NEWS FEATURE: Book Asks: What Kind of Civil Religion Will We Have?

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In her new book “Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship” (Jossey-Bass), Diana Butler Bass calls believers to examine U.S. actions and policies in light of Christian teaching and tradition. As the nation’s two major political parties try to link ideologies and presidential candidates to having the right […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In her new book “Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship” (Jossey-Bass), Diana Butler Bass calls believers to examine U.S. actions and policies in light of Christian teaching and tradition.

As the nation’s two major political parties try to link ideologies and presidential candidates to having the right kind of faith, the proper form of patriotism, Butler Bass recommends pausing amid the cacophony. The issue isn’t whether we will have civil religion, but what kind of civil religion we will have, she says.


Going back to the days of Abraham Lincoln, Butler Bass notes that the famous Civil War-era president did not invoke faith for his cause, but reflected on the complexities of faith and nationhood for the Union and for the Confederacy.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said of the two sides in the Civil War: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”

From Lincoln, Butler Bass turns to the history of civil religion in the United States, siding with church historian Martin Marty who once grouped the practice of civil religion into two broad categories.

“Priestly civil religion tends to bless the established order that fuses a `historic faith’ with `national sentiments,”’ Butler Bass writes. “Prophetic civil religion, on the other hand, draws a distinction between traditional faith and the nation.”

In the prophetic tradition, the United States tends to be held accountable to God’s standards and judgments.

A later book by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence honed Marty’s categories into two clashing positions _ zealous nationalism, a more militant version of priestly civil piety; and prophetic realism, which views American culture as the intermixing of good and evil, Butler Bass says.

She argues for people of faith to consider the call to believers to not just turn to church as “chapel, a place defined statically as a structure (or part of a structure).” Instead, she suggests seeing the church as dynamic and organic, a gathering of God’s people and not a building.


Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Butler Bass has found herself wondering if many Americans, including clergy, weren’t turning to zealous nationalism without pondering its implications.

On the morning of Sept. 11, she said, citizens recognized the power of their bonds “in thousands of ways and affirmed a sacred sense of our connectedness as Americans.”

“Something transcendant gripped us. In the music of `Amazing Grace’ and `God Bless America.’ In the unholy infernos of plane crashes and burning buildings. In the aftermath of fear and war,” she writes.

American response to the Sept. 11 tragedy proved citizens have inherited their grandparents’ sense of civic faith, she argues. Yet it is a civic faith transformed by “expanded practices of human rights and individual liberties and increased sensitivities to religious and ethnic diversity and pluralism,” Butler Bass says.

A writer and teacher, she is a senior research fellow and director of the Project of Congregations of Intentional Practice at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va. From 1995 to 2000, she wrote a weekly column on American religion for The New York Times Syndicate. Her previous book, “Strength for the Journey,” was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2002.

In this new book, Butler Bass approaches her analysis with theological and historical perspective, weaving in insights and experiences of Christian figures including St. Francis of Assisi, Jesus and Abraham. She details her own move from one congregation to another, her fear after Sept. 11 and that date’s impact on the prayer life of her young daughter, Emma.


Butler Bass’ book raises central, salient questions for Americans of all faiths, but is especially relevant for Christians.

DEA/PH END HOLMES

(Cecile S. Holmes, longtime religion writer, is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina. Her e-mail address is cholmes(at)sc.edu).

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