In a brief essay published around the first anniversary of President Trump's inauguration, John D. Carlson, who directs Arizona State University's Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, lamented the “corrosive effects on the American tradition of civil religion” of Trump's inaugural address (to say nothing of the president's first year in office more generally). Unlike its predecessors, Carlson wrote, Trump's address “failed to affirm even basic commitments to freedom, democracy and human dignity—ideals that many Americans hold as universal, self-evident, even God-given.” Trump's “battering of civil religion” was made even more objectionable, Carlson went on, by the fact that “Americans place our sacred trust in the principles, purposes and aspirations of this civil religion,” which he described as “the moral backbone of our body politic—a heritage of shared beliefs, stories, ideas, symbols and events that explains the American experience of self-government with reference to a moral order that transcends it” (See Carlson, “Donald Trump and the Battering of Civil Religion,” online at https://religionnews.com/2018/01/19/donald-trump-and-the-battering-of-civil-religion/).

I mention Carlson's essay—which remains well worth reading, and rereading, even as the Trump phenomenon continues to leave its distinctive mark upon our national discourse—as a way of introducing the two books under review here, because they all seek to illuminate the same cultural phenomenon: “American civil religion,” first elaborated by Robert Bellah in his landmark 1967 article, “Civil Religion in America” (Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21.). In that article, Bellah explored the “collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things, and instituted in a collectivity” (8), which in the American case was “selectively derived from Christianity [but] clearly not itself Christianity” (7). This civil religion had, for years, Bellah argued, linked American politics with a larger, transcendent reality; he traced its origins and development down through American history, and expressed concern about its continued capacity to bind an increasingly divided nation. In the fifty years since Bellah wrote, scholars have taken up the study of American civil religion and subjected it to continuing theoretical and empirical elaboration: Gorski and Squiers are merely the most recent in a long line of scholarship on the topic, which now stretches on more than fifty years from the original appearance of Bellah's essay.

Despite their common focus, these two books are quite different in their approaches. Philip Gorski's American Covenant offers an expansive narrative taking in the vast sweep of American political history since the New England founding, assesses the present moment, and offers a defense of civil religion against rival accounts of the American past, present, and future. It aims to “recuperate a certain tradition within American political culture, to demonstrate that it has been a living and evolving tradition, and to identify certain exemplary figures within that tradition from whom we might still draw some measure of inspiration today” (11). In The Politics of the Sacred in America, Anthony Squiers focuses more narrowly on presidential and vice-presidential rhetoric over the past fifty years or so, seeking to elucidate the ways in which American civil religion as an overarching, macro-level symbol system “manifests itself in institutional politics and public political discourse” (6). These differences notwithstanding, the two books each speak to the increasingly shrill partisan and polarized political rhetoric that dominates the contemporary American political scene, and explore the ways in which civil religious speech can either exacerbate or mitigate those divisions.

American Covenant has received a great deal of acclaim since its publication in early 2017, and for good reason. It offers a wide-ranging, measured, and thoughtful account of the particular political moment in which Americans find themselves, and situates that moment within a broader historical context. It defends American civil religion as possessing the potential to build on the nation's foundational aspirations while acknowledging the deep injustices that persist in American society. The picture that it paints is sober and realistic, but never cynical or defeatist. Among the book's many virtues are its encyclopedic treatment of the history of American political rhetoric—Gorski revisits familiar political figures but also devotes considerable attention to others from a wide range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds (journalists, activists, academics, religious leaders)—and its clear, accessible prose. Gorski is scrupulously fair in reconstructing the arguments of thinkers with whom he disagrees (at least until the book's final chapter when, for example, he refers to libertarianism as a “lazy person's freedom” [227]). I am looking forward to assigning the text in my “Religion and Politics” course this year, and I have no doubt that both undergraduate and graduate students will learn a great deal from reading it. Nor do I doubt that I will learn a great deal from rereading it with them.

Gorski positions his embrace of the American civil religion as a centrist alternative to two undesirable extremes: “religious nationalism” and “radical secularism.” He opens with a paean to moderation, invoking Arthur Schlesinger's “vital center” and insisting that the American civil religion is “not a mushy middle that splits the difference between Left and Right” but rather a “living tradition” (2) in keeping with Americans’ highest aspirations (though, he admits, not always with their practices). In fact, Gorski's book can profitably be viewed as an example of what Aurelian Craiutu has recently called “the art of balance in an age of extremes” (Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016]). Then again, claims to the moderate middle, as Ethan Shagan [2011] has shown, can also serve as powerful tools of exclusion and boundary policing. It is therefore important to stay focused on the content rather than merely the relative rhetorical positioning of various alternatives (see Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]).

The view of civil religion as a vital center between religious nationalism and radical secularism remains important throughout the book's treatment of American history, and it is an effective framing technique. But although Gorski presents the two rivals as mirror images of each other, or at least equally extreme next to his preferred option—he calls them “twinned hubristic stances” (36)—their larger historical, political, and institutional contexts are really quite different. While religious nationalism, heavily influenced by evangelical Protestantism and shot through with motifs of blood sacrifice and conquest, dates all the way back to seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay, radical secularism doesn't enter American Covenant until after the Civil War. (And even there, one of its early exemplars, William Graham Sumner, discreetly kept his criticisms of religion to private conversations [105].) Furthermore, radical secularism has hardly ever been openly embraced by more than a small number of extremists hostile to religion itself, not merely its entanglement with American government. Religious nationalism, on the other hand, has exerted an enormous influence over the nation's history, from the Pequot War through westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the Civil War, to say nothing of the growth of American empire beyond the nation's borders. At the present moment, it arguably dominates one of the nation's major political parties. Religious nationalism is not merely an interpretation of American history: it is a cluster of powerful political and economic institutions that has managed to shape the nation's political landscape in profound and long-lasting ways. Radical secularists simply have never been more than a small fraction of the American population, and have never had more than minimal influence on the nation's politics. In this respect, the measured tone of Gorski's analysis of these two rival traditions, and his positioning of civil religion as the moderate middle, tends to obscure the realities of contemporary American politics and to understate the challenges posed by contemporary religious nationalism to a democratic, pluralist public sphere.

An occupational hazard of the grand narrative is trading off depth for breadth, and thus one of the strengths of Gorski's approach—its ability to frame a coherent narrative spanning nearly four centuries—at times leads to an eagerness to fit pieces into one of three boxes (civil religion, religious nationalism, radical secularism) in ways that miss important detail and nuance. Gorski's offering of Locke's Second Treatise as an example of radical individualism (28), for instance, overlooks the way humans’ equal status as God's creation grounds Locke's entire understanding of ethics and politics. In fact, later in the book he describes “Lockean liberalism” as combining “an affirmation of natural rights and human equality with a thoroughgoing respect for religious freedom” (105). And only a framework that insists on separating liberalism from republicanism into two separate entities would ever describe American revolutionary ideology as “about three-quarters republican and one-quarter liberal” (62). Gorski's account of early America, like Bellah's before him, is New England-centric: American Covenant moves directly from the Winthrop fleet and the New England experience to the Revolution. It is an unfortunately truncated story, since when we look for precursors of the sort of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity that characterizes the United States today, and that will continue to do so into the future, taking the Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) as an historical resource holds a great deal of promise. There, of course, the English were only one of several European colonial influences, and their commercial vitality (to say nothing of their toleration in religious affairs), could offer something of great value to our collective self-understanding (see, e.g., Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012]; and Vicki Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010]).

Whereas Gorski offers a big-picture overview of American history and politics, Anthony Squiers focuses more specifically on presidential rhetoric during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Seeking to direct scholars toward a more intentionally political interpretation of American civil religion, he rightly notes that, heretofore, scholarship on it “has largely been the domain of the sociology of religion or religious studies” (5). Squiers draws on semiotic theory, emphasizing the intersubjectively shared beliefs that manifest themselves in symbols, signs, and rituals (8–9), which in turn are often “highlighted, emphasized, elevated, placed apart…given a central location, handled in a reverential manner.” Such reverential handling becomes particularly clear when we attend to their “ritual uses—i.e., their use in routinized, coordinated and socially shared, symbolic activities” (44). Thus Squiers's study of civil religion becomes a study of legitimation, and the ways in which politicians seek “the ultimate form of legitimizing,” by cementing their positions onto “something that is insulated from debate” (47) (in other words, the sacred). Squiers constructs a dataset based on presidential nomination acceptance speeches, transcripts of presidential and vice-presidential debates, and victory and concession speeches after presidential elections, which he analyzes for instances of such ritualistic and symbolic appeals.

Squiers's elaboration of the American Civil Religion is not the most parsimonious one might hope for—he lists thirteen major tenets, some of which, like “God is the supreme judge” or “Governmental authority comes from God,” seem a bit dated (57–8)—but it is thorough and provides a clear exposition of the many components that have occupied the attention of scholars since Bellah. The attempt to bring this analysis into everyday politics, particularly into judicial and electoral politics, is long overdue, and Squiers's approach helps us to understand what makes these sorts of debates, with all their religio-cultural-political-historical messiness, so apparently irresolvable. In part, he argues, it has to do with us: political actors “attempt to sanctify political positions…to place them outside the bounds of contestable politics and insulate them from critique” (117). Seen this way, any compromise becomes akin to heresy and sacrilege. (This conception is a useful one to scholars of a variety of religious actors beyond the American context.) But perhaps even more importantly, it also has a great deal to do with the subject matter itself: the sacred, Squiers insists, “has no (nor can it have any) absolute, true, universal or essential meaning which can act as a standard by which differing definitions can be arbitrated” (117). And so the politics of the sacred continues to be the site of bitter cultural conflict and an arena in which rival understandings of the American polity itself do battle.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Squiers's treatment comes with his analysis of the role played by “the Founding Fathers” in political discourse. Drawing on the notion of filial piety, Squiers treats the Founding Fathers not as historical actors who, across the centuries, offer insights into contemporary politics, but rather as “common cultural signs” (25), “an expressed idea…a referent object within the [American Civil Religion]” (77); in other words, “an American civil religious totem” (92). On the one hand, such an approach seems obvious: of course Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton can not offer meaningful insights about capital gains tax rates, or federal regulatory policy, or health care reform. But framing the role of the Founding Fathers in public discourse as an example of a “deeply entrenched, cultural-historical tradition of filial piety” (78) offers a sort of formula explicating how such rhetorical appropriations proceed: “By contextualizing the issue in a way that cements it to the founding fathers…each politician tries to define their position as the sacred position.” (94). The presence of civil religious “sacred documents” only strengthens the power of the totemic symbol provided by the Founding Fathers in American politics (Chapter 5).

Each of these books splendidly illustrates the continuing vitality of scholarship on American civil religion, and the hold that such ideas, symbols, and practices continue to exert on the nation's political discourse. Each also points to several puzzles, or conundra, facing scholars. How does Gorski's insistence that the American civil religion must “dra[w] deeply on prophetic religion” (224), or Squiers's identification of an American civil religion heavily shot through with references to God, speak to the increasing number of Americans who increasingly answer “none” when survey researchers ask about their religious affiliations? In a society in which religious affiliation has been plummeting for more than two decades, and where intensely polarized views of the nation's past continue to make headlines (e.g., Confederate monuments, naming of buildings, investigations into institutional complicity with slavery), how relevant is a term like civil religion? Bellah himself, by the mid-1980s, was shying away from the term, but Squiers and Gorski want to insist on the term's value even in our increasingly agnostic age. A more robust engagement with the rising disconnect—to say nothing of antipathy—between millennials and American religion might have shed further light on the contemporary civil religious landscape. I doubt, for example, whether in 2018, as Squiers claims, “every child” learns “the history of Washington… exemplified in Parson Weems's fable about…the cherry tree” (82); or whether Americans really view the Constitution as “codifying higher, divine law” (128). And having watched the recent Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I am far less certain than Squiers that the Supreme Court's attempts to present itself as “oracles and shaman” (131) hold water with most Americans. What does American civil religion look like in an increasingly nonreligious society? Neither book engages Dylan Weller's 2013 plea for a new approach to civil religion, one that would build upon the foundations of what has gone before but that could appeal to “godless patriots” (Weller, “Godless Patriots: Towards a New American Civil Religion.” Polity 45 [2013]: 372–392). Grappling with the transformed nature of American religion—often misleadingly described as “the rise of the Nones”—strikes me as the single most pressing question for future scholarship on American civil religion (see, e.g., Pew Research Center, “Nones on the Rise,” online at http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/; James Emery White, The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated [Ada, Michigan: Baker Books, 2014]; and David S. Gutterman and Andrew R. Murphy, Gutterman, David S., and Andrew R. Murphy. Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States [New York: Routledge, 2016]).

Relatedly, each of these books raise important questions about the nature of mass opinion and the degree to which “American civil religion” names a phenomenon that Americans, generally speaking, continue to embrace. How, specifically, does presidential and vice-presidential rhetoric, which rears its head every four years, provide evidence of the American public's broader views about its own nation's historical significance? This concern has dogged civil religious research since Bellah's article, which based much of its argument on elite speech like Kennedy's Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. Squiers acknowledges that there is no easy congruence between the high-flown rhetoric of presidential candidates and the views of the American people writ large, but insists that “in order to win elections the major parties need to speak to such a large percentage of the electorate, [thus] their language should be indicative of a general public discourse” (56). Later, he claims that the politics of the sacred “serves to shape how most in the nation know and understand reality, sets restrictions on what can be known and understood and consequently informs the manner in which those in the society reproduce their world” (134). But these are sweeping claims, offered without any real evidence. With its broad range of sources, Gorski's book is less susceptible to this kind of criticism, though delineating a powerful narrative embraced by American journalists, politicians, and activists is one thing; establishing its broader cultural foundations, and the degree to which ordinary Americans affirm it, is something else. What if the provocative question Gorski poses as his book draws to a close—“Who are we as Americans?” (221)—has no consensual answer (assuming that it ever did)? The greatest threat to American civil religion might not be Donald Trump, but the very nation that elected him.