Perspectives on Civil Religion

Volume 3

Gerald Parsons

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351750790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2002: Perspectives on Civil Religion introduces the concept of civil religion, examines the use of the concept in recent scholarship and investigates examples of civil religion in the contemporary world.

The book sets out to explore tensions and complexities in the relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular', and draws on two major case studies for in-depth illustration of key issues. It looks first at the development of rituals of remembrance from the American civil war, British and American responses to the two world wars and the controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

It then considers civil religion in the Italian city of Siena, especially in relation to the Palio of Siena and Sienese devotion to the Virgin. The five textbooks and Reader that make up the Religion Today Open University/Ashgate series are: From Sacred Text to Internet; Religion and Social Transformations; Perspectives on Civil Religion; Global Religious Movements in Regional Context; Belief Beyond Boundaries; Religion Today: A Reader

CHAPTER 1
'Lest we forget': British and American rituals of remembrance as civil religion

In any attempt to summarize the elements that make up the 'civil religions' of the UK and the USA, the rituals associated with the remembrance of those killed in war must surely occupy a prominent position. In the UK, the events and ceremonies that surround the annual celebration of Remembrance Sunday - the Sunday falling closest each year to 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War in 1918 - arguably constitute the most widespread and visible expression of British civil religion. On that Sunday, in literally thousands of cities, towns and villages across the UK, representatives of local communities gather at local war memorials to remember and to honour members of those communities killed in Britain's wars since the First World War. And in so doing, they function as so many local expressions of the national focus of remembrance, led by the royal family, that takes place at 11 a.m. on that same Sunday at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London.

Similarly, public ceremonies, including the observance of a moment of silence, take place in the USA every year on Veterans Day, 11 November, to honour and commemorate the dead of that nation's wars. These ceremonies too provide widely diffused and localized expressions of an official national ceremony - the focal point of which is the laying of a presidential wreath - which takes place at 11 a.m. that day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC. Together with similar ceremonies for the remembrance of the dead of all of America's wars held on Memorial Day (another and historically earlier focus for commemoration, stemming from the American Civil War and celebrated in most states on 30 May), Veterans Day, like the British Remembrance Sunday, provides a highly visible annual reaffirmation of national recollection of the war dead and their sacrifice for America.

In neither the UK nor the USA are such rituals the only, or even arguably the predominant, expression of 'civil religion'. In the UK, the symbolic role of the monarchy in national life is another major element in civil religion (Bocock, 1985, pp.213-18; Wolffe, 1993, pp.318-27). And in the USA the celebrations of the Fourth of July and of Thanksgiving¹ provide further annual festivals of American civil religion with somewhat different emphases, while the institution of the presidency remains an important focus for American civil religious sentiments and reflections (Pierard and Linder, 1988; Linder, 1996). Nevertheless, it is clear that rituals of remembrance and commemoration play a central part in the construction of civil religion in both countries. Indeed, one recent and hostile critic of Robert Bellah's seminal formulation of American civil religion (Bellah, 1967) has complained that 'the holidays of American civil religion seem predominantly militant', and that Bellah's use of the concept of civil religion in the American context is restricted to militant expressions of the values involved (Mestrovic, 1993, pp.130-1). It is by no means clear that this criticism of Bellah's description of American civil religion is either fair or adequate. For example, it seriously neglects the self-critical and prophetic role that Bellah included in his understanding of American civil religion (Bellah, 1967, pp. 16-19; 1974; 1975), and it fails to distinguish between American civil religion as understood by Bellah himself and the militant - and indeed military - uses to which the concept has subsequently been put by others. It also fails to consider whether acts of remembrance of those killed in war must necessarily in themselves be understood to be militaristic in nature or uncritically celebratory in relation to the wars whose dead they commemorate. However, the criticism at least serves to confirm that the association between civil religion and the remembrance of those killed in war is one that is both intimate and complex.

The rest of this chapter will explore aspects of that complexity. It will do so in two main sections. The first will review the origins and broad development of the principal rituals of remembrance in both the UK and the USA. The second will consider the preceding section in the light of Richard Pierard's and Robert Linder's five-part definition of the nature and function of a 'civil religion', and will also explore some of the ambiguities and unresolved tensions raised by the relationship between rituals of remembrance and civil religion in both the UK and USA.

Inventing remembrance

The origins of American rituals of commemoration

The emergence - 'invention' is arguably an even better word - of national rituals of remembrance of those who died in war began at significantly different points in British and American history. For both nations, the traumatic experience of the First World War - between 1914 and 1918 for the UK, between 1917 and 1918 for the USA - was to prove a crucial moment in the development of such rituals. Indeed, in the UK this experience was the origin and inspiration of all of the principal elements in the still continuing traditions of remembrance that are characteristic of British civil religion. In the USA, by contrast, some of the most important rituals and symbols of what was to become the national understanding of remembrance had begun to take shape some 50 years earlier in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

As Bellah argued in his seminal essay on American civil religion, the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century was a moment of severe trial and crisis in the history of the American nation and in the development of its civil religion. Between 1861 and 1865, the Civil War tested the ideals and values of the American people and threatened the very existence of America as a single, unified nation. It also resulted in the addition of a number of new and powerful elements to the stock of traditions, values and rituals, derived from the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century, that had already come to constitute an American civil religion. The Revolution had given American civil religion the 'sacred text' of the Declaration of Independence, the annual ritual of the Fourth of July, and a core of beliefs about the newly independent nation, including the belief in a God that had a special interest in America and its destiny (Bellah, 1967, pp.5-9). The Civil War - one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century and one which, by definition, divided the American people and tested their collective identity to the point of potential destruction - added new themes, new sacred texts, new rituals, and both sacred places and a sacrificial martyr figure to the civil religion of the nation that emerged from the war.

The powerful sacrificial martyr figure was President Lincoln, who was assassinated in April 1865, just as the Civil War was coming to an end. The violent and untimely death of the president who had led the North to victory over the Confederacy in the South - thereby preserving the nation as a single entity - provided a striking symbol of the themes of death, personal sacrifice and rebirth that were so prominent in the wider interpretation of the Civil War and its painful meaning by those who had lived through it and seen so many others die. And such themes were nowhere more dramatically or memorably enshrined than in Lincoln's own most famous attempt to derive meaning from the conflict into which he had led his nation. On 19 November 1863, on the battlefield at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where just four and a half months earlier one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War had been fought, Lincoln delivered what became known as the Gettysburg Address. Only 268 words long, the Gettysburg Address encapsulated themes that became central to the Civil War's contribution to the development of American civil religion. Opening with a reference to the founding principles of the nation some 87 years earlier - the belief in liberty and the equality of all - Lincoln explained that they had assembled at Gettysburg to dedicate a part of the battlefield to those who had died there in order that the nation might live. Yet, he continued, in a larger sense it was the sacrifice of those who had died which had already consecrated the ground, while for the living the task was to dedicate themselves to the completion of the work begun by the dead. Thus, Lincoln concluded, the living must now be resolved that 'this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom' (quoted in Foote, 1997, pp.8-9). Despite - or perhaps because of - its brevity, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has become one of the sacred texts of American civil religion. Thus, it has been described as 'a symbolic and sacramental act' (Lowell, 1964, pp.88-9, quoted in Bellah, 1967, p. 11), and as a 'key sermon of American civil religion, delivered by its principal patron saint' (Sellars and Walter, 1993, p. 188). Its status has also been recognized by the fact that the full text of the Gettysburg Address is inscribed on two American national monuments - the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and at Gettysburg, where a monument was erected to the Address itself (Hass, 1998, pp.53 and 138).

The Gettysburg Address, Bellah suggested, thus became one of the 'civil scriptures' of American civil religion. Indeed, for Bellah, this addition to the 'civil scriptures' was part of the 'Lincolnian New Testament' of American civil religion which the legacy of the Civil War added to the 'Old Testament' of the civil religion of America's founding fathers. The original civil religion, Bellah argued, had been 'Hebraic', without being in any specific sense 'Jewish'. Thus, the founding fathers of America had seen it as a new 'promised land' to which God had led their predecessors. Similarly, Bellah claimed, in speaking of the dead of Gettysburg as 'those who here gave their lives, so that the nation might live', Lincoln used Christian symbolism and language, yet without equating American civil religion specifically with Christianity or the Christian Church (Bellah, 1967, pp.8-11).

The pivotal role of the Civil War in the construction of American national identity has recently been re-emphasized in historical scholarship (Grant, 1998). It has also been demonstrated dramatically at the popular level by the phenomenal success of a monumental eleven-hour-long television series on the Civil War edited by Ken Burns and first broadcast in the UK in 1990. Moreover, as recent scholarship strikingly demonstrates, the Civil War was not simply a key moment in the development of American identity but is still regarded as a 'salvation-drama of the American nation', and is frequently described or discussed in 'religious' language and terminology. Thus, historians have described it as providing Americans with 'a sense of identity, of resurrection through disintegration'; as a 'war of national redemption'; as 'a struggle over the nation's soul', and as 'America's Holy War', which is consequently 'sacred' to Americans - and in using such language modern historians echo the sentiments of observers and commentators who lived through the war itself (Grant, 1998, pp. 163-5). Significantly, it has also been shown that both sides in the Civil War drew on the traditions and ideals associated with the American Revolution and the successful struggle for independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century. The armies of both sides celebrated both the birthday of the first president, George Washington, and the Fourth of July. Both sides also found moral justification for their own cause in the Civil War in the values and heritage of the American Revolution. The earliest stages in the formulation of 'American civil religion' thus provided the resources for both the Union in the North and the Confederacy in the South to develop their own distinctive mythical and mystical understandings of the Civil War some 80-odd years later (Linenthal, 1991, pp.23-5; Grant, 1998, pp.170-1).

In the North, the war came to be seen as a 'holy crusade', a blending of patriotism and religious devotion, in which the ending of slavery was the moral imperative that justified the war and all the sacrifices involved. This was the ideological position of the North that was enshrined in Julia Ward Howe's famous 'Battle Hymn of the Republic', with its defining line, 'as He [Jesus] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free'.² Howe thus provided a clear example of the introduction of the language of death and sacrifice into the civil religion of the North - and, because the North won the war, into the civil religion of the post-Civil War nation as whole. In the North, therefore, such language was used to create an understanding of the war as a process of national sacrifice - a 'baptism of blood' that might lead to a moral purification and rebirth of the nation. In the South, meanwhile, the bitter experience of defeat gave rise to a different but arguably no less mystical - understanding of the war as sacrifice. In the South, however, it was a myth of sacrifice for a tragically lost cause and a celebration of the devotion and heroism of an outnumbered army in the defence of a just but losing cause.'³ Significantly, the concept of a 'baptism of blood' has also been used in relation to the interpretation of the Southern cause, as has the concept of civil religion (Wilson, 1980; Foster, 1987; Grant, 1998, pp. 170-3).

The myths of sacrifice created in both the North and the South were, inevitably, partial and in many respects problematic: that of the North conveniently ignored the existence of racism in the North as well as the South, and glossed over the bloody realities of the war with its rhetoric of heroic sacrifice; that of the South similarly ignored the issue of race and slavery, and appealed to a romantic view of the graciousness and elegance of pre-war Southern life that was, in reality, largely mythical. But as a means of integrating the legacy and the memory of the Civil War into the civil religion of post-Civil War America, the theme of sacrifice was invaluable and highly effective. By emphasizing the shared experience of war and sacrifice, and by recognizing the bravery and devotion to their cause of Southern soldiers as well as those of the North, the Civil War could even become a shared experience of national suffering and rebirth. If the war was thus recast as a heroic and painful struggle between brothers, then it was possible to claim that the blood of both sides had ultimately strengthened and purified the newly reborn nation. Thus, the emergence and growth of the 'cult of the Lost Cause', and the celebration of Confederate heroes as part of this 'cult', enabled even the defeated South to contribute to the patriotic mythology of the nation as a whole (Wilson, 1980; Foster, 1987, Linenthal, 1991, pp.93-4; O'Leary, 1994, pp.24-6; Grant, 1998, pp. 174-6). It is not surprising, therefore, that it was the Civil War that prompted the emergence of some of the most important and enduring features of the rituals of memorialization and remembrance that are characteristic of modern American civil religion.

Along with literally hundreds of memorials located on the battlefields of the American Civil War and in local courthouse squares and parks (Sellars, 1986), the Civil War gave American civil religion two of its most hallowed and sanctified 'sacred places' and one of its most revered 'holy days'. The two 'sacred places' are both cemeteries; the 'holy day' is the annual day set aside for recalling the dead of America's wars. The Civil War marked a dramatic change in attitudes to the remains of those killed in America's wars, for until then the standard practice had been to bury the dead in mass and unmarked graves. The American dead of the Revolution had been buried in this way in the late eighteenth century. The one marked grave at Valley Forge - of a lieutenant from Rhode Island - was remarkable precisely because it was the only individually marked grave at a place where some 3,000 Americans had died in the winter of 1787-8. Indeed, the practice of mass burial continued in the early stages of the Civil War itself - the dead of both the Union and the Confederacy being buried in unmarked mass graves after the battle of Manassas in 1861.

However, by the time of the Civil War such attitudes were changing. The war was fought by mass armies and in the name of democratic ideals. Advances in military technology, together with the very size of the armies and the inability of medical services and science to keep pace with the efficiency of the new weaponry, resulted in ferocious casualty rates. Of the one and a half million Northerners and one million Southerners who fought, 359,000 and 259,000 respectively were killed (Mayo, 1988, p. 170), a fatality rate of 1 in 4, and thus far in excess of fatality rates in America's subsequent wars. Improved communications and photography brought the realities - or at least the grim post-battle evidence - of such casualty rates closer to the rest ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: the concept of civil religion
• Chapter 1 'Lest we forget': British and American rituals of remembrance as civil religion
• Chapter 2 Public monuments and private grief: war graves, war memorials and personal pilgrimage
• Chapter 3 'To heal a nation?' Civil religion and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• Chapter 4 'Dedicated to the Virgin': civil religion and Sienese devotion to the Madonna
• Chapter 5 'Unity in diversity': civil religion and the Palio of Siena
• Chapter 6 Images of civic devotion: Palio drappelloni and Sienese civil religion
• Chapter 7 'Sacred and profane': popular rituals in Sienese civil religion
• Conclusion: civil religion reconsidered
• Glossary of Sienese words
• Index