Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.
Readings
The first reading is from sociologist Robert Bellah’s article titled “Civil Religion in America,” first published in the journal Daedalus in 1967:
“The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion [of the United States] as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God. The God of civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern from America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the ‘American Israel’ is not infrequent. What was implicit in the words of Washington [in his inaugural address] becomes explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural when he said: ‘I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.’ Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all nations.”
The second reading is from an interview with the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, in the recent book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief:
“Taking Christianity as the exemplar of religion skews philosophical discussion towards attempts to solve, resolve, or dissolve difficult philosophical puzzles inherent in monotheism: problems about God’s powers, goodness, and knowledge; attempts to provide rational arguments for God’s existence; the problem of evil; and so on. Hindu philosophers have traditionally been far more interested in a quite different array of problems, especially questions about the nature of religious knowledge and religious language, initially arising from their concerns with the Veda as a sacred eternal text and as a source of ritual and moral law…. Some of the more important Hindu philosophers are atheists, arguing that no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the possibility of error. Whether believed in or not, a personal god does not figure prominently as the source of the divine, and instead nontheistic concepts of the divine prevail.”
Sermon: Our Civil Religion
The subject for this morning is civil religion in the United States. Our U.S. civil religion has been explored by scholars going back to 1967 when sociologist Robert N. Bellah published an article on the topic. While talking about our American civil religion is nothing new, at the same time in the current political situation it’s also very much of the moment.
I do have to admit, however, that not everyone agrees that the United States has a civil religion. Conservative Protestant Christians, for example, are often uncomfortable with the notion that our country has a civil religion, for at least two reasons. First, the U.S. civil religion does not fit into their definition of religion, because our civil religion does not center on belief. On the contrary, U.S. civil religion centers of performance of rituals rather than belief. Second, conservative Protestant Christians are quite certain that a person can only have one religious commitment. For this reason, they deny that a civil religion exists; and then they conflate their performance of the religious rituals of U.S. civil religion with their conservative Protestant Christianity. As a result, conservative American Protestantism sometimes becomes a mash-up of Protestant Christianity and U.S. civil religion; using the technical term, it is a “syncretic religion.”
By the way, it can be controversial to point out the fact that U.S. civil religion is different from Christianity. Robert Bellah points out that “from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political group have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion.” (1) Yet even though conservative Christians find this controversial, it’s important for us to see clearly that an American civil religion actually does exist — and further, it’s also critically important to see clearly that the American civil religion is not Christianity
So that we can see more clearly, let’s admit that (all too often) we Unitarian Universalists default to the conservative Protestant Christian definition of religion. All too often, we just assume that a person can only have one religion at a time; that religion centers on belief in a transcendent deity; that the purpose of religion is salvation; that religion is entirely a personal matter; that every religion must have a single sacred text like the Bible. Of course, by this standard, Unitarian Universalism would not be a religion, because we don’t require belief in a deity, we don’t mind if you follow more than one religious path, we don’t have a founding figure, and we’re pretty loose about what constitutes a sacred text. We should know better: the conservative American Christian definition of religion does not work. To be blunt, it is just plain wrong.
So let’s put that definition of religion aside. And to better understand our current U.S. civil religion, let’s take a look at ancient Rome. The religions of ancient Rome can teach us a lot about the religions in our society today.
Ancient Rome was a multicultural society, somewhat similar to the way the United States is a multicultural society. Many different religious sects flourished throughout the Roman Empire, sects like the Eleusinian mystery religion in Greece, the religion centered around Isis in Egypt, Judaism in Judea, and so on. A person could join any of these religions, but that person would also be expected to participate in the rituals of the Roman state cult. The Roman state cult provided a measure of social cohesion across the vast empire, with an elaborate calendar of ritual events. Everyone in society had a part to play in the various ceremonies and festivals and sacrifices. Ancient Rome even had sports events as part of the Roman state cult — the Taurean Games, which helped propitiate the deities of the underworld.
In ancient Rome, Judaism was notable because it was perhaps the only group whose adherents were not required to participate in the ritual sacrifices of the state cult. Admittedly, a few emperors sometimes forgot that the Jews were exempt; so for example, the mad emperor Caligula, who had gotten the Senate to deify him, threatened to place a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. When the Christians came along, as an offshoot of Judaism they tried to piggy-back on this exemption from the state cult, but got thrown to the lions instead. Thus, with the occasional exception of the Jews, it didn’t matter what other religion you practiced, you had to participate in the state cult of the Roman Empire, or face the consequences.
I think you can begin to see the parallels between the ancient Roman state cult, and today’s U.S. civil religion; although there were also significant differences. Like the ancient Romans, our civil religion has a calendar of events. The high holiday of this calendar is Independence Day, the fourth of July, which is widely celebrated with fireworks, barbeques, and other standardized rituals. Unlike the ancient Romans, you don’t have to go to a barbeque or watch the fireworks, but at some point in our lives most Americans do participate in these rituals. The rest of the yearly calendar is filled with lesser holidays and their associated rituals: Memorial Day parades, commemorations of 9/11, Martin Luther King Day celebrations, and so on.
Just as the ancient Romans integrated sports into their state cult, so too are sports an integral part of our U.S. civil religion. Every sports event in the U.S. includes an important ritual from our state cult, the playing of the Star Spangled Banner during which everyone is supposed to stand. When we understand this is a religious ritual, we can understand why there was such a strong reaction when Colin Kaepernick (KAP er nik) took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner. By refusing to participate in a ritual of the state cult, Kaepernick was was actually emulating what the ancient Christians did; and while the lions he got thrown to were metaphorical, he was still thrown to the lions. Interestingly, many conservative Christians didn’t understand how his action was somewhat analogous to the ancient Christian martyrs.
Another feature of our U.S. civil religion is that we deify our presidents. When I say “deify,” there’s a tendency to confuse that with the Christian idea of the relationship between Jesus and God-the-Father. But deification in ancient Rome was something quite different. When Caesar Augustus died, the Roman Senate voted to deify him — that is, human beings could turn another human being into a god through a legislative act. Once Augustus was voted a deity, then he became part of the Roman pantheon, the government built temples to him and staffed those temples, and his name was invoked on a regular basis in political rhetoric. In U.S. civil religion, we have a similar process with some of our past presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln for example. His birthday was made a holiday through a legislative act; his portrait was placed on coinage; the government built a temple to him which we call the Lincoln Memorial; and Lincoln’s temple is staffed, not with priests, but with uniformed National Park Service members. Once you understand that Lincoln is analogous to those deified emperors of ancient Rome, you can better understand the bitter reaction to two initiatives of the current presidential administration: the proposal to do away with the penny means doing away with the deified Lincoln’s portrait on our coinage; and cutting National Park Service staff means cutting the uniformed priesthood that cares for the Memorial.
This also helps us understand why the Trump administration was so upset about the flags flying at half staff for Jimmy Carter during the Trump inauguration. In the last hundred years, every president has received some level of deification upon his death; at a minimum, that deification involves U.S. flags being flown at half staff for a month. But Donald Trump and his followers have begun to sound a little too much like the ancient Roman emperor Caligula and his followers; Caligula and his followers decided to deify him before his death, not after. Increasingly over the past two decades, our presidents and their followers have been trying to deify them before they’re dead. As an independent, belonging neither to the Democratic nor the Republican party, I find this concerning. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are well on their respective paths to deification, and I don’t think either one of them deserves it. While they are each human beings with strengths and weaknesses, in my view neither one is worthy of deification — and I make that last statement with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that statement will anger their respective followers. It’s almost as if our American civil religion has been torn apart into competing subsects.
In 1976, a decade after he proposed the idea of a U.S. civil religion, Robert Bellah wrote that our civil religion was at that time in disarray. He wrote: “The legitimacy and authority of all our institutions, political, economic, educational, even familial, as well as religious, has never been shakier.” (2) Civil religion was one of those institutions whose legitimacy and authority was called into question. And when the country as a whole drew back from American civil religion, the conservative Christian view — that Christianity is the state religion — won by default.
Yet, as Bellah pointed out in 2002, a broader civil religion can serves an important unifying function: “Without some degree of ethical and religious consensus [Bellah said], the burden of social coherence must rest entirely on economic, political, and military structures — just the structures that our highly individualist society most abhors. Religious individualism, then, leads to a purely secular society which can be held together only by external coercion. [This is] a contradiction indeed.” (3)
Bellah wrote that in 2002, and it seems to me that we are still facing that same contradiction nearly a quarter of a century later. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to propose any unifying ethical and religious consensus; nor has our one lone socialist, Bernie Sanders. Increasingly, our social coherence rests on external coercion through economic, political, and military structures.
It is tempting to point fingers of blame, and say that the other political party is at fault for destroying social cohesion. The Republicans point the finger of blame at the Democrats, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by attacking marriage and the family, killing unborn babies, and the like — and if you think my rhetoric sounds outrageous, I’m actually toning it down from what I’ve heard in public discourse. For their part, the Democrats point the finger of blame at the Republicans, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by wanting to reinstate slavery and subjugate women and go back to the Stone Age — again, for the sake of this sermon, I’m toing down the rhetoric as we actually hear it in the public square.
So what happens when American civil religion breaks down? When we can no longer promote social cohesion through the relatively benign means of American civil religion, then people start trying to promote social cohesion through external coercion. Yet for us Americans, external coercion is a form of social cohesion we find abhorrent. When the Republicans talk about “owning the libs,” that’s a mild form of external coercion. When the Democrats talk about how only stupid people could vote for Trump, that’s a mild form of external coercion. Both these forms of social coercion strike at the roots of our cherished ideal of valuing the individual.
We Unitarian Universalists, as a matter of religious principle, place a high value on the individual. We are still followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent eight years as a Unitarian minister before transitioning to a full-time career as a writer. In his essay on Self-Reliance, Emerson taught us to value the powers of the individual, and to appreciate both personal responsibility and the right to not conform to societal expectations. Emerson’s protege Henry David Thoreau, a Unitarian for the first two decades of his life, promoted individualism in his famous essay on civil disobedience, in which he taught that individuals must heed the promptings of higher principles. The teachings of both Emerson and Thoreau lie at the core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists: we place the highest value on the worthiness and dignity of individual persons, and we do not like external coercion in any form.
Because we don’t like coercion — and because we value the individual — I would suggest that we may want to revisit our attitude towards the U.S. civil religion. Over the past few decades, we Unitarian Universalists have been inclined to remove examples of American civil religion from Unitarian Universalism. For example, the last two hymnals published by the Unitarian Universalists Association removed all the patriotic hymns that we used to sing — including the removal of “My Country Tis of Thee,” in the absence of which some of Martin Luther King’s sermons lose their meaning. There have been very good reasons for every action where we’ve removed ourselves from American civil religion. But the effect of all those actions has been that we’ve participated in the erosion of “ethical and religious consensus” in the United States. As a result, we’ve helped to create a climate where some form of external coercion is increasingly required to maintain social cohesion.
Now because we Unitarian Universalists value individualism so highly, I’m not going to try to tell you what to do. But I’d like to suggest that it would be beneficial for us Unitarian Universalists to re-engage with American civil religion. And in fact, our congregation has been re-engaging with American civil religion over the past few years. We’ve been flying both the United States flag and the Progress Pride flag outside the Meetinghouse (at least, we were flying those two flags alternately until one of this winter’s wind storms broke the flagstaff). Here inside the Meetinghouse, a committee consisting of Bill Baird and Rory Toyoshima recommended moving the U.S. flag down from the gallery to the main floor of the Meetinghouse, and now we display the U.S. flag along with the progress pride flag, the African American national flag, the state flag, and the United Nations flag. Holly Harris and I have started an annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence here in the Meetinghouse on the Sunday before Independence Day. In each of these small acts, we as a congregation have re-engaged with the U.S. civil religion, while putting out own interpretation on it.
I hope that none of these small actions is perceived as being in any way coercive of your rights as an individual. This is part of our interpretation of the U.S. civil religion. No one is going to tell you what to believe. No one is telling you that you have to participate in any ritual that you don’t want to participate in. And if you are sincerely opposed to any of the actions of the U.S. government, we will uphold your right — no, your responsibility — to engage in civil disobedience if your conscience calls upon you to do so.
But our small actions — things like flying a U.S. flag in front of the Meetinghouse — can signal that we as a religious community are equal participants in American civil religion. And if we can manage our own strong feelings that have been bubbling up because of the current political situation, we are actually well placed to provide powerful spiritual leadership to help this country find common ground. We can present an expansive vision of those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And we can do this without requiring belief in unbelievable things, without having to deify presidents; and also without having to demonize presidents, for as Unitarian Universalists we know that presidents are neither gods nor demons, but merely fallible human beings.
Will we convince everyone of our expansive vision of the Declaration of Independence? No, not everyone. But I believe the vast majority of Americans actually do share this vision. And this is a shared vision that could promote social cohesion without external coercion, allowing us to work together as a nation once again.
Notes
(1) Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Winter, 1967, vol. 96 no. 1, Religion in America (Winter, 1967), footnote 1.
(2) Robert N. Bellah, “The Revolution and Civil Religion,” in Religion and the American Revolution, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Fortress Press, 1976).
(3) Robert N. Bellah, “New-time Religion,” The Christian Century, May 22-26, 2002, pp. 20-26.