American Covenant

Philip Gorski approaches the topic of American Civil Religion as a sociologist of European religion. This unexpected background helps explain the approach of the book, its strengths, and its weaknesses. Gorski describes long-term trends that define how a society thinks about itself, following the lead of his mentor Robert Bellah. In describing those trends, however, Gorski tends to “lump” a variety of thinkers and movements together, to conform to his typology that all thinking about civil religion falls into only three categories: civil religion, religious nationalism, or radical secularism. Gorski offers an impressionistic intellectual history of the varieties of civil religion, choosing figures who address the themes he deems most important. He tells this story for two purposes: first, to argue that the mainstream of the American civil religious tradition is an outlook he describes as “Prophetic Republicanism”; second, to encourage readers to contemplate these ideas as citizens and so to renew this tradition in the present. In his first chapter, Gorski defines prophetic republicanism as the merging of Jewish and Christian belief (rooted in the Hebrew Prophets, connected to notions of national covenants) with the political philosophy of civic republicanism. Its main competitors, according to Gorski, are religious nationalism, which sacralizes the state, and radical secularism, which aims to cut off any public role for religious belief.

Civil Religion · Covenant · Mainstream · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Secularism · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies