Recently in Civil Religion Category

Amy Sullivan has the scoop on the Obamas' choice of church: Camp David's Evergreen Chapel. A politic move, and probably a wise one: Not only do the Obamas seem to want to be together as a family at Camp David whenever possible (so where else go to church?), but it was going to be a circus if they chose any D.C. congregation. 

What is Evergreen Chapel? Amy calls it a "non-demonational church," which is not quite accurate. It's a non-sectarian chapel, built with private funds raised by a planning committee of clergy from different faiths, and dedicated in 1991. The non-sectarian aspect of the place did not come without a struggle, as recounted by James Rudin, the rabbi who served on the committee in his capacity as the American Jewish Committee's director of interreligious affairs. The struggle had to do with the eight stained glass windows that adorn the place. Originally, six of them were dedicated to each of six mainline Protestant denominations, one was for Roman Catholicism, and the other featured symbols of various "others."

Rudin, who tells the story in chapter VII of his 2006 book, The Baptizing of America, successfully persuaded the committee that such privileging of Christianity (and Protestant Christianity of a certain kind at that) was not the American way, and in consequence a new set of windows was created featuring more abstract spiritual objects: the sea, an anchor, a mountain, a globe, an open book, a tree of knowledge, a sheaf of wheat, seven flames, a dove, and a lamp with a flame.

Evergreen Chapel does have a presiding chaplain, a military one assigned on a rotating basis by the Navy. The current occupant of that position is a Southern Baptist out of the Marines, whom Amy considers as close as possible to a "polar opposite" of the Obamas' former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. (But maybe not so much: Wright was a Marine too.) In any event, the Obamas chosen church is, strictly speaking, not a church at all, but a place for all faiths, fully achieved as such in a typical exercise of the American civil religion.

Update: Whoops! The White House has told Brody it ain't so. The Great Church Hunt continues. Maybe. Amy sources her story as "Obama has told White House aides."

Further Update: Amy stands by her story, suggesting that, sure, the Obamas will be on the lookout for a regular D.C. church, but not so's you'd notice. Meanwhile, Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is on the case of the current Camp David chaplain, Lt. Carey Cash. Turns out he's part of a hard-core evangelize-the-military ministry--which makes you wonder a little about the Navy's decision to rotate him into the Camp David position in January. From Amy's account, it seems as though there's a generic (evangelical?) Protestant congregation embedded in the formally non-sectarian chapel. Has the place has ever been used for services of other faith traditions?   

The Immanent Frame, purveyor of religious cogitation from the Social Science Research Council, has begun a new series of essays inspired by this passage from President Obama's inaugural address:

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old.  These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

Is there a problem with this rather banal reflection? Well, there's the perennial worry among some religion scholars that any appeal to shared values is by definition exclusionary. As Frame editor-at-large David Kyuman Kim frames it:

Nonetheless, by casting certain values as "old" and as "true," Obama has enjoined the American public in an affirmation of a tradition that may or may not be in fact be as "common" as he claims.  For while he invites the American citizenry to think of ourselves as part of a common conversation that makes for a tradition, he presumes a common inheritance.  And yet: there will no doubt be those who feel left out of this inheritance and from this invitation.  They will feel so for a host of reasons: differences over political positions or moral points of view, or disputes about the master narratives that have rendered the lives of various people invisible or "insignificant."  This is one of the perils of making an appeal and a claim to "the common good" and to shared values. When a tradition aspires to be encompassing, if not universal, in its moral claims, it will inevitably leave many feeling excluded.

This, it seems to me, is a fine expression of the characteristic American concern that the ingrained celebration (viz: valorization) of pluralism (viz: difference) as marker of America's collective identity not be threatened by the enunciation of common traditions (except, of course, pluralism itself). The great bogey for such religion scholars is the idea of an American civil religion. The hegemony, the hegemony!

But the species of civil religion experienced in America is a far cry from the kinds of political religion associated with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, , and Soviet Russia. Here's how Europe's great student of those political religions, Emilio Gentile, defines it (in his Politics as Religion, p. xvi): 

the conceptual category that contains the forms of sacralization of a political system that guarantee a plurality of ideas, free competition in the exercise of power, and the ability of the governed to dismiss their governments through peaceful and constitutional methods. Cvil religion therefore respects individual freedom, coexists with other ideologies, and does not impose obligatory and unconditional support for its commandments.

Those scholars anxious about creeping Obamaite civil religion would do well to broaden their national and historical horizons, perhaps bearing in tmind he president's response when asked by a reporter if he subscribed to the "school of  'American exceptionalism.":

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Among the five ways Obama is, in the view of Kristol's latest WaPo column, "surprisingly vulnerable to political and substantive attack," is his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Kristol does not specify the nature of the president's Guantanamo problem, contenting himself with the reflection that it is very like Jimmy Carter's returning the Panama Canal to Panamanian control--"a perhaps mostly symbolic issue that caused terrible political problems for both the Democratic administration and Democrats in Congress." For him, this is merely a political target of opportunity. Not that the analogy is perfect; after all, the U.S. really did surrender control of an important piece of real estate and regaining sovereignty over the Canal Zone was hardly a symbolic issue for the Panamanians.

On the other hand, to call Guantanamo "a perhaps mostly symbolic issue" is an understatement. The Supreme Court has determined that it makes no legal difference whether the prisoners are held there or in the U.S. proper, and no one seriously proposes that American high-security prisons are incapable of holding dangerous persons. So what, exactly, is the symbolic problem here?

In a smart article in Religion in the News on the Oklahoma City bombing eight years ago, Ed Linenthal argued that transgressors like Timothy McVeigh are treated as "contaminants of the body politic" that somehow represent a toxic presence wherever they happen to have been present on American soil. Ed distinguishes such native sources of contagion from alien ones, but it seems to me that the Guantanamo detainees represent the same sort toxicity. Their mere presence on American soil is metaphysically intolerable.  

Does this interpretation seem a little too academic for your taste? Well, last week the House Appropriations Committee defeated an amendment by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan. that would prevent any detainee from entering the United States. "Do you want the terrorists in your hometown?" Tiahrt asked. He went on say, according to Fox, that "the government frequently tells people to wear their seatbelts and wash their hands to stay clear of H1N1 flu, and a vote for his amendment would also bolster safety."

I'm inclined to doubt that Guantanamo will achieve the traction that the Panama Canal did three decades ago. But it won't be for lack of Kristoline agitation.

Madison would have liked this:

On this day of unity and prayer, let us also honor the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. We celebrate their commitment to uphold our highest ideals, and we recognize that it is because of them that we continue to live in a Nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience.

This, not so much:

I call upon Americans to pray in thanksgiving for our freedoms and blessings and to ask for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection for this land that we love.

Full text after the jump.

President Obama's decision to issue a Proclamation for the National Day of Prayer but take a pass on the East Room festivities laid on by his predecessor seems pretty much of a piece with James Madison's efforts to walk the line between custom and constitutional mandate in the matter of presidential religious leadership. As Madison put it in a letter written near the end of his life:

There has been another deviation from the strict principle in the Executive Proclamations of fasts & festivals, so far, at least, as they have spoken the language of injunction, or have lost sight of the equality of all religious sects in the eye of the Constitution. Whilst I was honored with the Executive Trust I found it necessary on more than one occasion to follow the example of predecessors. But I was always careful to make the Proclamations absolutely indiscriminate, and merely recommendatory; or rather mere designations of a day, on which all who thought proper might unite in consecrating it to religious purposes, according to their own faith & forms. In this sense, I presume you reserve to the Govt. a right to appoint particular days for religious worship throughout the State, without any penal sanction enforcing the worship.

The Day of Prayer is one of those religious encrustations that have formed on the body politic since World War II. (Cf. "Under God" in the Pledge.) Established by Truman in 1952 and given a date regular (the first Thursday in May) by President Reagan in 1982, it's become the province of a Task Force run out of Focus on the Family headquarters by Shirley Dobson, wife of James. She professes to be disappointed at the president's decision but religious indiscriminacy is not, shall we say, Focus' forte. We await the Proclamation.

As a student of the history of the use of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" in American public discourse, I can't resist posting this Blitzer-mediated exchange between Carville and Donatelli on the president's remarks concerning the kind of nation the United States is: not Christian or Jewish or Muslim but "a nation of citizens." That is, of course, exactly what the founders had in mind, and Obama is obliquely referring here to Washington's famous 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport that makes that point:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Donatelli thinks such statements should not be made, as if in doing so the religious heritage of the country is dismissed or demeaned. Not that the founders would have identified that heritage as "Judeo-Christian." That shibboleth dates to World War II (Wikipedia doesn't have it quite right), and really only came into its own during the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower used it in his notorious (misquoted) statement implying that America needed religion but that it didn't matter what kind of religion. (For a complete discussion, see my 1984 American Quarterly article, "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.")

What the Washington-Obama position is based on, however, is not a belief in the necessity of some kind religious underpinning for the American approach to religion, unless by that is meant a belief that the Judeo-Christian tradition is particularly given to recognizing humankind's "inherent natural rights," and in particular a right of conscience. That's a debatable proposition. 

Let's put the grumbling about President Obama's corralling of clergy to give vetted invocations at his Beyond-the-Beltway town meetings together with the grumbling over his choice of Federal District Judge David F. Hamilton to ascend to 7th Circuit. The invocations, according to Gilgoff's sleuthing, have got to be inclusive. And Hamilton's most controversial decision--at least to the religious grumblers--is his declaring unconstitutional pervasively sectarian (as opposed to "inclusive and non-sectarian") invocation-giving in the Indiana House of Representatives. Coincidence?

Over at my temporary blogging home on Belief, I've outlined why I think it's perfectly OK for the White House to screen invocations for inclusivity. Here I'll just make the point that Obama's sense of the role of religion in society is of the let's-get-together-and-raise-the-barn variety. This, as I've argued elsewhere (see here and the last chapter of One Nation, Divisible), is a classical Midwestern Methodist disposition, and very much congruent with classic American civil religion. Oh, and perhaps not coincidentally either, David F. Hamilton is the son and grandson of Midwestern Methodist ministers. Not to mention a nephew of former Indiana congressman and current Obama foreign policy eminence grise, Lee Hamilton.

It's worth bearing in mind that opposition to relocating the Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland may have less to do concerns about security than with fear of a kind of infection. Take this statement from Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania:

I don't think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo. You intermix them with the prison population, and there's the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison."

Lurking beneath the surface is the sense that, even if kept in solitary confinement, these people will contaminate the homeland.

Steve Waldman has a good overview of the declining inclusivity of inaugural prayers over the past half-century. I find his overall argument persuasive and would only take slight exception to his claim that the country's founders would have disagreed on the desirability of having prayers at the inauguration at all. Steve bases his claim on the differing views of Washington, Adams, and Madison on presidential prayer proclamations. But it's worth noting that none of the above, nor any other president for nearly a century (until Chester Arthur, who took office in 1881) so much as used the phrase "so help me God" when taking the oath of office. This was to be a secular ritual, not a sacred rite complete with invocation and benediction. Yes, most pre-invocation presidents employed a Bible, but that ought to be seen in the usual common law sense of oath-taking in a courtroom. So while I have no particular enthusiasm for Newdow et al.'s efforts to get the prayers out of the Inauguration, I do think there would have been a consensus among that first generation of national leaders to keep religion out of it--lest, as Madison said of the proclamations, it imply and nourish "the erroneous idea of a national religion."