175 - Civil Religion and the Churches Behaving Civilly

Civil Religion and the Churches Behaving Civilly
By Martin E. Marty

The late General Lewis B. Hershey is remembered for his honesty: "If you don't know what I'm talking about, I share your lack of knowledge. I don't know what I'm talking about either." Whoever writes on civil religion has something of the same kind of confession to make. There are as many civil religions as there are analysts, be they friend or foe. Most of them are united in discussing under that term the current reification of religiosity fused with national or societal impulses. Robert N. Bellah is at least partly right when he says that civil religion today exists since his journal article in 1967 said that it existed, since he gave it a name.¹

At the very least, civil religion has to be religious. Mere patriotism, loyalty to nation or state, love of tribe or territory need not be classified as religious. We would expect to employ the term religion only when something like ultimate concern might come into play. There must be other signs: socialization; the enactment of myth or symbol through rite and ceremony; some sort of quasi-metaphysical claim would be called forth; there should be behavioral correlates. And the word "civil" serves to broaden religion beyond the ecclesiastical, though it may also narrow it to terms smaller than those encompassed in "way of life" or other generalized religions.

I

However it is defined, we now have a quarter of a century of American discussion about current manifestations of civil religion, or at least of debate about it. J. Paul Williams first gave it wide publicity in his books on education and religion; Will Herberg followed in the later 1950s with his negative references to civic religion; Sidney E. Mead was a harbinger of a more positive turn in the early 1960s; Bellah's tour de force of apt and well-timed definition appeared in the later 1960s.

Martin E. Marty, a member of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council, is Professor of Modern Church History and Associate Dean of the Divinity School, the University of Chicago. He also has many editorial responsibilities, including associate editor of The Christian Century and an editor of Church History and the Journal of Religion. The following article is based on a keynote address at a conference on civil religion sponsored by the Faith and History conference and is appearing in Faith and History, and, by permission, in THEOLOGY TODAY.
¹ A revision of the speech in which Bellah noted this appears in Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (eds.), American Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 21 ff. and see p. 33 especially.

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The major discussants of civil religion tend to move Robin M. Williams' "is" observation to "ought" status: "Every functioning society," the sociologist wrote in 1951, "has to an important degree a common religion. The possession of a common set of ideas, rituals, and symbols," said Williams as he moved toward "ought," "can supply an overarching sense of unity even in a society riddled with conflicts."² Even Herberg, who considered most civil religion to be idolatry from the viewpoint of prophetic biblical religion, saw its inevitability and social utility.³ Few of them pictured the possibility of a truly secular society. Where no established religion survived vestigially, especially in more complex societies like that of the United States, there would be some sort of common religion.

All the analysts on both sides also sense that some sort of tension will exist between the common faith and the particular religions of the divided ecclesiastical communities and other religious organizations. Robin Williams may have been implying this tendency when he spoke of society being "riddled with conflict." Civil religion somehow is generated at the expense of competitors, or in the interstices between them, or as a fulfillment of them. The corollary of this argument holds that the competitive faiths in America have left a void, by accident or intention, because they have also other purposes and are distracted from the generalizing civil task, or because they are by nature divided and divisive.

The pressure, however subtle, from those who favor civil religion, is to ask particularists to abdicate, modify their claims about their own civic contributions, retreat, or publicly acknowledge their overall irrelevance. It is possible, however, to argue for the coexistence and creative tension of the two value- and meaning-systems or organizational nexuses. One can be civically loyal without rendering that loyalty religious, as we already have argued, or can see the separate religious groups making societal contributions without over-adapting in the light of criticisms. If I issue some demurrers, then, about civil religion, this is not because I see no need for a network of shared values. Certainly it is not born of an impulse to deny the validity of the American experience. In the spirit of my fellow-townsman Al Capone: "Don't get the idea that I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system."

II

The criticism of the churches and other religious institutions deserves a fair hearing. Sidney E. Mead has provided the best case against their contribution in the civil realm. This most influential American church historian for a quarter century progressively came to move beyond the churches when he looked for the matrix and re-

² Robin M. Williams, American Society: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 312.
³ For a recent statement that picks up on themes in his Protestant-Catholic-Jew from 1955 see his essay in Richey and Jones, pp. 76 ff.

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pository of spiritual values in American society. Looking back to Benjamin Franklin's remarks that what sects held in common was of value but what they held separately and apart from questions of the common weal was at best irrelevant, Mead looked ahead with what has to be called a kind of monistic hunger toward ever higher levels of human unity and synthesis. The "religion of the republic" in the "nation with the soul of a church" served as an important way-station.

Needless to say, Professor Mead is a gentle and tolerant man who would permit the particularists to survive, enjoying their foibles and rejoicing in their triumphs as Benjamin Franklin often was wont to do. But in a number of essays he made clear that the churches were too self-defensive to offer an undistracted and positive vision. Their theology was wrong for this purpose. What was held in common was what mattered. Too many people did not come into the orbit of churches' influences, while potentially at least all citizens could be reached through the religion of the republic. "Church members in America have always been faced with the necessity to choose, implicitly at least, between the inclusive religion of democracy and the particular Christianity of their sect." The old division of labor between the civil and religious realms would no longer well serve.⁴

Mead was not alone in his understanding that the religion of the republic would progress at the expense of the denominations and other religious groups. In the anomie and accidie of modern pluralism, somehow civil society would have to offer symbols of unity. George M. Cohan: "Many a bum show has been saved by the flag." Mead, Bellah, and Williams went far beyond the superficialities of flag symbolism and showed how in the civic faith of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln American societal religiosity offered depths that appear in continuity with those of prophetic religion.

The polemic against the churches varied from observer to observer. J. Paul Williams, though he first devoted 471 pages to What Americans Believe and How They Worship before he came to the civic dimension, called the believers in the particular groups "imperial" or "exclusivistic." He saw as their future mission only a validity that came with their contribution to the "whole," the "active promulgation" of a generalized religion of democracy.⁵

Will Herberg, often scorned by civil religionists for being the most vocal critic of civic faith, one who judged national religiosity from the

⁴ "The 'Nation with the Soul of a Church' " appears in Richey and Jones, pp. 45 ff. See also "The Post-Protestant Concept and America's Two Religions" in Robert L. Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 369 ff. and, most of all, "The Fact of Pluralism and the Persistence of Sectarianism" in Elwyn A. Smith, ed., The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia: Fortress, 197 1), pp. 247ff. See especially the essay reprinted by Ferm, op. cit., p. 383.
⁵ J. Paul Williams, What Americans Believe and How They Worship (New York: Harper and Row, revised edition, 1962); pp. 472 ff. deals with his call for support by metaphysical sanction and ceremonial religion of the teaching of democratic values as ultimate, as religion.

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viewpoint of normative biblical standards and thus always found it wanting, unquestionably saw that the religion of the American Way was in competition with prophetic religion in the churches and synagogues and criticized them for finding their life only as separate versions of the common faith. Mead took more delight in the irrelevance of the churches. Bellah was quite mild; as an explorer of religion that moves "beyond belief," he paid compliments to the faiths but seemed to have little faith in their positive potency. Civil religion exists "alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches" as an "elaborate and well-institutionalized" religion. Churches could serve as feeders into the civil synthesis. Yet church religion also was "a political instrument which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of a democratic republic among the Americans." It simply did not serve all needs of all people.⁶

Bellah is correct in his final observations. Civil religionists should not worry about church support. They receive it. It serves as engine, instrument, and glue. The churches might do the worrying. To speak in these terms renders one vulnerable to Professor Mead's charges that to defend particular religions evidences the influence of neo-orthodoxy, European biblical scholarship, and the like. The tension is observable on other grounds, however, and the reasons for the tension can be located by people not blighted by propheticism in modern theology and biblical thought. It would be hard to read the Bible itself without finding the Hebrew prophets or New Testament eschatologists attacking the cognates of civil religion in their time. That today's civic faiths might be less encompassing and encroaching than were those in biblical times is a point worth entertaining, of course. The discussion has to do with kinds, not degrees of tension between the systems.

III

We are ready to face two propositions. First, the public order has and needs an "institutionalized" civil religion that can and will produce the needed common values over against churchly particularity, divisiveness, and irrelevance. A question must be asked of those who support this: has civil religion in any of its forms turned out to be sufficiently institutionalized, undivided, and potentially creative to fulfill its mission? I argue "no," if one applies to it the same rigorous standards of criticism that church religion regularly receives from its thoughtful advocates.

And the other: churches are incapable of generating such common values. The question: on this topic, are they all that divided? Answer: no. On this point, they were born ecumenical and have become more ecumenical and synthetic. Exceptions are few.

⁶ "Civil Religion in America" in Daedalus, Winter, 1967, p. 1. See also pp. 12-13 where Bellah observes the civil behavior of churches and questions whether the fact that "civil religion" has a "pervasive and dominating influence within the sphere of church religion" might not lead churchly critics of civil religion to express animus.

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The resultant burden for anyone who takes such attitudes to those two propositions is this: in the behavior and practice of Americans we must show that civil religion is also denominationalized and that denominations are also civil, devoted to the common. The first of these can here be done rather briefly.⁷ Was civil religion truly general and universal? Women claimed that men alone spoke for it. Blacks called it WASP in origin and outlook. J. Earl Thompson called for "the reform of the racist religion of the republic." Vincent Harding considered it to be white sectarianism. D. W. Brogan from England thought it was Protestant. Ethnic and racial particularists and movement people or foreign observers may not have all been correct, but their perceptions are important. Civil religion was also particularist.⁸

Other sectarian divisions are present in the civil religious camp, all of them preventing Robin Williams' "common religion" from developing toward fruition. Élites differ from élites, élites contend with the range of publics, right-wing interpreters vie with left-wing interpreters. There are even vast demonstrable regional and class differences within the civil camps, as studies of religious practices in public institutions have shown.⁹ Idealists battle realists and nominalists. To point to these internal contentions is not to point to a flaw or to ill-health in the religions of the American Way. Instead it suggests the vitality of a cause worth fighting about. And, in the spirit of James Madison who had reference to conventional religious institutions, the citizen has some security because of the presence of a "multiplicity of sects" as opposed to a monopoly by one religious viewpoint or group. Quod erat demonstrandum: one does not even potentially move from the realm of defensiveness, particularity, or divisiveness in the sanctuaries of civic piety.

IV

If the civil religion is often denominationalized, the denominations are often civil. Their behavior reveals this more than their dogma or structure, but in America religious behavior matters not a little and may be a most revealing sign of "real" religion. Virtually all the denominational religions share the national consensus that calls for religious support of civil society and the state. Public opinion polls find true dissent against this idea extremely rare. With the sanction of Romans 13, which provides a theological ground for loyalty, the churches have often been the most reflexive instruments for sup-

⁷ See "A Nation of Behavers," in Worldview, May, 1974, pp. 9ff.
⁸ For samples, see Thompson's essay reprinted by Smith, op. cit., pp. 286ff.; Vincent Harding, "The Religion of Black Power," in Donald M. Cutler (ed.), The Religious Situation 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 3ff. and "The Afro-American Past," in Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman, New Theology No. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 167ff. See also "The Uses of the Afro-American Past," in Donald M. Cutler (ed.), The Religious Situation 1969, pp, 829ff. and D. W. Brogan, "Commentary," The Religious Situation 1968, p.357.
⁹ See for an example Richard B. Dierenfeld, Religion in American Public Schools (Washington: Public Affairs Press), pp. 51, 56, 66.

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porting the civic as being "ordained of God." Where there are dogmatic reservations, these have rarely been used against the common religion or the consensus. This may not be a flattering dimension of religion in the eyes of Mead's despised neo-orthodox or European-influenced biblical scholars, but our interest here is in pointing to what is, not to what should be in their or anyone's eyes.

Those who have rightfully pointed to Jefferson and Lincoln and their kith as the embodiments of the best of civil religion may not always cherish the kinds of support the churches give. They are not always based on the deep philosophical or prophetic themes that have emerged in decisive moments in American history. Churches' support may often rely on unquestioned loyalty to the state. The attempt to remove a national flag from a church sanctuary would be seen as desecrating in more places than would a similar attempt to remove a cross or menorah. The Sunday School and parochial schools teach loyalty to the common national values in the name of God. The issue here is not the quality of devotion or depth of understanding but the common support of a common faith on the part of the churches. The last decade or two have seen many calls for, not many signals of the prophetic or the disruptive. The few exceptions in the 1960s were "done in" not by a repressive civil society but by that majority in the churches who knew how to take care of their own when they stepped out of line to pose prophetic faith over against American religiosity and policy.

Peter Berger has pointed to the "overwhelmingly conservative and inhibitory effect" of religion in societal history.¹⁰ Henri Desroche notes that most religion attests, it does not contest or protest, the civil realm.¹¹ Robert Alley, after pointing to the religion of presidents, notes that churches have "never been far removed from willingness to join in with missionary nationalism." William Lee Miller found churches to be in broad support of the "piety along the Potomac" of the Eisenhowerian 1950s. Jeffrey Hadden saw a "gathering storm" in the churches when the clergy deviated from national consensus. The polls throughout the Vietnamese War saw the churches in almost perfect congruence with the society at large; they almost all behaved civilly almost all the time. Harold Quinley observed "the prophetic clergy" and found them out of step with their congregations. Charles Y. Glock saw the "comfort" hypothesis almost always and everywhere predominating over the "challenge" approach, with the result that there was little abrasion between the churches and the society.

J. Milton Yinger observed how the laity would devise supportive novel faiths right under the noses of any prophetic clergy, Dean Kelley did not isolate this subject, but with only one or two exceptions (e.g.,

¹⁰ Peter L. Berger, The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 195 1), p. 156.
¹¹ Henri Desroche, Jacob and the Angel: An Essay in Sociologies of Religion (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), pp. 36 ff.

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Jehovah's Witnesses) he saw the strict churches that seemed to be most particularist growing most rapidly-but differing not at all on civil matters of loyalty. Dorothy Dohen traced the themes of civil support by clerics throughout Catholic history. A student of "the Lutheran ethic" found Lutheran people to be astonishingly content with the civil status quo. Richard Pierard looked at the evangelicals and said "it is significant that relations between civil religion and the Christian churches in America have been quite harmonious."¹²

The point here is not to suggest that civil religion-nationalism and hyper-patriotism, but rather that the "common values" of the religiously-supported general faith of society are not being challenged with any consistency by any large numbers in the churches. Whoever would summon support for civil religion could hardly look for a better-organized, more poised group of advocates than could be found in what might on some scores be preoccupied, divided, distracted, defensive churches. Nor has it been shown that these same churches do not also house serious observers of the best in civil religion.

V

Two questions remain. Should civil religion be denominationalized? Those who look toward world synthesis-Bellah, for example, sees civil religion not in jingoistic but ecumenical or cosmopolitan terms-might say no. Those who share William James' perceptions of a "pluralistic universe" or even Father John Courtney Murray's concept that pluralism, while it may be against the will of God is written into the cards of history and might be appraised positively, will live at ease with the sects among the civil.

Second, should the churches behave so civilly? Here some sort of dialectic response is probably to be forthcoming from advocates of particular religion. Most of them have in their charters the call for support of the common along with the withholding of consent when it becomes oppressive or all-inclusive. Those who truly are concerned to apply prophetic or eschatological norms-the William Stringfellows and Jacques Elluls, the Abraham Joshua Heschels and Daniel Berrigans and Martin Luther Kings in the recent past-will have reason for concern about support of the consensus on the part of the particularists. But at their side are also many devotees of a more political kind of Christianity, one that is more ready to affirm the goods

¹² For these other testimonies, see infer alia, Robert S. Ailey, So Help Me God: Religion and the Presidency, Wilson to Nixon (Richmond, Va., John Knox, 1972), p. 143; William Lee Miller, Piety Along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); Jeffrey K. Hadden: The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969); Harold E. Quinley, The Prophetic Clergy (New York: Wiley, 1974); Charles Y. Glock, Benjamin B. Ringer, and Earl R. Babbie, To Comfort and to Challenge (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967); J. Milton Yinger, Sociology Looks at Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Lawrence L. Kersten, The Lutheran Ethic (Detroit: Wayne State, 1970); Dorothy Dohen, Nationalism and American Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967); Richard Pierard, The Unequal Yoke: Evangelical Christianity and Political Conservatism (New York: Lippincott, 1970), p. 121.

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effected in the existing civil order. Thus it can be seen that in both camps both positive and negative attitudes to our similar and parallel questions are represented.

What we may have learned from the debates of recent years is, at the very least, the need consistently to apply the same measures or norms for judgment and appraisal in "our" camp as in "theirs," in both the civil or common and the churchly or particular spheres. This growth of a sense of fairness and charity may not solve all the substantive or behavioral issues at stake, but it will contribute greatly to civility. Thus it can provide a context and climate in which fresh thinking, marked by clarity and charity, can emerge.