The New Religions and the Religion of the Republic

In an effort to gain perspective on the newly emerging cultic movements in America, I place them against the historical backdrop of civil religious development Civil religion is itself set against the backdrop of secularization in America, and that process is distinguished from the simpler course of secularization by abandonment in Western Europe. I then expand the theme, found largely in the work of Sidney Mead, of a profound tension in American life between the orthodoxies of the denominations and the religion of the republic (civil religion). The history of that tension is bound up with secularization because, although Americans made religion a social value and linked theological understandings of the nation with political ones, the public importance of civil religion diminished over the years Jefferson's vision of the religious character of the republic underwent distortion, kicking and struggling into the modern period primarily in pnvatistic and individualistic guise. In order to see what power the form of civil religion which we have inherited may still possess, I look to the American literary tradition, particularly to Norman Mailer. In Mailer's work, the possibility arises that civil religion indeed perdures, but in paradoxical form, in subverted, even negated, transvaluation. However oddly, though, Mailer's God does stand in continuity with Lincoln's and with Jefferson's. Against these understandings of the historical dynamics of both secularization and civil religion in America, I set the new religious and cultic movements, and the self-improvement industry as well, in direct inheritance of the massive fact that Americans have always been characterized by extremely high religious involvement whether in denominational, sectarian, or, now additionally, in cultic and “human growth” casts. One may perceive, I argue finally, our extravagant religious enthusiasms as ironic cultures in Ernest Gellner's sense. They flourish because they are isolated from the hard marketplaces of life where the substantive decisions about our collective destinies are made, and they flourish as well because Americans still continue to consider religion socially valuable. Conceptions available to us for purposes of understanding the relationship between the individual and his or her religious involvements lie in my terms “polysymbolism” and “serial adhesion” The first word catches the syncretistic and ironic character of much contemporary religious dabbling, while the second phrase indicates its experimental and mutable quality.

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