In 2008, Philip Gorski began writing American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present during “a cooler, more hopeful moment” than the one in which we presently find ourselves.^{Footnote 1} Barack Obama was gaining traction in the Democratic primary with his galvanizing calls for “hope and change” and steady assurance that “Yes We Can.” But as Gorski listened to Obama, he heard something else, too—references to what his graduate school mentor Robert Bellah had called “the American civil religion.”

The civil religion, as Bellah defined it, is the “‘founding myth’ of a political community, [which] generates a ‘religious dimension found… in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality” [16]. Upon hearing Obama’s now-famous speech about race in America, Gorski observed:

Bellah had decades earlier become cynical about the unifying potential of the “founding myth” and declared the civil religious tradition an “empty and broken shell.” Yet as Gorski watched Obama speak, he was inspired to ask, “Was the civil religious tradition still alive?” [vii]^{Footnote 2}.

During Obama’s next eight years in the political spotlight, he breathed new life into the civil religious tradition and proved to be one of its most skilled and inspiring (if still imperfect) carriers. But as Gorski shows in American Covenant, Obama was only the latest to tap into this rich well of religious and political thought in order to weave a story about what America is, where it has been, and where it is going.

In telling this story about a story, Gorski adds depth and clarity to Bellah’s original account of the American civil religion. He does so in two ways. First, Gorski clarifies what the American civil religion is. It is a “tradition”—one of several competing “accounts of how the world is and should be” [4]. Gorski’s understanding of tradition is not fixed and backward-looking but dynamic and open to revision and reinterpretation. To participate in a tradition is to be part of a “culture that is self-conscious of its past,” but it is also to “enter into an ongoing conversation” [4]. Moreover, as Gorski demonstrates, while the civil religious tradition may have originally been articulated by white Protestant men, it has been “revised and reformulated” by an increasingly diverse set of civic prophets [ix].

Second, Gorski insists that the American civil religion must be sharply distinguished, both analytically and morally, from two rival traditions: radical secularism and religious nationalism. He is particularly focused on the distinction between civil religion and religious nationalism, arguing that a “major weakness” of Bellah’s definition of civil religion is that “it does not draw a clear enough line between” these two traditions, which opened Bellah up to criticism that he was “promoting ‘national self-worship.’” [16-17].

In Gorski’s formulation, these traditions differ in terms of “both form and substance” [17]. First, they involve different visions of the proper relationship between religion and politics. While religious nationalism calls for a total fusion between the worlds of religion and politics; and radical secularism seeks total separation between the two, civil religion envisions a partial overlap between them. Second, in terms of substance, the three traditions draw on different sources. While religious nationalism draws exclusively on biblical sources (narratives of conquest and apocalypse) and radical secularism draws exclusively on Western political philosophy (libertarian liberalism and total separationism), civil religion draws on both the Bible (prophetic religion) and political philosophy (civic republicanism).

By the time American Covenant was published in 2017, it was a “less hopeful time.”^{Footnote 3} In Donald Trump, white Christian nationalism had found a powerful new mouthpiece. Exclusionary impulses that many Americans believed had been exorcized from the body politic were laid bare by their fellow citizens’ support for this man, who among other things was a prominent promoter of the “birther” conspiracy theory that questioned Obama’s citizenship and underscored his alleged foreignness by accusing him of being a Muslim.

Of course, white Christian nationalism was never really gone. Even when coded and submerged, this exclusionary tradition seethes beneath the surface of American life, like an undertow threatening to pull society backward. While many Americans celebrated the “post-racial” triumph of the Obama era, the power of this tradition was visible in that “birther” conspiracy theory that propelled Trump to national prominence; in the Tea Party movement’s impassioned efforts to take “their” country back and protect its Judeo-Christian heritage; in the increasingly open embrace of Islamophobia and nativism; and the list continues. By 2017, this tradition had gained in strength and power, less an undertow than waves crashing into the shore, threatening to wash away decades of progress that had seemed solid but, like a sandcastle, could quickly dissolve.

Americans concerned about the damaging potential of religious nationalism for democracy have often viewed radical secularism—the complete expulsion of religion from politics—as its most effective antidote. Yet Gorski shows that both traditions present problems for American democracy: religious nationalism is “political idolatry dressed up as religious orthodoxy”; radical secularism is “political illiberalism dressed up as liberal politics”; neither are “worthy of our allegiance” [3]. Meanwhile, the shouting match between these two sets of extreme voices have, in his view, “drown[ed] out the quieter voices of the vital center,” [3, emphasis added] a phrase he borrows from the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

It is to the members of this vital center that American Covenant is primarily addressed. Although this group has in recent decades been riven by partisan polarization, rising economic inequality, and culture wars, Gorki believes it represents the country’s best chance of survival. The vital center consists of “believers and nonbelievers, Republicans and Democrats—who support a moderate form of secularism and a liberal form of nationalism” and “know that the American project has a moral and spiritual core” [3]. Gorski presents the American civil religion as “the historical tradition that undergirds their deepest convictions” [3]. By reviving interest in the American civil religion, Gorski hopes to revive the vital center, and so too American democracy.

It is an ambitious task for anyone, let alone a sociologist. Despite appeals for more sociologists to bring their extensive knowledge to bear on public issues, public sociology remains difficult and rare. There is concern that when a scholar shows too many of their cards, morally or politically, this risks undermining their scholarly credibility and marking their conclusions as irredeemably politicized. Gorski is direct about his political views and goals, and the fact that American Covenant is not simply a value-free description of these three traditions, but rather an evaluation of them. Evaluation involves judgement but, as Gorski explains, it is “not just a matter of opinion” [4]. Rather, he argues that one can fairly evaluate the merits of ideas using three criteria: are they 1) internally consistent, 2) historically accurate, and 3) sociologically plausible? He finds that the “civil religious tradition passes these three tests, and that its two rivals fail them” [4]. While some readers may disagree with this conclusion, the clarity with which Gorski frames his “scholarly but accessible” [8] approach is a model for scholars seeking to intervene in public debates in a polarized age.

Gorski addresses his readers “as citizens first and scholars second” [11], but American Covenant also makes a significant scholarly contribution. In the wake of Trump’s victory and strong ongoing support from white evangelical Christians, scholars of religion are already drawing on Gorski’s insights to more fully investigate how different visions of the proper relationship between religion and politics—and not just personal religiosity—inform political life.^{Footnote 4} And American Covenant’s contributions are not limited to the sociology of religion; indeed, it brims with insights that will be relevant to researchers and students interested in American political history, political culture, and nationalism.

One question that will likely arise as scholars draw on Gorski’s framework involves the extent to which the sharp distinctions he draws between civil religion, religious nationalism, and radical secularism hold up in everyday practice. Put differently, American Covenant is a book about ideas and their elite carriers, and, as Gorski acknowledges, the traditions he sketches are “ideal types” [7]. When we shift our analytic lens to regular people, it is unlikely they can be sorted so easily. For example, it is one thing to note that an individual or group draws on ideas associated with religious nationalism; and another to brand them “religious nationalists,” a label that generally bears the weight of censure. This identity label will certainly be appropriate in some cases, but it may not be in others—consider, for example, someone who references these ideas without understanding their history or implications; or someone who simultaneously holds Christian nationalist and radical secularist ideas; or someone whose use of civil religious language unintentionally results in racial or religious exclusion. How to label each of these individuals is an empirical question that could easily be confused with a political one. Moreover, if scholars are too quick to sort people into “good” and “bad” categories based on their use and misuse of these ideas, we risk missing the often-contradictory ways in which people draw on these ideas in practice, and the varieties of ends—intended or not —to which they are deployed.

Gorski opens American Covenant with an excerpt from W. B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” including the line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The words feel prescient, suited to our current political moment, despite having been written a century ago. In 1919, the world was reeling in the wake of World War I and widespread social upheaval. Our challenges today are immense, but the contrast is instructive—things have not yet fallen apart to such a degree. The question is thus: can the center hold this time? As Americans struggle to reimagine who they are and what their place is in the world, American Covenant offers an indispensable primer on the ideas that have shaped the country’s foundings and “refoundings” [9], and have determined whether Americans have pulled together or pulled apart in moments such as these.