Civil Religion Sanctifies the Civic Culture
By saying that every right is “sacred,” Carl Schurz had adopted the vocabulary of the civic culture’s own religion. Twenty-five years earlier, Francis Grund had written that “their political doctrines have become the religion and the confession of the people … like the truths of Christianity, they have their apostles and their martyrs.”96 Americans transmit their political principles as “their faith to their children,” and “every newcomer is initiated into its creed, and soon becomes a convert to it; for if he should not, they would shun him as given to idolatry.”97 Liberty, said Grund, was “not only the bond of union,” but also “the confession, the religion, the life of Americans.”98
The religion of republicanism was something quite different from sectarian religions. While other nations felt chosen or blessed by God or gods, Americans were evolving what twentieth-century scholars would call a “civil religion,”99 in which they felt a special mission to live up to the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and attributed to the authority of God (“they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …”). Jews of old had covenanted to follow the laws of Yahweh. The Americans, in accepting their blessings, took on other obligations. Swearing allegiance to the Constitution, paying homage to the almost sainted Washington and to the Declaration of Independence, they, by implication, promised to fulfill the founding myth of the nation as a divinely inspired asylum for those who sought liberty and opportunity.
The Puritans of early colonial New England preached that they had been chosen to effectuate a divine plan for the salvation of souls. The apostles and prophets of the new republic preached that it had been chosen to save refugees and immigrants from tyranny and want. No one before had described their nation, as Washington did, as “an Asylum … to the oppressed and needy of the Earth.”100 Jefferson asked, “Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on the globe?” when arguing for a short period of residency for aliens to become eligible for citizenship.101 Not only was “the bosom of America,” in Washington’s maternal phrase, “open to receive … the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions,” but they were “welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.”102
James Otis wrote, “There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a national right to be free.”103 The spread of liberty to all, justified as a natural, God-given right, became the American national mission. That sense of mission pushed Americans toward a powerful emotional and spiritual national patriotism. Franklin called the Revolution a “glorious task assigned to us by Providence,” and Adams considered the settlement of the American colonies “as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”104 Washington wrote to the Jewish congregations of Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond that “The power and goodness of the Almighty were strongly manifested in the events of our late glorious revolution. —and his kind interposition in our behalf has been no less visible in the establishment of our present equal government.”105 Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1787 during deliberations on the new Constitution, “Our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude, either that there is no God, or that he is a malevolent being.”106
Not just the politicians but also ministers and educators believed that the American experiment in government was providential. Samuel Cooper declared in 1790, upon the inauguration of the new Massachusetts Constitution, that America was a new Israel, designed as “a theater for the display of some of the most astounding dispensations of His Providence.” The new constitution was a thing of beauty and godliness, maintained Cooper, because the power of the government was so intricately balanced as to protect liberty. The president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, preached before the General Assembly of Connecticut in 1783, singing hosannahs to the new Zion: “this will be a great, a very great nation … when the Lord should have made his American Israel high above all nations which He has made, in numbers, and in praise, and in name, and in honor!”107 Two generations later, Phillips Brooks said, “I do not know how a man can be an American and not get something with regard to God’s purpose as to this great land.”108
The American experiment in representative self-government was blessed, but the congregation—the members of the polity—were covenanted as partners of God in fulfilling the promise of the blessing. The civic culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and voluntary pluralism, made it possible for sectarian religious groups to go unmolested even if they did not participate in the republic. Germans provided some of the best examples of such groups, such as the Old Order Amish, who chose not to vote or run for office or even participate in the wider economic marketplace. They governed themselves without becoming governors of the republic. But the vast majority of immigrants and their children embraced the vocabulary, liturgy, and icons of the civil religion as they participated increasingly in the civic culture, and they did it while holding on to their ancestral sectarian religions.
In the early 1770s, Crèvecoeur observed that Americans were much more religious than Europeans. But for the vast majority of immigrants and their descendants, sectarian religion was put in the service of the civic culture. By the early decades of the republic, some Jewish congregations had already altered their liturgy to pray in their Sabbath service for the president and the people of the United States, the “citizens of one common country.”109 In Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1890s, Swedes mingled their hymns and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in celebrating Independence Day. In 1896, a divinity student spoke on the relationship of the American Revolution to Christ’s message of liberty to the world.110 The “public religion,” as Franklin called it, promoted a general disposition to be religious as a sign that one was a good American, a believer in the providential mission of the American nation. This new patriotic religion, the “religion of democracy,” as Lord Bryce called it in the late nineteenth century,111 did not replace sectarian religions but, paradoxically, encouraged sectarian religious affiliation while uniting sectarians in feelings of national patriotism which helped to blur the edges of doctrinal differences.
Sectarian religions did not hold the passion of their adherents as much as they did in Europe, but, as Grund observed, the promotion of religion seemed “essential to the Constitution” of Americans. “Religion presides over their councils, aids in the execution of the laws, and adds to the dignity of the judges.”112 Here was the most amazing paradox of all. Crèvecoeur observed that religious freedom led to a kind of religious “indifferentism.”113 The modern word would be “toleration,” as exemplified by Jefferson’s remarks during the debate over the proposal to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia. “It does me no injury,” he said, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”114
The separation of state and church was strengthened in the ensuing years: disestablishment in Virginia (1788); the proclamation of religious freedom in the Northwest Ordinance as policy for the territories and new states (1787); the passage of the Constitution with a sixth article barring a religious test for holding public office (1789) and a First Amendment prohibiting Congress from making any law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise (1791).
Toleration meant that it was hard for foreign visitors to tell Presbyterians and Congregationalists apart, and even Baptists and Presbyterians seemed to converge in doctrinal and organizational matters, but it did not mean toleration for the village atheist. Grund, who wrote that it was “with the solemnities of religion that the Declaration of Independence is yet annually read to the people from the pulpit,” and that “Americans look upon religion as a promoter of civil and political liberty,” also noted that Americans “should belong to some persuasion or other, lest his fellow-citizens should consider him an outcast from society.”115 Almost 125 years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a descendant of a sectarian German Pietist family, said Americans should belong to some religious group but that it did not matter which one.