American Covenant

American society is at a crossroads. It is deeply divided and the level of public discourse is at an all-time low. Recovering and reviving the “vital center” of politics is crucial. American civil religion opens a path toward this goal, argues Philip Gorski in American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. The book is at once an analysis and a plea: thus Gorski addresses readers “as citizens first and scholars second” (11). He offers a public sociology that combines social intervention with scientific rigor, historical breadth, and analytical depth. The writing is erudite, lucid, and elegant. Gorski takes up the concept of civil religion from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s initial use of the phrase, but more immediately from his mentor Robert N. Bellah’s influential essay, “Civil Religion in America” (1967). Bellah argued in Durkheimian fashion that “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity” existed in the United States from the beginning of the Republic (8). Bellah described that set of practices and phenomena as a religion; as a civil religion that was in no way “antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, and which “was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian” (8). American civil religion proper is an institutionalized collection of beliefs and rituals mixing together religious and secular imagery that sacralizes the American nation and endows it with a divine mission.

Christianity · Civil Religion · Covenant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• The broken covenant

  Robert Neelly Bellah•The broken covenant•1992

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• Civil religion in America

  Open Access•Robert N Bellah, Robert Ν Bellah•Daedalus•2005

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