Recently in Civil Religion Category

What do the OWS demonstrations have to do with religion? Over at the Scoop, Lee Gilmore notes the rather modest role traditional religious representation has played thus far, and decides that the most active presence has been neo-pagan. My son Ezra, a newspaperman who has just set out to cover the demonstrations nationwide--check out his blog, America, Occupied--found a transcendentalist spirituality on the ground in (where else?) Boston.

No doubt, the motives and rationales of OWS run a wide gamut; hell, it's all about letting anyone who shows up have a say at the general assembly. But the movement's signature expression--the extended, 24-7 encampment--is best thought of not in terms of a political rally but as a religious vigil. The relatively small number of occupiers are bearing witness for the community at large to what they see as societal injustice. And when motorists honk their approval as they drive by, they are not signalling their support for a particular agenda, or someone else's cause. They are expressing their own identity as the 99 percent. They are the ones we've been waiting for.

I'm at Virginia Tech to participate in a symposium on the Judeo-Christian tradition and yesterday had a chance to visit the memorial erected to the victims of the April 16, 2007 massacre perpetrated on campus by Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally disturbed student. The memorial sits at the head of the the Drillfield, the large open space so named because VT has long been a military school, now counting some 1,000 cadets among its undergraduates. There's are 300-pound gray dolomite "Hokiestones" for each victim, arranged in a semi-circle, some with pebbles on top that have been left by visitors in a custom most familiar from Jewish cemeteries.

I picked up the pamphlet describing the memorial featuring photos and brief bios of the 32 who died, accompanied by "We Remember Them," a poem identified as coming from Gates of Prayer. That's the new Reform Jewish prayer book, and the poem turns out to have been written by Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, who was the first Jewish chaplain to serve in the Marine Corps, and who became famous for ministering to the troops at Iwo Jipril, the university celebrates Jewish Awareness Month. It seems that the Judeo-Christian tradition is alive and well in Blacksburg.

I was discussing the history of the Pledge of Allegiance in my class on religion and the media today, and was astonished to learn that some of my students--one from Santa Barbara, others from upstate New York--had been accustomed to recite the Pledge in public school with the words "under all" replacing "under God." As in: "one nation, under all, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Under all what? All gods, goddesses and beliefs, as one blog comment I found puts it? Or, self-referentially, the same "all" that liberty and justice is for?

Howsoever, if this is indeed happening in school districts across the U.S., it would appear that some teachers or administrators or school boards have quietly (I can't find any news coverage) decided that--as Michael Newdow argued before the Supreme Court--"under God" is an unconstitutional establishment of religion that they want no part of. Or maybe it's another example of rote mishearing, like "Our Father which art in heaven, Harold be thy Name." Anybody out there know?

The usual suspects plus some unusual ones are unhappy with Mayor Bloomberg's decision to conduct the 10th anniversary commemoration ceremonies at Ground Zero without benefit of clergy, and at first blush, the decision is a little hard to comprehend. After all, these days Americans do tend to solemnize such occasions with some sort of joint religious exercise.

On second blush, however, the mayor is simply insisting on sticking close to the ritual that was established 10 years ago and continued ever since: a reading of the names of the victims with moments of silence for attendees to fill with whatever thoughts or prayers they may have. This approach seems to sit well with the victims' families as well as with leading religious figures in New York, such as Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis.

But let's try a third blush--one that provides formal religion for those that want it, without imposing it on those that don't. Let's hark back, in other words, to the way New Englanders used to remember the fallen on Memorial Day.

In "An American Sacred Ceremony," anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner's classic account published six decades ago, Memorial Day in "Yankeetown"--Newburyport, Mass.--began with members of the different religious bodies attending services in their own houses of worship; then forming a parade and marching together to the town's main cemetery, where separate ceremonies were performed; then reforming the parade with a final collective salute, and heading back to town. As Warner summed it up:

Here we see people who are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox involved in a common ritual in a graveyard with their common dead. Their sense of separateness was present and expressed in the different ceremonies, but the parade and the unity gained by doing everything at one time emphasized the oneness of the total group. Each ritual also stressed the fact that the war was an experience where everyone sacrificed and some died, and not as members of a separate group, but as citizens of a whole community.

In today's America, it is no longer possible to make the civil religious umbrella work with a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant minister; or an Abrahamic triplet of rabbi-priest-imam; or anything short of a herd of be-robed clerics. And even then there will be exclusions--of those of no faith, of course, but also Mormons and Missouri Synod Lutherans, and others who for their own theological reasons will not pray with those who do not share their beliefs.

So let the members of New York's several religious bodies who wish convene simultaneously in nearby houses of worship this Sunday morning to memorialize the dead of 9/11 as they see fit; and then let all proceed to Ground Zero, for the collective secular ritual that brings the community together.

Amy Sullivan, may her blog posts increase, has a fine one up on Swampland explaining why the Gingrichian outreach to evangelicals is likely to go nowhere. Among other things, the guy seems incapable of showing remorse (read: repentance) for his well-known sins (ah, those adulteries), and unaware that evangelicals really like to be told your conversion story.

But, you say, Newt ain't no evangelical; he made his conversion to Roman Catholicism two years ago. True enough, but if he's acquired some Catholic chops on his faith journey, he's keeping them well hidden. In his public utterances, there's nothing but the usual conservative sloganeering about the importance of faith and the dangers of secularism.

Actually, it's worse than that. What he's retailing is the lowest form of Bartonian civil religion: the revision of American history into pious patriotism. His book, God in America, is structured as a walking tour of the national monuments of Washington, D.C., for crying out loud. There's a word for this kind of thing. Idolatry.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off "the Judeo-Christian tradition." Inspired by a new "Judeo-Christian Voter Guide," he resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper over the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating Jewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations.

In a study published over a quarter-century ago, I traced this claim as far back as 1943, but its prime exponent has been the late author and publisher Arthur A. Cohen, whose 1969 Commentary article, "The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition" (redone in his 1970 essay collection of the same title) blacklisted the term, at least in certain circles. The article, which Goldman persists in calling "brilliant," is a piece of agit-prop that fundamentally misconstrues how the JCT came into common usage. Goldman doesn't do much better.

Cohen asserted that the tradition "as such" originated among the German higher critics of the Bible, whose aim was to "de-Judaize" Christianity even as they acknowledged its Jewish roots. But no such usage exists in German biblical criticism. "Judeo-Christian" was first commonly employed in mid-19th-century English and French accounts of Christian origins. The "Judeo-Christians" were those early followers of Jesus who wished to restrict their messiah's message to the Jews, and insisted that all who followed Jesus also follow Jewish law. They lost out, of course, to Paul and his compadres--the non-Judeo-Christians.

So far as I can tell, it was the French who first used "Judeo-Christian" to refer more generally to the Western religious tradition. Tellingly, this extended usage appears to have caught on at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in 1899. Anti-Dreyfusards, convinced that defenders of the Jewish officer were part of an anti-Catholic conspiracy, began referring darkly to their opponents as a "Judeo-Masonic-Protestant coalition" or "syndicate." Dreyfusards like Anatole France responded by characterizing Western religious values and outlooks not as "Christian" but as "Judeo-Christian" (e.g. "the old Judeo-Christian cosmogony," p. 199).

In a word, opposition to anti-Semitism was the key factor in explaining the rise of "Judeo-Christian" as a term of general cultural import. During the late 1930s, anti-Fascists in both France and the United States took up the term at a time when "Christian" had become a code word for anti-Semitic organizations on the Fascist right. Indeed, the least attractive aspect of the Jewish critique of the phrase is the charge that "Judeo-Christian" signals a Christian desire to absorb and denigrate Judaism. On the contrary, it served precisely as a rebuke to those who wanted to exclude Jews and eradicate Judaism. Theologically, Judeo-Christian language was not merely ecumenical happy talk; it was used by neo-orthodox thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, who wanted to emphasize the Hebraic (prophetic) side of their faith over Hellenic theological categories.

There is, to be sure, no little irony in the fact that, over the past generation, the phrase has been so fervently embraced by the religious right. To understand how this could have come about, you have to follow the JCT through its service as an anti-Communist shibboleth during the Cold War, and its rejection in the counterculture of the 1960s.There's no doubt that, so far as the folks behind that new voter guide are concerned, "Judeo-Christian" is just code language for their own conservative understanding of Western religious values. That said, it should not be doubted that when, say, the new governor of Alabama allows as how his only brothers and sisters are Christians, it's useful to be able to remind him that his own religious tradition is actually Judeo-Christian.

There's always been something peculiar in the claim that belonging to the same tradition means that you've always gotten along fine. No one would say that the heretics of Late Antiquity or the High Middle Ages (Arians, Donatists, Waldensians, etc.), didn't belong to the Christian religious tradition, much less that the Catholics and Protestants who fought each other to a standstill in Early Modern Europe didn't. Islam has been called a Judeo-Christian heresy, and Mormonism could as well; crusades and jihads and excommunications don't erase genetic identity. After all the politic rhetoric is over, there's more than sufficient common ground between Judaism and Christianity to justify the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition. That's probably why, in this era of increased awareness of non-Western religions, the term has grown in popularity, notwithstanding Cohen et al.

It is a rare thing when one Catholic cardinal publicly attacks another. The most famous example occurred in the middle of the 11th century, when Humbert of Silva Candida bitterly criticized Peter Damian for claiming that bishops who had purchased their offices were still valid bishops. The saintly (later sainted) Damian was one of the circle of papal reformers who strongly opposed simony, but he was unwilling to evoke the chaos that would have ensued if half the bishops in Europe (and all the priests they had ordained) had been kicked out of their jobs. Humbert was the kind of intellectual radical whose unwillingness to compromise helped bring about Rome's permanent split with Eastern Orthodoxy.

Now comes Christoph Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, accusing  Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state, of having blocked the Vatican's inquiry into sex abuse allegations against the late, disgraced cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer. Schönborn also said that Sodano had done "massive harm" to victims of sex abuse on Easter Sunday when he waved away criticism of the church's handling of sex abuse as "idle gossip." Declared Schönborn, a sometime protege of Benedict XVI: "The days of cover up are over."

While Sodano--also protector of the late, disgraced Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado--could never be confused with Peter Damian (and Schönborn seems a far cry from Humbert), there's certain parallel with the earlier strife, which help set the terms for the papacy's massive effort to reform the medieval church. The question now is what the papacy will do to reform its own ways and means.

In the 1050s, it was Humbert's ideas that prevailed with the pope. A millennium later, will Schönborn's?

Mary Ann Glendon's fulsome appreciation of Cicero in the current issue of First Things is one lawyer/public figure's tribute to her most distinguished predecessor, but given Glendon's own involvement with issues of religion in public life--and the main preoccupation of the magazine she's writing for--it's curious that she didn't manage, in nearly 4,000 words, to say anything about Cicero's view of religion. Well, maybe not so curious.

That view was purely instrumental. Like his friend Marcus T. Varro, Cicero admired Numa Pompilius, the mythic second king of Rome, for having invented religious practices that civilized the thuggish warriors who had founded the city. Famously, he served as an augur even as he wrote a tract demonstrating that augury was nonsense. He did not believe in the gods, or at least denied that they could be shown to exist, and thought private religious practices were not for serious men of affairs. In short, so far as he was concerned, religion was a fiction useful only for fostering social harmony.

This is not an understanding of religion that American conservatives like Glendon like to talk about, much less celebrate, in public.

From the president's remarks:

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next...

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

That seems pretty good as these things go, but I wish Obama would abandon his use of that fake Lincoln quote about praying to be on God's side. Better to quote the great last graph of the Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

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?