America Without God?

The new radical conservatives citing cancel culture deplore the increasing secularization of America. Many say that the nation is losing its Christian moorings. An excellent dispatch by Shadi Hamid in the latest April 2021 Atlantic Magazine asks the question about the relation of the decline in America’s unity to the decline in religious faith. It is a good challenge to this former Jesuit theologian with a degree in social ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Please read it. My comments are not quite an analysis of this article, but more an attempt to answer its question: is religious faith necessary to hold the nation together. My jesuitical answer is of course: yes and no. First some distinctions.

1. Faith and Belief. Religious faith for many of us implies a belief in a Transcendent Being or Beings or in English “God.” But there is another notion of faith. As when you say to your struggling comrades in social justice: okay, friend, keep the faith. There is faith as a core of beliefs or a creed. But there is also faith as a commitment or act. It relates to the distinction in linguistics between the parole parlee (the word spoken) and parole parlante (speaking). Faith is a commitment and process that expresses itself to the world in words, rituals, institutions — human artifacts and symbols culturally bequeathed. Transcendence, distinguished from the Transcendent as expressed, is a quality of human existence. It is the desire to live and thrive, to know, and to belong in community. It is a reaching beyond oneself and one’s troubled “world. The transcendent is a noun; transcendence is a verb. It is quite possible to believe in transcendence without believing in transcendent persons, places, and things.

2. Public and private. Religion etymologically means “binding.” It is the cultural, mimetic way that holds a community together. A democratic republic separates religion and politics by affirming the right of freedom of (and from) religion. Sectarian, traditional, ethnic beliefs and behaviors belong to the private sector and are a binding force for families and ethnic communities which the public sector through its main institution of government protects. No private or sectarian religion or its beliefs dominate the public sector and its rules. However, those who hold them may enter the public process to influence the outcome of public sector deliberations. But the public sector also has unifying cultural force which we might call civil or public religion. This is a complex of beliefs, rituals, memories, values, and institutions that citizens espouse to bind the nation. Historians call it the idea or ideal, the soul or character, and the spirit of America. It’s expression develops and grows in time and space.

Now I am ready to give my yes and no answer.

Yes. To be a nation that can find unity even in diversity of opinion and belief, America needs to have a religion, an evolving set of beliefs that express a transcending faith in our country. Those beliefs include freedom of religious persuasions which are relegated to the private sphere. They include universal human rights. They include the ideal of democratic social change that builds a public sphere that welcomes all without discrimination based on race, origins, sex, religion, age, or lifestyle to speak and act in shaping that public sphere. That faith is a commitment and allegiance to one nation under God for freedom and justice for all.

Under God. In God we trust. Is God an expression of the idea or soul of America? In the ancient civilizations of the Mideast, Baal the Master God of Fertility was the principle of unity. The Hebrew tribes became one nation, according to Hebrew scholars, when it combined their creation stories and gods under Yahweh in conflict with Baal. Greece united the city-states under Zeus. Rome under Jupiter. Europe under Christ became the Holy Roman Empire in conflict with the Muslim world under Allah. They discovered an Indian continent under Vishnu and then Buddha as a unifying idea in Asia.

And so, the first British American colonies established a national unity under God, but not as some sectarian notion professed by a charismatic prophet with a private revelation. Or as instructions written in a book of sacred writings compiled by officials of a traditional religion. The founders of a democratic Republic relegated these gods and rites to the private sector and spoke of God in public within the beliefs and principles that underlie the public sector that included all those of every persuasion even those who rejected the language of theism in order to maintain the separation of private from civil religion.

The God of the civil religion in a democratic Republic is not a personal or transcendent entity as in many private, traditional religions. This God is Plato’s Idea of the Good, Aristotle’s Deist First Cause, Spinoza’s Love of Reason, Heidegger’s Being, Evolutionary Scientists’ Omega Point or Supreme Consciousness, Whitehead’s Universal Process, Humanists’ Higher Power or New Humanity. In the public sphere, transcending humanity speaks and acts to discover and create the Reign of God as the Beloved Community.

The American democratic republic is not a Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or New Age nation. While my personal life might be enriched by these religions and I may use their principles even in public, they do not and must not determine the structure and laws of the nation. Policies and rules of the nation are built on the consensus of the citizens, diverse as they are in tradition and opinion, who constitute the public. The nation is not governed by divine revelation or ecclesiastical order or theological teaching.

A people or nation declines without a unifying idea that binds and citizens together and inspires their transcendence, their creation of a public place of freedom and peace that is open to all and moves beyond the sphere of necessity and violence to fill the desires to live, to know, and to belong. Such an idea is “credal” in that people voluntarily commit themselves to this idea to be citizens. And indeed, citizenship is determined and measured by a person’s commitment and actions of a common faith. But how that is expressed in a creed is arbitrary and changing. It may or may not include God-language and is distinct from the beliefs that govern one’s household or private behavior.

So, my answer to the question of the necessity of God to America is No. A Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, or Abrahamic “God” is not the principle of the unity from many in the American nation. Nor is any other transcendent entity or household god.

But whether using “God” or not, the question of religious faith and civil religion, pauses us to consider what our collective objects of worship and our rituals are in deed as well as in word. I am struck how “theological” is the article by Ben Ehrenreich in the TNR March 18, 2021 on climate warming and his prophetic warning against the false gods and institutions of “economy” which lead us to self-destruction.

Historian Rogers Smith (Civic Ideals: Connecting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History) finds three stories that woven together make up the stories that define the ideas, soul or character of America: 1) progressive democratization or inclusion, 2) societal pluralism, and 3) universal rights. But he warns of another tradition found in America linked to the European colonialization of America that led to its division into nation states. He calls it the “ascriptive” tradition in which people are ascribed a place in society based on a quality beyond their control. Race, sex, age, class at birth, religion, ethnicity, residence, and country of origin are examples of these qualities. This is the dark side of the soul of America. Elsewhere I identified three elements of this tradition: 1) American caste system, 2) the Masculine ideal, and 3) Christian dogmatism. The notions of freedom, justice, and equity in our pledge of allegiance are significantly redefined in this tradition. And so is “under God” written on the American currency as in whom we trust.

It could be said that that the dogmatic assertions of Apocalypse in the struggle of civilizations under their own gods, of divine determination and God’s will, of divine favor and exceptionalism, of justice in an afterlife, of a freedom, redemption, and grace based on an individual personal faith, self-interest, and effort without a recognition of the dignity of and responsibility to all undermine the responsibility of citizenship and the soul of the nation. I believe that these dogmas applied to the public sector by religious adherents are a sign and cause of the decline of democracy and the American Republic.

One could also say that Catholic and Protestant Social teaching, Jewish Tikkun, Unitarian Universalist principles, and Islamic foundations for social justice as taught by Sayyid Qutb can supplement and support the principles and national character of the American democratic Republic. When I hear evangelical Christians saying that “God told me X,” I wonder what God they are talking about.

rollie smith 3–29–21