By Mark Tooley @markdtooley
Wesley Seminary Professor Shaun Casey is heading the new Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives at the U.S. State Department. Casey conducted outreach to faith communities for the Obama Campaigns in 2008 and 2012. From a conservative Church of Christ background, he reportedly has become more recently a United Methodist. While liberal politically, he was probably a more theologically orthodox voice at Wesley Seminary, which is one of United Methodism’s 13 official seminaries.
One report about Casey’s new appointment cited his remarks last year at the liberal Center for American Progress, where he expressed satisfaction that American civil religion is dying but wondered what would replace it. “The old 1950’s civil religion is frayed and can no longer bind the country together coast to coast,” he said. “But what do you do instead of that if you’re running for president, and that’s very complex.”
“There is also a negative underside to that history with respect to slavery, manifest destiny, to war, you know, to empires, so I, frankly, am glad American civil religion is dying,” Casey also said. “But it does raise the practical question of what binds us together as a country. We need a substitute for that, and I don’t think we’ve found it yet.”
Casey was too harsh when he faulted civil religion for America’s sins. Slavery, conquest and empires are tragically universal to human experience, long predating American civil religion. The better side of American civil religion provided the language for challenging America’s failures without undermining American democracy. The broad, distilled nature of American civil religion also avoided deep sectarianism. Critics complain not entirely inaccurately that it was largely water-downed Protestantism. But it allowed different Protestants, plus Catholics and Jews, and even religious skeptics, to participate in American political discourse as equals without disputing that religious faith has always been central to American understanding.
Several years ago Casey wrote a good book on JFK’s successful 1960 election as the nation’s first Catholic president, despite doubts by some Protestants. (My Weekly Standard review is here.) Kennedy of course directly appealed to the inclusive nature of American civil religion in arguing that he could be President of America’s Protestant majority. Civil religion in that same era was central to the Civil Rights Movement, with Martin Luther King, Jr., making direct appeals to it, leading marches with clergy from across denominations and faiths.
Virtually every American reform movement has appealed consciously or unconsciously to American civil religion or at least spoken in its language. Civil religion has been crucial to mediating social and political chasms, from the Jeffersonian-Federalist dispute of the early republic, to mending the wounds of the Civil War, to transitioning from an agrarian nation to an industrial superpower with global responsibilities.
Probably it’s premature to say that American civil religion is dying. Even scoffing secular elites still unknowingly often operate within its parameters. And the vast majority of Americans, even including the overly celebrated religiously unaffiliated “nones,” still accept many of civil religion’s assumptions. But civil religion does face new challenges, chief of which is the scarcity of its robust defenders. Some conservative Christians celebrate its ostensible demise because reputedly it blocks more authentically orthodox Christian faith. And some on the left imagine civil religion is historically a tool of conservative religionists, not recalling how liberals have exploited it no less often.
Too many imagine that today’s social disputes are unique and forget far more vitriolic conflicts of the past, for which civil religion offered a pathway forward that was at least more peaceful that the alternatives. As Casey notes, critics of civil religion rarely if ever offer an alternative. The nation is not, has never been, and will never be entirely orthodox Christian or of any one faith, as some Christians imagine. (Nor is it helpful for Christians to plot cultural or political withdrawal.) And the nation will never entirely forsake religion and entirely accept secularism, as some secular elites forlornly hope.
Civil religion remains a faith-informed but inclusive framework that allows a republic of 310 million to cohere and move while building on its democratic heritage. It’s flawed but usually works. Problematically, American civil religion was mostly created by Mainline Protestants, who are now demographically fading. In the new era of post-denominational faith, who will be its new champions?
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