it’s time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington’s children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them.”

It is likely that Republicans and the Koch brothers took the ruling as a personal affront, and dangerous sign that their crusade to transfer public education funding directly to corporate-run charters and churches might gain public exposure and garner the robust opposition it warrants.

For nearly all public education advocates, this ruling is important because it is no revelation that Republicans have madeassaulting public schools by underfunding them and sending the money directly to corporations and a sign that when educators, parents, and voters challenge corporate theocrats in the courts, the Constitution prevails. In fact, it was just last June that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the abominable idea of using public money for private schools is unconstitutional. Colorado’s High Court was particularly incensed because parents were using the state’s “school choice” voucher program “to appropriate taxpayer money to send their children to private religious schools” that had no accountability to the state or voters.

According to reports after the ruling, the decision blindsided charter school operators who were completely unaware that a panel of jurists would rule according to the U.S. Constitution; likely because they have had relative free rein to rob public school funds with impunity and use them for profit and religious indoctrination. The chair of the Washington State Charter School Commission, Steve Sundquist, said, “We were not expecting a ruling as deeply disappointing as this one.” One can only imagine that the state’s Republicans, the Koch brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and theocratic corporatists were deeply disappointed as well and are preparing for court battles in several Republican-controlled states.

The Washington and Colorado rulings are a victory for students in those states as much as for the Constitution and public education. Every dollar funneled from public education into corporate-run religious charter schools is theft from students in public schools that are being underfunded deliberately. In states with Republican governors and majority legislatures, not only are public school funds being diverted to corporate charter and private religious schools, the overall education funding has been slashed drastically to fund tax cuts for the rich; and likely the same corporations operating charter schools.

However, at least for the time being, two state Supreme Courts have ruled that robbing public school funds to profit corporations and churches is unconstitutional. It is a good sign that the religious privatization of America’s public schools may not reach fruition until at least next year; because the Kochs and the religious right do not acknowledge the Constitution as the law of the land and with Republicans doing their bidding, public education is still in danger.

Original Intent: Revisionist rhetoric notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution, and it wasn't an oversight.

Original Intent

Revisionist rhetoric notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution, and it wasn't an oversight.

Illustration: John Hersey

When the Supreme Court, in one of its most important decisions of 2005, ordered two Kentucky counties to dismantle courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Court majority was wrong because the nation's historical practices clearly indicate that the Constitution permits "disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."

The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief—apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment's familiar declaration that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase "free exercise thereof—as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow." The justice's impassioned dissent in McCreary County v. the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.

For the 21st-century apostles of religious correctness, the godless Constitution—how could those framers have forgotten the most important three-letter word in the dictionary?—poses a formidable problem requiring the creation of tortuous historical fictions that include both subtle prevarication and bald-faced lies.

Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."

The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.

Eighteenth-century theological conservatives lost the battle over the Constitution, and the pill remains equally bitter to their spiritual descendants. Every time I write an article mentioning the constitutional omission of God, I receive hundreds of identical emails calling me a liar (sometimes a godless liar), because the document is unmistakably dated "in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." That the religious right should fall back on a once-common manner of dating important papers—as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D.—demonstrates just how seriously it takes the enterprise of controlling the past in order to control the future.

The revisionist script goes something like this: The founders were devout men who based their new government on Christian teaching (the religiously correct invariably use the term "Judeo-Christian"); they were unconcerned about religious interference with government and cared only about government interference with religion; and, last but not least, there was no tension between secularism and religion in the nation's halcyon early decades, because everyone accepted God as the source of civic authority.

The first part of the script—the so-called devoutness of the founders— is least relevant to the current debate over religion in government. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to name only a few, were prolific writers who contradicted themselves (and one another) almost as frequently as did the authors of the Bible. They certainly believed in some form of God or Providence, as Enlightenment rationalists preferred to call the deity, but that is all we can conclude with reasonable certainty. Jefferson's political opponents in the early 1800s were as mistaken to call him an atheist as his conservative modern rebaptizers are to claim him as a committed Christian. (For one thing, Jefferson emphatically rejected the idea that Jesus was divine and instead regarded him as a great but wholly human teacher of morality.) Adams' critics and admirers, then and now, have been equally misguided in their attempts to portray him as a man of orthodox faith.

What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs that included strong hostility toward all ecclesiastical hierarchies (the original 17th-century meaning of the lovely word "freethought"); the Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to conduct earthly affairs; and the assignment of faith to the sphere of private conscience rather than public duty. These convictions carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution.

Regardless of the framers' private beliefs about God, it is more important to look at their public actions in crafting the legal foundation for the new republic. (One might, with less pride, make the same observation about the founders' attitudes toward slavery; whatever they "truly" believed, what matters is that they signed off on a formula counting a slave as three-fifths of a man.) And here the right-wing script goes awry, for it cannot explain why, if the founders intended to base the government on Christianity or monotheism, they failed to spell out their intentions in the Constitution itself. There was certainly ample precedent for doing so, not only in the Articles of Confederation but in nearly every state constitution.

When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.

Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.

The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

In the McCreary case, Scalia objects to Justice John Paul Stevens' citation of Madison'sMemorial and Remonstrance, an impassioned polemic—condemning both religious meddling with government and government meddling with religion—that turned the tide in favor of Virginia's separation of church and state. Scalia disingenuously dismisses the reference because Memorial was written before the federal Constitution—as if Virginia's recent experience had nothing whatever to do with the deliberations of the framers in Philadelphia.

Confronted with the Constitution's silence on divine authority, revisionists repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God's omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution. Moreover, this line of reasoning is self-contradictory, coming as it does from a political/religious lobby that backs the appointment of "originalist" judges—those who insist that the Constitution can only mean exactly what it said at the time it was written. It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.

Equally ludicrous is the notion that there was no tension between religion and secularism before federal courts, in the 20th century, began to apply the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to states. The balancing act between secularism and religion, as old as the republic, originated as a creative tension—in contrast to the destructive power struggle that has developed in recent years. For several decades after the Revolution, many Americans saw no conflict between devout personal religious views and secular views of governmental responsibilities.

The degree to which a secular approach to government was accepted in early 19th-century America was demonstrated by Congress' refusal to abandon Sunday mail service, which it had mandated in 1810. The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail, but in the 1820s and '30s, business still depended on the government to keep the mails moving seven days a week. Nevertheless, powerful right-wing religious leaders waged an unceasing campaign against the sacrilege of Sunday mail, which some considered a more important moral issue than slavery. But evangelical Christians and freethinkers, who had joined together to write and ratify the godless Constitution, wanted no part of government sanction for a religious Sabbath.

In 1828, Congress referred the godly mess to the powerful Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. Its chairman was Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson—a general, a hero of the War of 1812, and a devout Baptist. Johnson's report to Congress uncompromisingly declared that any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath would be unconstitutional. He reminded his fellow legislators of the religious persecutions and intolerance that had impelled their revolutionary predecessors to draw a firm line—"the line cannot be too strongly drawn"—between church and state. (So much for separation of church and state being a recently invented lie of the left.)

The report also noted that many Americans, Christian and non-Christian, observed the Sabbath not on Sunday but on Saturday, and that the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were designed to prevent the majority from dictating to minorities. Johnson emphasized that the Constitution "gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of the whole community."

The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Scalia predictably cites Washington's thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson's position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that "the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them."

We cannot know what the founders would have thought about the "values issues" that are touchstones for cultural conservatives today—abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, the right to die—but we certainly can infer what Jefferson would have thought about claims that the Ten Commandments and the Bible are the foundation of American law. The religious right's attempt to rewrite the history of the nation's founding is not some abstract debate of concern only to constitutional scholars but an integral part of a larger assault on all secular public institutions. If the Constitution really were based on the Bible, for instance, how could there be a valid legal argument against teaching creationism in public school biology classes or adding Bible courses to public school curricula?

Custom, rather than law, is the basis of the most common arguments for breaching the wall between church and state. On the same day that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 majority, ordered the removal of Ten Commandments plaques from Kentucky courthouses, it allowed a Ten Commandments monument to remain on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (also by a 5-4 margin). Justice Stephen G. Breyer was the swing vote. The chief rationale for the change in Breyer's vote—against the Commandments displays in Kentucky, for the monument in Texas—seems to have been that the Kentucky displays were only six years old, while the Texas monument had been in place for more than four decades without causing controversy. The suggestion that something must be constitutional if it has been around long enough plays neatly into the Christian right's version of history.

With John Roberts as chief justice and Sandra Day O'Connor—who generally sided with church-state separationists—in retirement, there is good reason to fear that the reconfigured Supreme Court will adhere closely to the religious right's history script. In 1991, as principal deputy solicitor general during the administration of George H.W. Bush, Roberts argued in favor of recognizing the nation's "religious heritage" in church-state cases—an opinion echoing Scalia's frequently expressed conviction that all just governments derive their authority from God. This is indeed "originalist" logic—the original document being not the Constitution but the Bible or, to be more precise, certain biblical passages upholding the divine right of kings.

Arguments relying on custom, bolstered by personal religious belief, have great potency when presented to a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history. In a 1998 survey by the National Constitution Center, only about one-third of teenagers knew that the Constitution begins with the words "We the People," so it is hardly surprising that college students at my lectures are often astonished to hear that the Constitution never mentions God.

Handed a tabula rasa by a public uneducated in civics, right-wing revisionists are free to ignore not only the strong anticlerical views of so many of the nation's first leaders but also their loathing of all entanglements between religion and government. "Oh! Lord!" Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. "Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would."

If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did—and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans. Here is the real history lesson, straight from the pens of the founders, that ought to be taught—and is too often ignored—in every American public school.

American Civil Religion

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Robert N. Bellah

 

 

 

 

 

 Civil Religion in America

by Robert N. Bellah

  Acknowledgement: 

Reprinted by permission of Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, "Religion in America," Winter 1967, Vol. 96, No. 1, pp. 1-21.

 

At the beginning of a reprint of this essay (Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 168), the author wrote: 

 

This chapter was written for a Dædalus conference on American Religion in May 1966. It was reprinted with comments and a rejoinder in The Religious Situation: 1968, where I defend myself against the accusation of supporting an idolatrous worship of the American nation. I think it should be clear from the text that I conceive of the central tradition of the American civil religion not as a form of national self-worship but as the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it in terms of which it should be judged. I am convinced that every nation and every people come to some form or religious self-understanding whether the critics like it or not. Rather than simply denounce what seems in any case inevitable, it seems more responsible to seek within the civil religious tradition for those critical principles which undercut the everpresent danger of national self-idolization.

While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of "the American Way of Life," few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America. This article argues not only that there is such a thing, but also that this religion-or perhaps better, this religious dimension-has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.[i]

The Kennedy Inaugural

John F. Kennedy's inaugural address of January 20, 1961, serves as an example and a clue with which to introduce this complex subject. That address began:

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom-symbolizing an end as well as a beginning-signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. 

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and to abolish all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe-the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

 

And it concluded:

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice that we shall ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

These are the three places in this brief address in which Kennedy mentioned the name of God. If we could understand why he mentioned God, the way in which he did, and what he meant to say in those three references, we would understand much about American civil religion. But this is not a simple or obvious task, and American students of religion would probably differ widely in their interpretation of these passages.

Let us consider first the placing of the three references. They occur in the two opening paragraphs and in the closing paragraph, thus providing a sort of frame for more concrete remarks that form the middle part of the speech. Looking beyond this particular speech, we would find that similar references to God are almost invariably to be found in the pronouncements of American presidents on solemn occasions, though usually not in the working messages that the President sends to Congress on various concrete issues. How, then, are we to interpret this placing of references to God?

It might be argued that the passages quoted reveal the essentially irrelevant role of religion in the very secular society that is America. The placing of the references in this speech as well as in public life generally indicates that religion "has only a ceremonial significance"; it gets only a sentimental nod that serves largely to placate the more unenlightened members of the community before a discussion of the really serious business with which religion has nothing whatever to do. A cynical observer might even say that an American President has to mention God or risk losing votes. A semblance of piety is merely one of the unwritten qualifications for the office, a bit more traditional than but not essentially different from the present-day requirement of a pleasing television personality.

But we know enough about the function of ceremonial and ritual in various societies to make us suspicious of dismissing something as unimportant because it is "only a ritual." What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life. Following this line of argument, it is worth considering whether the very special placing of the references to God in Kennedy's address may not reveal something rather important and serious about religion in American life.

It might be countered that the very way in which Kennedy made his references reveals the essentially vestigial place of religion today. He did not refer to any religion in particular. He did not refer to Jesus Christ, or to Moses, or to the Christian church; certainly he did not refer to the Catholic church. In fact, his only reference was to the concept of God, a word that almost all Americans can accept but that means so many different things to so many different people that it is almost an empty sign. Is this not just another indication that in America religion is considered vaguely to be a good thing, but that people care so little about it that it has lost any content whatever? Isn't Dwight Eisenhower reported to have said "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith-and I don't care what it is,"[ii] and isn't that a complete negation of any real religion?

These questions are worth pursuing because they raise the issue of how civil religion relates to the political society on the one hand and to private religious organization on the other. President Kennedy was a Christian, more specifically a Catholic Christian. Thus his general references to God do not mean that he lacked a specific religious commitment. But why, then, did he not include some remark to the effect that Christ is the Lord of the world or some indication of respect for the Catholic church? He did not because these are matters of his own private religious belief and of his own particular church; they are not matters relevant in any direct way to the conduct of his public office. Others with different religious views and commitments to different churches or denominations are equally qualified participants in the political process. The principle of separation of church and state guarantees the freedom of religious belief and association, but at the same time clearly segregates the religious sphere, which is considered to be essentially private, from the political one.

Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word "God" at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion. The inauguration of a president is an important ceremonial event in this religion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the highest political authority.

Let us look more closely at what Kennedy actually said. First, he said, "I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago." The oath is the oath of office, including the acceptance of the obligation to uphold the Constitution. He swears it before the people (you) and God. Beyond the Constitution, then, the president's obligation extends not only to the people but to God. In American political theory, sovereignty rests, of course, with the people, but implicitly, and often explicitly, the ultimate sovereignty has been attributed to God. This is the meaning of the motto, "In God we trust," as well as the inclusion of the phrase "under God" in the pledge to the flag. What difference does it make that sovereignty belongs to God? Though the will of the people as expressed in the majority vote is carefully institutionalized as the operative source of political authority, it is deprived of an ultimate significance. The will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. The president's obligation extends to the higher criterion.

When Kennedy says that "the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God," he is stressing this point again. It does not matter whether the state is the expression of the will of an autocratic monarch or of the "people"; the rights of man are more basic than any political structure and provide a point of revolutionary leverage from which any state structure may be radically altered. That is the basis for his reassertion of the revolutionary significance of America.

But the religious dimension of political life as recognized by Kennedy not only provides a grounding for the rights of man that makes any form of political absolutism illegitimate, it also provides a transcendent goal for the political process. This is implied in his final words that "here on earth God's work must truly be our own." What he means here is, I think, more clearly spelled out in a previous paragraph, the wording of which, incidentally, has a distinctly biblical ring:

Now the trumpet summons us again-not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need-not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"-a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

The whole address can be understood as only the most recent statement of a theme that lies very deep in the American tradition, namely the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God's will on earth. This was the motivating spirit of those who founded America, and it has been present in every generation since. Just below the surface throughout Kennedy's inaugural address, it becomes explicit in the closing statement that God's work must be our own. That this very activist and noncontemplative conception of the fundamental religious obligation, which has been historically associated with the Protestant position, should be enunciated so clearly in the first major statement of the first Catholic president seems to underline how deeply established it is in the American outlook. Let us now consider the form and history of the civil religious tradition in which Kennedy was speaking.

The Idea of a Civil Religion

The phrase "civil religion" is, of course, Rousseau's. In chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract, he outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance. All other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and may be freely held by citizens. While the phrase "civil religion" was not used, to the best of my knowledge, by the founding fathers, and I am certainly not arguing for the particular influence of Rousseau, it is clear that similar ideas, as part of the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, were to be found among the Americans. For example, Benjamin Franklin writes in his autobiography,

I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world and govern'd it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing of good to men; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, I respected them all, tho' with different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mix'd with other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote or confirm morality, serv'd principally do divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another.

It is easy to dispose of this sort of position as essentially utilitarian in relation to religion. In Washington's Farewell Address (though the words may be Hamilton's) the utilitarian aspect is quite explicit:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to cherish and respect them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

But there is every reason to believe that religion, particularly the idea of God, played a constitutive role in the thought of the early American statesmen.

Kennedy's inaugural pointed to the religious aspect of the Declaration of Independence, and it might be well to look a that document a bit more closely. There are four references to God. The first speaks of the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that entitle any people to be independent. The second is the famous statement that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights." Here Jefferson is locating the fundamental legitimacy of the new nation in a conception of "higher law" that is itself based on both classical natural law and biblical religion. The third is an appeal to "the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions," and the last indicates "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." In these last two references, a biblical God of history who stands in judgment over the world is indicated.

The intimate relation of these religious notions with the self-conception of the new republic is indicated by the frequency of their appearance in early official documents. For example, we find in Washington's first inaugural address of April 30, 1789:

It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge.

No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man more than those of the United States. Every step by which we have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token providential agency..

The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.. The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.

 

Nor did these religious sentiments remain merely the personal expression of the President. At the request of both Houses of Congress, Washington proclaimed on October 3 of that same first year as President that November 26 should be "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer," the first Thanksgiving Day under the Constitution.

The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God.[iii] The God of the civil religion is not only rather "unitarian," he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern for America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the "American Israel" is not infrequent.[iv] What was implicit in the words of Washington already quoted becomes explicit in Jefferson's second inaugural when he said: "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life." Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all the nations.[v] This theme, too, has been a continuous one in the civil religion. We have already alluded to it in the case of the Kennedy inaugural. We find it again in President Johnson's inaugural address:

They came already here-the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.

What we have, then, from the earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity. This religion-there seems no other word for it-while not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian. At a time when the society was overwhelmingly Christian, it seems unlikely that this lack of Christian reference was meant to spare the feelings of the tiny non-Christian minority. Rather, the civil religion expressed what those who set the precedents felt was appropriate under the circumstances. It reflected their private as well as public views. Nor was the civil religion simply "religion in general." While generality was undoubtedly seen as a virtue by some, as in the quotation from Franklin above, the civil religion was specific enough when it came to the topic of America. Precisely because of this specificity, the civil religion was saved from empty formalism and served as a genuine vehicle of national religious self-understanding.

But the civil religion was not, in the minds of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, or other leaders, with the exception of a few radicals like Tom Paine, ever felt to be a substitute for Christianity. There was an implicit but quite clear division of function between the civil religion and Christianity. Under the doctrine of religious liberty, an exceptionally wide sphere of personal piety and voluntary social action was left to the churches. But the churches were neither to control the state nor to be controlled by it. The national magistrate, whatever his private religious views, operates under the rubrics of the civil religion as long as he is in his official capacity, as we have already seen in the case of Kennedy. This accommodation was undoubtedly the product of a particular historical moment and of a cultural background dominated by Protestantism of several varieties and by the Enlightenment, but it has survived despite subsequent changes in the cultural and religious climate.

Civil War and Civil Religion

Until the Civil War, the American civil religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny. The Civil War, which Sidney Mead calls "the center of American history," [vi] was the second great event that involved the national self-understanding so deeply as to require expression in civil religion. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the American republic has never really been tried and that victory in the Revolutionary War was more the result of British preoccupation elsewhere and the presence of a powerful ally than of any great military success of the Americans. But in 1861 the time of testing had indeed come. Not only did the Civil War have the tragic intensity of fratricidal strife, but it was one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century; the loss of life was far greater than any previously suffered by Americans.

The Civil War raised the deepest questions of national meaning. The man who not only formulated but in his own person embodied its meaning for Americans was Abraham Lincoln. For him the issue was not in the first instance slavery but "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure." He had said in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861:

All the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated in and were given to the world from this Hall. I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. [vii]

 

The phrases of Jefferson constantly echo in Lincoln's speeches. His task was, first of all, to save the Union-not for America alone but for the meaning of America to the whole world so unforgettably etched in the last phrase of the Gettysburg Address.

But inevitably the issue of slavery as the deeper cause of the conflict had to be faced. In his second inaugural, Lincoln related slavery and the war in an ultimate perspective:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But he closes on a note if not of redemption then of reconciliation-"With malice toward none, with charity for all."

With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the new civil religion. It is symbolized in the life and death of Lincoln. Nowhere is it stated more vividly than in the Gettysburg Address, itself part of the Lincolnian "New Testament" among the civil scriptures. Robert Lowell has recently pointed out the "insistent use of birth images" in this speech explicitly devoted to "these honored dead": "brought forth," "conceived," "created," "a new birth of freedom." He goes on to say:

The Gettysburg Address is a symbolic and sacramental act. Its verbal quality is resonance combined with a logical, matter of fact, prosaic brevity.. In his words, Lincoln symbolically died, just as the Union soldiers really died-and as he himself was soon really to die. By his words, he gave the field of battle a symbolic significance that it has lacked. For us and our country, he left Jefferson's ideals of freedom and equality joined to the Christian sacrificial act of death and rebirth. I believe this is the meaning that goes beyond sect or religion and beyond peace and war, and is now part of our lives as a challenge, obstacle and hope.[viii]

Lowell is certainly right in pointing out the Christian quality of the symbolism here, but he is also right in quickly disavowing any sectarian implication. The earlier symbolism of the civil religion had been Hebraic without any specific sense of being Jewish. The Gettysburg symbolism (" . those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live") is Christian without having anything to do with the Christian church.

The symbolic equation of Lincoln with Jesus was made relatively early. W. H. Herndon, who had been Lincoln's law partner, wrote:

For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lincoln through his fiery furnace. He did it to try Abraham and to purify him for his purposes. This made Mr. Lincoln humble, tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffering, kind, sensitive, tolerant; broadening, deepening and widening his whole nature; making him the noblest and loveliest character since Jesus Christ.. I believe that Lincoln was God's chosen one. [ix]

 

With the Christian archetype in the background, Lincoln, "our martyred president," was linked to the war dead, those who "gave the last full measure of devotion." The theme of sacrifice was indelibly written into the civil religion.

The new symbolism soon found both physical and ritualistic expression. The great number of the war dead required the establishment of a number of national cemeteries. Of these, Gettysburg National Cemetery, which Lincoln's famous address served to dedicate, has been overshadowed only by the Arlington National Cemetery. Begun somewhat vindictively on the Lee estate across the river from Washington, partly with the end that the Lee family could never reclaim it,[x] it has subsequently become the most hallowed monument of the civil religion. Not only was a section set aside for the confederate dead, but it has received the dead of each succeeding American war. It is the site of the one important new symbol to come out of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; more recently it has become the site of the tomb of another martyred President and its symbolic eternal flame.

Memorial Day, which grew out of the Civil War, gave ritual expression to the themes we have been discussing. As Lloyd Warner has so brilliantly analyzed it, the Memorial Day observance, especially in the towns and smaller cities of America, is a major event for the whole community involving a rededication to the martyred dead, to the spirit of sacrifice, and to the American vision.[xi]  Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals.

The Civil Religion Today

In reifying and giving a name to something that, though pervasive enough when you look at it, has gone on only semiconsciously, there is risk of severely distorting the data. But the reification and the naming have already begun. The religious critics of "religion in general," or of the "religion of the 'American Way of Life,'" or of "American Shinto" have really been talking about the civil religion. As usual in religious polemic, they take as criteria the best in their own religious tradition and as typical the worst in the tradition of the civil religion. Against these critics, I would argue that the civil religion at its best 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. Like all religions, it has suffered various deformations and demonic distortions. At its best, it has neither been so general that it has lacked incisive relevance to the American scene nor so particular that it has placed American society above universal human values. I am not at all convinced that the leaders of the churches have consistently represented a higher level of religious insight than the spokesmen of the civil religion. Reinhold Niebuhr has this to say of Lincoln, who never joined a church and who certainly represents civil religion at its best:

An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place and of its polemical use on the slavery issue, which corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln's religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.[xii]

 

Perhaps the real animus of the religious critics has been not so much against the civil religion in itself but against its pervasive and dominating influence within the sphere of church religion. As S. M. Lipset has recently shown, American religion at least since the early nineteenth century has been predominantly activist, moralistic, and social rather than contemplative, theological, or innerly spiritual.[xiii] De Tocqueville spoke of American church religion as "a political institution which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of a democratic republic among the Americans"[xiv] by supplying a strong moral consensus amidst continuous political change. Henry Bargy in 1902 spoke of American church religion as "la poésie du civisme."[xv]

It is certainly true that the relation between religion and politics in America has been singularly smooth. This is in large part due to the dominant tradition. As de Tocqueville wrote:

The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.[xvi]

 

The churches opposed neither the Revolution nor the establishment of democratic institutions. Even when some of them opposed the full institutionalization of religious liberty, they accepted the final outcome with good grace and without nostalgia for the ancien régime.

The American civil religion was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. In this way, the civil religion was able to build up without any bitter struggle with the church powerful symbols of national solidarity and to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals.

Such an achievement is by no means to be taken for granted. It would seem that the problem of a civil religion is quite general in modern societies and that the way it is solved or not solved will have repercussions in many spheres. One need only to think of France to see how differently things can go. The French Revolution was anticlerical to the core and attempted to set up an anti-Christian civil religion. Throughout modern French history, the chasm between traditional Catholic symbols and the symbolism of 1789 has been immense.

American civil religion is still very much alive. Just three years ago we participated in a vivid reenactment of the sacrifice theme in connection with the funeral of our assassinated President. The American Israel theme is clearly behind both Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society. Let me give just one recent illustration of how the civil religion serves to mobilize support for the attainment of national goals. On March 15, 1965, President Johnson went before Congress to ask for a strong voting-rights bill. Early in the speech he said:

Rarely are we met with the challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our society-but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation.

The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul."

And in conclusion he said:

Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin, "God has favored our undertaking."

God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine his will. I cannot help but believe that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.[xvii]

The civil religion has not always been invoked in favor of worthy causes. On the domestic scene, an American-Legion type of ideology that fuses God, country, and flag has been used to attack nonconformist and liberal ideas and groups of all kinds. Still, it has been difficult to use the words of Jefferson and Lincoln to support special interests and undermine personal freedom. The defenders of slavery before the Civil War came to reject the thinking of the Declaration of Independence. Some of the most consistent of them turned against not only Jeffersonian democracy but Reformation religion; they dreamed of a South dominated by medieval chivalry and divine-right monarchy.[xviii] For all the overt religiosity of the radical right today, their relation to the civil religious consensus is tenuous, as when the John Birch Society attacks the central American symbol of Democracy itself. 

With respect to America's role in the world, the dangers of distortion are greater and the built-in safeguards of the tradition weaker. The theme of the American Israel was used, almost from the beginning, as a justification for the shameful treatment of the Indians so characteristic of our history. It can be overtly or implicitly linked to the ideal of manifest destiny that has been used to legitimate several adventures in imperialism since the early nineteenth century. Never has the danger been greater than today. The issue is not so much one of imperial expansion, of which we are accused, as of the tendency to assimilate all governments or parties in the world that support our immediate policies or call upon our help by invoking the notion of free institutions and democratic values. Those nations that are for the moment "on our side" become "the free world." A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes "the free people of South Vietnam and their government." It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and "the last best hope of earth" to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are "free like us," such arguments are convincing. Fortunately President Johnson has been less ready to assert that "God has favored our undertaking" in the case of Vietnam than with respect to civil rights. But others are not so hesitant. The civil religion has exercised long-term pressure for the humane solution of our greatest domestic problem, the treatment of the Negro American. It remains to be seen how relevant it can become for our role in the world at large, and whether we can effectually stand for "the revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought," in John F. Kennedy's words.

The civil religion is obviously involved in the most pressing moral and political issues of the day. But it is also caught in another kind of crisis, theoretical and theological, of which it is at the moment largely unaware. "God" has clearly been a central symbol in the civil religion from the beginning and remains so today. This symbol is just as central to the civil religion as it is to Judaism or Christianity. In the late eighteenth century this posed no problem; even Tom Paine, contrary to his detractors, was not an atheist. From left to right and regardless of church or sect, all could accept the idea of God. But today, as even Time has recognized, the meaning of "God" is by no means so clear or so obvious.  There is no formal creed in the civil religion. We have had a Catholic President; it is conceivable that we could have a Jewish one. But could we have an agnostic president? Could a man with conscientious scruples about using the word "God" the way Kennedy and Johnson have used it be elected chief magistrate of our country? If the whole God symbolism requires reformulation, there will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification that have not so far been prominent in this realm. The civil religion has been a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans. It is not too soon to consider how the deepening theological crisis may affect the future of this articulation. 

The Third Time of Trial

In conclusion it may be worthwhile to relate the civil religion to the most serious situation that we as Americans now face, what I call the third time of trial. The first time of trial had to do with the question of independence, whether we should or could run our own affairs in our own way. The second time of trial was over the issue of slavery, which in turn was only the most salient aspect of the more general problem of the full institutionalization of democracy within our country. This second problem we are still far from solving though we have some notable successes to our credit. But we have been overtaken by a third great problem that has led to a third great crisis, in the midst of which we stand. This is the problem of responsible action in a revolutionary world, a world seeking to attain many of the things, material and spiritual, that we have already attained. Americans have, from the beginning, been aware of the responsibility and the significance our republican experiment has for the whole world. The first internal political polarization in the new nation had to do with our attitude toward the French Revolution. But we were small and weak then, and "foreign entanglements" seemed to threaten our very survival. During the last century, our relevance for the world was not forgotten, but our role was seen as purely exemplary. Our democratic republic rebuked tyranny by merely existing. Just after World War I we were on the brink of taking a different role in the world, but once again we turned our backs.

Since World War II the old pattern has become impossible. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has been groping toward a new pattern of action in the world, one that would be consonant with our power and our responsibilities. For Truman and for the period dominated by John Foster Dulles that pattern was seen to be the great Manichean confrontation of East and West, the confrontation of democracy and "the false philosophy of Communism" that provided the structure of Truman's inaugural address. But with the last years of Eisenhower and with the successive two presidents, the pattern began to shift. The great problems came to be seen as caused not solely by the evil intent of any one group of men. For Kennedy it was not so much a struggle against particular men as against "the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself."

But in the midst of this trend toward a less primitive conception of ourselves and our world, we have somehow, without anyone really intending it, stumbled into a military confrontation where we have come to feel that our honor is at stake. We have in a moment of uncertainty been tempted to rely on our overwhelming physical power rather than on our intelligence, and we have, in part, succumbed to this temptation. Bewildered and unnerved when our terrible power fails to bring immediate success, we are at the edge of a chasm the depth of which no man knows.

I cannot help but think of Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry seems more apt now than when it was written, when he said:

Unhappy country, what wings you have! .

Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for

         the terrible magnificence of the means,

The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the

bloody and shabby

Pathos of the result.

 

But as so often before in similar times, we have a man of prophetic stature, without the bitterness or misanthropy of Jeffers, who, as Lincoln before him, calls this nation to its judgment:

When a nation is very powerful but lacking in self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner that is dangerous both to itself and to others.

 

Gradually but unmistakably, America is succumbing to that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past.

If the war goes on and expands, if that fatal process continues to accelerate until America becomes what it is not now and never has been, a seeker after unlimited power and empire, then Vietnam will have had a mighty and tragic fallout indeed.

I do not believe that will happen. I am very apprehensive but I still remain hopeful, and even confident, that America, with its humane and democratic traditions, will find the wisdom to match its power.[xix]

 

Without an awareness that our nation stands under higher judgment, the tradition of the civil religion would be dangerous indeed. Fortunately, the prophetic voices have never been lacking. Our present situation brings to mind the Mexican-American war that Lincoln, among so many others, opposed. The spirit of civil disobedience that is alive today in the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War was already clearly outlined by Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, "If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Thoreau's words, "I would remind my countrymen that they are men first, and Americans at a late and convenient hour,"[xx] provide an essential standard for any adequate thought and action in our third time of trial. As Americans, we have been well favored in the world, but it is as men that we will be judged.

Out of the first and second times of trial have come, as we have seen, the major symbols of the American civil religion. There seems little doubt that a successful negotiation of this third time of trial-the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order-would precipitate a major new set of symbolic forms. So far the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this. It would necessitate the incorporation of vital international symbolism into our civil religion, or, perhaps a better way of putting it, it would result in American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the world. It is useless to speculate on the form such a civil religion might take, though it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone. 

Fortunately, since the American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality, the reorganization entailed by such a new situation need not disrupt the American civil religion's continuity. A world civil religion could be accepted as a fulfillment and not as a denial of American civil religion. Indeed, such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civil religion from the beginning. To deny such an outcome would be to deny the meaning of America itself.

Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with the will of God as men can make it, and a light to all nations.

It has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need-as any living faith-of continual reformation, of being measured by universal standards. But it is not evident that it is incapable of growth and new insight.

It does not make any decisions for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being, in Lincoln's fine phrase, an "almost chosen people." But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.  

Endnotes

[i] Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is itself an interesting problem. Part of the reason is probably the controversial nature of the subject. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political groups have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. Some of them from time to time and as recently as the 1950s proposed constitutional amendments that would explicitly recognize the sovereignty of Christ. In defending the doctrine of separation of church and state, opponents of such groups have denied that the national polity has, intrinsically, anything to do with religion at all. The moderates on this issue have insisted that the American state has taken a permissive and indeed supportive attitude toward religious groups (tax exemptions, et cetera), thus favoring religion but still missing the positive institutionalization with which I am concerned. But part of the reason this issue has been left in obscurity is certainly due to the peculiarly Western concept of "religion" as denoting a single type of collectivity of which an individual can be a member of one and only one at a time. The Durkheimian notion that every group has a religious dimension, which would be seen as obvious in southern or eastern Asia, is foreign to us. This obscures the recognition of such dimensions in our society.

[ii] Dwight D. Eisenhower, in Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1955), p. 97.

[iii] God is mentioned or referred to in all inaugural addresses but Washington's second, which is a very brief (two paragraphs) and perfunctory acknowledgement. It is not without interest that the actual word "God" does not appear until Monroe's second inaugural, March 5, 1821. In his first inaugural, Washington refers to God as "that Almighty Being who rules the universe," "Great Author of every public and private good," "Invisible Hand," and "benign Parent of the Human Race." John Adams refers to God as "Providence," "Being who is supreme over all," "Patron of Order," "Fountain of Justice," and "Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty." Jefferson speaks of "that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe," and "that Being in whose hands we are." Madison speaks of  "that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations," and "Heaven." Monroe uses "Providence" and "the Almighty" in his first inaugural and finally "Almighty God" in his second. See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington 1789 to Harry S. Truman 1949, 82d Congress, 2d Session, House Document No. 540, 1952.

[iv] For example, Abiel Abbot, pastor of the First Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts, delivered a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799, Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel, in which he said, "It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence 'Our American Israel' is a term frequently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper." In Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 665.

[v] That the Mosaic analogy was present in the minds of leaders at the very moment of the birth of the republic is indicated in the designs proposed by Franklin and Jefferson for the seal of the United States of America. Together with Adams, they formed a committee of three delegated by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, to draw up the new device. "Franklin proposed as the device Moses lifting up his wand and dividing the Red Sea while Pharaoh was overwhelmed by its waters, with the motto 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.' Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness 'led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night.'" Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Co., 1950), pp. 467-68.

[vi] Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 12.

[vii] Abraham Lincoln, in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Ill. Press, 1964), p. 39.

[viii] Robert Lowell, in ibid., "On the Gettysburg Address," pp. 88-89.

[ix] William Henry Herndon, in Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 162.

[x] Karl Decker and Angus McSween, Historic Arlington (Washington, D.C., 1892), pp. 60-67.

[xi] How extensive the activity associated with Memorial Day can be is indicated by Warner: "The sacred symbolic behavior of Memorial Day, in which scores of the town's organizations are involved, is ordinarily divided into four periods. During the year separate rituals are held by many of the associations for their dead, and many of these activities are connected with later Memorial Day events. In the second phase, preparations are made during the last three or four weeks for the ceremony itself, and some of the associations perform public rituals. The third phase consists of scores of rituals held in all the cemeteries, churches, and halls of the associations. These rituals consist of speeches and highly ritualized behavior. They last for two days and are climaxed by the fourth and last phase, in which all the separate celebrants gather in the center of the business district on the afternoon of Memorial Day. The separate organizations, with their members in uniform or with fitting insignia, march through the town, visit the shrines and monuments of the hero dead, and, finally, enter the cemetery. Here dozens of ceremonies are held, most of them highly symbolic and formalized." During these various ceremonies Lincoln is continually referred to and the Gettysburg Address recited many times. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 8-9.

[xii] Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Religion of Abraham Lincoln," in Nevins, ed., op. cit., p. 72. William J. Wolfe of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written: "Lincoln is one of the greatest theologians of America-not in the technical meaning of producing a system of doctrine, certainly not as a defender of some one denomination, but in the sense of seeing the hand of God intimately in the affairs of nations. Just so the prophets of Israel criticized the events of their day from the perspective of the God who is concerned for history, and who reveals His will within it. Lincoln now stands among God's latter day prophets." The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1963), p. 24.

[xiii] Seymour Martin Lipset, "Religion and American Values in The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1964), chap. 4.

[xiv] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1954), p. 310.

[xv] Henry Bargy, La Religion dans la Société aux États-Unis (Paris, 1902), p. 31.

[xvi] De Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 311. Later he says, "In the United States even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment, as in politics the care of their temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. Thus every man is allowed freely to take that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven, just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his own government" (p. 436).

[xvii] Lyndon B. Johnson, in U.S., Congressional Record, House, March 15, 1965, pp. 4924, 4926.

[xviii] See Louis Hartz, "The Feudal Dream of the South," pt. 4, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955).

[xix] Senator J. William Fullbright, speech of April 28, 1966, as reported in The New York Times, April 29, 1966.

[xx] Henry David Thoreau, In Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 274.