Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The Semiquincentennial Commission is considering a number of grand plans: a “Great American State Fair” at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, monuments such as a National Garden of American Heroes, commemorative stamps and coins, new naval vessels christened with patriotic names, and local commemorations in Boston, Pittsburgh, Charleston, New York harbor (where a parade of tall ships is envisioned), and Philadelphia (where a time capsule is to be buried for Americans to open in the year 2276).
Behind all the hoopla lurk some deadly serious questions. What sentiments should the semiquincentennial organizations seek to kindle or rekindle in the hearts of the American people? What higher purposes should the planners strive to achieve? Will the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence end up being just a more elaborate iteration of a parades-and-barbecues holiday, or can it be an occasion for all Americans, of whatever color, creed, or sex, to consider the miraculous founding of the nation they share, to give thanks for its longevity, and to pledge to pass on their liberties to future generations?
It may be instructive to recount my own experience at the University of Pennsylvania, where every few years I have taught a seminar that initially baffles my students, many of whom are not sure whether they want to enroll in the course. Indeed, they are not sure what the class is even about. So imagine their discomfort when I postpone all introductory remarks and bid them sit still for an hour while I play a videotape of a presidential inaugural ceremony. After the last ruffles and flourishes I ask the students—in a seeming non sequitur—what sorts of activities comprise the liturgy (meaning the ceremony, I explain) of worship in a church or synagogue? Prayers, they answered, and hymns, and psalms. Did we just observe those activities on the tape? I ask. Yes, we sure did. What about a sermon or homily? Absolutely, for what is an inaugural address but a political sermon? Did we witness a solemn procession, an invocation of the divine, and a convocation in which the congregation celebrates its common creed? Yes again. How about a call to repentance and amendment of those shortcomings besetting our nation? Yes again. How about a dismissal in which the new high priest calls on the assembly to go forth in faith and serve as good citizens? Yes again. Well, I conclude, if a presidential inauguration possesses all the characteristics of a religious service, what religion does it serve? So we set out on our semester’s quest: “In Search of the American Civil Religion.”
The spiritual qualities of public rhetoric in American politics, courtrooms, churches, schools, and patriotic fêtes used to be so pervasive, familiar, and unobjectionable that most citizens took them for granted. Our national motto is “In God We Trust.” Our Pledge says we are a nation “under God.” Our Congress and Supreme Court invoke God at the start of sessions. Presidents of all parties and persuasions have made ritual supplications that the United States might be blessed with divine protection. The last stanza of “America” begins, “Our Father’s God to Thee, / Author of Liberty, / To Thee we sing,” and ends by naming “Great God” (not George III) “our King.” The last stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner” urges our “Heav’n-rescued land” to “Praise the Power that has made and preserved us a Nation.” “America the Beautiful” bids God to “shed His grace on” that nation. Most Americans, even today, would likely agree with the Boston Puritans John Winthrop and Jonathan Mayhew, with Princeton Presbyterian Jonathan Witherspoon and his disciple James Madison, with Virginia Anglican (and Freemason) George Washington, and with Deists Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, that Americans are “called unto liberty” (a phrase from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Galatians), that we are a new chosen people and ours a new promised land, and that our mission is to bestow liberty on all mankind, by example if not exertion.
To be sure, a majority of Americans has always found it easy to identify the God who watches over America with the God of their Protestant theology. But thanks to the free exercise of religion—which law professor John Noonan called the “lustre of our country”—ensured by the First Amendment, religious minorities have been free to embrace the American Creed with equal fervor. Thus did Bishop John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, “sing canticles of praise to the Lord” for granting his flock “a country now become our own and taking us into her protection.” Thus did the Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin liken Americans to the Children of Israel being led through the Sinai: “God Bless America, land that I love. / Stand beside her and guide her / Through the night with a light from above.” When Americans of all sects or no sect gather in civil ceremonies to praise their freedom, honor its Author, and rededicate themselves to their nation’s ideals, they do not merely prove themselves a religious people, they prove the United States of America itself a sort of religion, a civil religion—or as G. K. Chesterton put it in 1922, “a nation with the soul of a church.”
Civil religion broadly defined is a universal phenomenon. The ancient Greeks and Romans worshiped the gods and goddesses whom they believed were patrons of their local city-states and regional empires. To chant “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians” or to burn incense to Caesar was to pay political as well as spiritual obeisance. The cults of the god-kings and god-emperors of Egypt, China, Korea, and Japan were civil as well as religious. Even monotheistic Judaism displayed features of a civic cult in the eras of its monarchy and two temples. In late medieval and early modern Europe, the divine right of kings conflated civil and religious loyalties, while the city-states of the Italian Renaissance inspired their own patronage cults, albeit to saints (for instance, St. Mark in Venice). But the modern concept of civil religion was born of the Protestant Reformation’s notion of civic polity as a holy covenant or social contract made by the people themselves. James Harrington, theoretician of Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth in mid-seventeenth-century England, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher from the Republic of Geneva in the mid-eighteenth century, asked what might hold a government of the people together in the absence of royal or ecclesiastical hierarchy. Their answer was civil religion, a faith and commitment all the more powerful for being voluntary (not imposed), devoted to the unity and prosperity of the commonwealth (not a king or oneself), and inspired by devotion to God or Nature (rather than corrupt human authorities). How conscious were eighteenth-century Americans of their civil religion? Those whose church choirs sang “To the King they shall sing Hallelujah, / And all the continent shall sing: / Down with this earthly King; / NO KING BUT GOD” certainly were conscious. And to judge from President Trump’s inaugural addresses, “red-state America” (at least) still clings to that old-time civic faith.
I did not realize the existence of an American Civil Religion until I began research on my 2004 book Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828. Evidence of an American civil religion piled up until I was obliged to make it a major theme in the story of American independence and early national growth. Then, while preparing my seminar, I learned how few Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been conscious of the religion they shared. Walt Whitman, the civil religion’s poet laureate, certainly was, as was Whitman’s hero Abraham Lincoln, the civil religion’s martyred messiah. Later, when the United States got in the business of exporting its faith in the Spanish American and First World Wars, a handful of scholars wrote books on “the American religion” and “the religion of the flag.” But otherwise, American statesmen, artists, teachers, and preachers disseminated the creation myth, martyrology, moral code, theology, liturgy, and eschatology of American republicanism without explicitly acknowledging its status as a transcendental creed. Indeed, not until 1967 did the UC Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah describe in a celebrated article what he christened “the American Civil Religion.” Curiously, what inspired him to think about the matter was the 1961 inauguration of the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Prior to that, intellectual scoffers had usually dismissed the “God talk” permeating public life as evangelical cant pandering to Bible Belt voters. Now Bellah observed a young, hip, liberal, rich, Harvard-trained Catholic politician intoning “the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God” and “asking His blessing and His help” in the knowledge “that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” Fascinated by the non-sectarian (or poly-sectarian) cast of this rhetoric, Bellah recalled President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s observation, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith . . . and I don’t care what it is!” Clearly there was more to this than “feel-good” piety. So Bellah turned to history and found he could trace the American civil religion all the way back to the Founding Fathers, who had institutionalized a civil faith meant not to replace sectarian faiths but to stand above them in benign toleration, so that a diverse people might unite and fulfill the glorious destiny allotted them by the Almighty.
Who is that God of the Founders, the God of the American civil religion, if not Jehovah or the Holy Trinity? He is the God with no name, but a hundred names. Benjamin Franklin called him “Father of Lights” and “Supreme Architect”; George Washington, the “Almighty Being,” “Invisible Hand,” and “Parent of the Human Race”; John Adams, the “Patron of Order,” “Fountain of Justice,” and “Protector”; Thomas Jefferson, the “Infinite Power”; Madison, the “Being who Regulates the Destiny of Nations”; James Monroe, merely “Providence” and “the Almighty”; John Quincy Adams, the “Ark of our Salvation” and “Heaven”; Andrew Jackson, “that Power and Almighty Being Who mercifully protected the United States during its national infancy”; and so on down to Abraham Lincoln. It was Lincoln who understood that Northerners and Southerners, praying as they did to the same Biblical God, must listen to “the mystic chords of memory” and heed “the better angels of our nature.” It was he who understood, four years later, that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” and that his people must strive to bind up their nation’s wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” Lincoln himself seemed never to confess Christian faith, yet he became the martyred prophet of the American civil religion. Jackson posed as a Presbyterian but was in fact a fervent Freemason who believed in the God whose name is “Geometry,” the master builder and Mason whose all-seeing eye looks down in blessing upon the unfinished pyramid that appears on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States and our one-dollar bills even today. Likewise, Jefferson was an Enlightened philosopher who clung romantically to a faith in reason alone. Yet they, no less than devoutly Protestant presidents, swore fealty to the Providence that seemed to watch over the American people.
“Seemed to watch over” is a loaded phrase. For though historians trace the intellectual origins of the American Creed to James Harrington’s seventeenth-century republicanism, John Locke’s natural rights (“life, liberty, and property”), the Scottish Enlightenment (“pursuit of happiness,” “common sense,” and free markets), English common law, Whig ideology, and the evangelical individualism of the First Great Awakening, the fact remains that the American civil religion derived in large part from the experience of the American colonists over 150 years. The Bible makes clear that Jews and Christians did not invent their religions. Rather, their experience of divine intercessions in history was what turned them into Jews and Christians. In like fashion, the things that happened to American colonists—material blessings beyond measure, deliverance from “Egyptian bondage” in the Old World, the liberty and self-governance allowed by sheer remoteness, a sense of being guided for some higher purpose, not least the extraordinary series of “lucky” events that permitted thirteen ragtag, divided colonies to win independence from earth’s greatest empire—invited Patriots to embrace an inchoate but powerful faith wherein they, their forbears, and their descendants were actors in a play scripted by the Author of History. Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the Continental Congress, comprising mostly wealthy, well-connected men with the most to lose by rebellion, ever taking the mortal risk of declaring independence without faith in the justice and therefore divine blessing of their cause.
Blessing comes at a price. That was the message of Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Jeremiah, St. Paul, and the Revelation to St. John. It was also the message of the radical Deist who penned the pamphlet that was the immediate inspiration for the Declaration of Independence: Tom Paine.
Early in 1775, the thirteen colonies were ablaze with resistance to Britain’s Intolerable Acts. In the years following the Anglo-American victory in the last French and Indian War, the Parliament, with the blessing of the king, violated all the spirits that had set England’s (and after 1707, Great Britain’s) national agenda for two hundred years. Those spirits were: first, rabid anti-Catholicism; second, militant rivalry with the French and Spanish empires; third, hustling capitalism, both agricultural and mercantile; and fourth, self-righteous displacement of “savage” peoples who made little use of their lands, such as the Irish and Native Americans.
No Britons had drunk more deeply of those four spirits than the emigrants who peopled the thirteen colonies of North America. The colonists were shocked when the crown and Parliament suddenly jettisoned the Salutary Neglect the British had displayed toward America over the seventy years prior to the end, in 1763, of the last French and Indian War. Parliament’s Quebec Act established the Roman Catholic Church in Canada in order to appease the crown’s new French-speaking subjects. The king’s Proclamation Line forbade new American settlements west of the Allegheny Mountains in order to appease Britain’s American Indian subjects. The peace treaty had broken French power in America but vastly expanded that of Catholic Spain, which was awarded the west bank of the Mississippi River and the entire province of Louisiana. Most egregious, Parliament began to impose a whole series of taxes, commercial restrictions, and monopolies that, if enforced, would have choked the colonies’ economic growth. The British were violating all four of their own imperial spirits. They had become, in effect, heretics in their own church! No wonder patriots such as John Dickinson spied in Parliament’s acts a plot to reduce the colonists to the status of slavery.
What happened next scarcely needs relating, from the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, to the Boston Tea Party, to Patrick Henry’s fiery sermon in Virginia—whose stirring climax (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) was preceded by these assurances: “We shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.” Henry’s speech hints at an answer to John Adams’s question: How was it that thirteen clocks struck as one?
Tom Paine was a thirty-seven-year-old ne’er-do-well when he landed in Philadelphia in November 1774. The rudely educated son of a Quaker father and Anglican mother, he had failed in two marriages and numerous jobs, ranging from corset-maker to collector of taxes on tobacco and liquor. His sole achievement in life was a broadside exposing corruption among excise officials, which he blamed on the low wages they received. But by chance (or Providence), the colonial agent in London, Benjamin Franklin, advised Paine to seek his fortune in America. Armed with Franklin’s recommendation, Paine published a series of articles for Pennsylvania Magazine that caught the eye of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who suggested Paine write an essay weighing the arguments for and against independence. He even suggested the title. But Paine’s Common Sense did much more than weigh arguments: His choleric fifty-page indictment of British oppression targeted the king himself, not misguided ministers or members of Parliament. Paine took as his text the Old Testament prophet Samuel, who rebuked the Israelites for demanding a king when they had the Lord and His prophets and judges to govern them. He invited Americans to heed Samuel’s godly admonition and liberate themselves and mankind from three millennia of oppression. He reminded Americans that they were uniquely blessed with self-government in a new world. He described the stark choice faced by the colonists as one between acquiescing in their own enslavement, which amounted to rebellion against God’s purpose for man, and claiming their freedom, which amounted to rebellion against the crown. Indeed, Paine accused colonists who shrank from declaring independence of lacking not only common sense, but virtue and manhood itself.
Published in January 1776, Common Sense went through so many printings that 100,000 copies were in circulation by spring, most of them read or heard by multiple people. In Washington’s estimation, the “unanswerable” tract worked a magnificent change in the minds of men and women. With brilliant intuition, Paine tapped both the vocabularies—Enlightenment philosophy and moral evangelism—that resonated with Americans eager to know their destiny. He demanded that the colonies separate from Britain before they were corrupted beyond redemption. His sublime aphorisms, exhortations, and jeremiads thrilled and horrified. Paine did in print what Patrick Henry did with his voice.
Yet liberty comes at a price, one that Paine was not sure Americans were willing to pay. So Common Sense also echoed Moses’s farewell address in Deuteronomy, in which he promises the children of Israel every blessing if they hearken to the law of the Lord, but warns they will be cast out and become a byword among nations if they reject the Lord and the law. Thus did Paine foresee a continental union of limitless potential arising in North America, yet he warned that this union might prove as fragile as glass. He damned governmental authority, yet called for its relentless exercise lest the American cause be aborted. He told Americans they were like Noah’s family, free to begin the world over again, yet feared they might lack the virtue that calling required. He preached liberty, yet called on patriots to repress enemies in their midst. He extolled equality, yet feared “the mind of the multitude.” He foresaw unimagined prosperity, yet warned that materialism bored and corrupted. He praised Americans’ rebelliousness, yet chided them for their lawlessness. He pleaded for reason, yet played on a keyboard of emotions ranging from hatred, anger, and vengeance to fear, self-love, and self-doubt. In fact, the pamphlet’s demagogic style and “democratical” implications moved John Adams to write a hasty rebuttal.
But Paine, after just one year in America, understood the colonists’ temper better than Adams. Paine preached a civil religion in language that appealed to Americans of all persuasions. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists nodded in agreement when Paine labeled vice the solvent of liberty and established churches and monarchies the symptoms of sin, not its correctives. Deists and skeptics nodded in agreement when Paine employed biblical allusions to make secular political points. “Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do” made independence itself the Messiah and faint-hearted colonists the Roman soldiers on Calvary. In sum, Christians reading Common Sense found in it the God of the Bible and a politics derived from religion. Deists found in the pamphlet the God of Nature and a religion derived from politics. Paine even foresaw the three ways by which the colonists might achieve nationhood: “by the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob.” He hoped for a combination of all three, which is precisely what Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts proceeded to make.
Paine’s remarkable pamphlet cemented the alliance between the Awakened and the Enlightened, summoned them to a just war, and promised a kind of heaven on earth if they won. That is why some historians miss the point when they denigrate the role of religion in the American rebellion. The American cause was profoundly religious for theists and Deists alike, because both groups identified America’s future with a providential design, both entertained millenarian hopes, and both placed their cosmologies at the service of an overarching civil religion. Thus did Paine, like Paul the Apostle, become “all things to all men,” and craft a template for all American political rhetoric to come. He made unity the first and greatest civic virtue, and he united most Americans in hatred and fear of external oppressors and internal dissenters. Paine implied that to be lukewarm or cold toward the glorious cause was sacrilege. Paine invited—nay, commanded—colonists to become part of his ubiquitous “we,” adding always the not-so-veiled threat that “we” will get all who do not join us. As for devising a new form of government—“the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth”—that could wait. The first task was to wrest power away from corrupt British lords. That could be done only by winning the war, which could be done only by declaring independence. Only then would Americans be forced to hang together, lest they be hanged as traitors. Only then could Americans gain the foreign alliances they needed to prevail in the war and so enlist monarchies such as France and Spain in their holy war against monarchy.
On May 15, the Congress, riding the storm stirred up by Paine, instructed the assemblies of the thirteen colonies to suppress royal authority and organize themselves as autonomous states. Most colonies, by way of justifying their acts of separation, appealed to natural law or Providence, and named as their purpose the preservation of liberties. Jefferson described the latter as “the whole object of the present controversy,” and it was he, serving on a committee chaired by John Adams, who was charged with drafting a joint declaration. Since the other members of the committee, notably Benjamin Franklin, had what they considered more important tasks to perform, they asked their cerebral thirty-three-year-old colleague to put pen to the page.
“American Scripture” is the epithet historian Pauline Maier attached to the Declaration of Independence, and rightly so, for it would become holy writ and is still revered by most Americans in the twenty-first century. But it did not begin in apotheosis. Jefferson himself confessed that he took up the quill in his parlor on Market Street not to discover “new principles, or new arguments,” but simply to state “the common sense of the subject.” What is more, most of the original passages in Jefferson’s draft were not very good, and the good ones were not very original. The text’s lofty philosophical introduction, bill of particulars against King George, and syllogistic conclusion calling for independence were a pastiche of phrases lifted from Common Sense, from the “little declarations” issued by colonies, and from Virginia’s lofty Declaration of Rights, composed by George Mason and published in Philadelphia on June 6. It was Mason who based Virginia’s government on the premise that all men are “born equally free and independent.” It was Mason who listed the rights of man as the “enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness.” It was Mason who traced those rights to “God and Nature, vested in, and consequently derived from the People.” It was Mason who called for abolition of privilege, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a bill of rights, a free press, and “the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion.”
Jefferson did compose the elegant preamble, “When in the course of human events. . . .” He did condense Mason’s natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He did compose the Declaration’s moving conclusion, which pledged “our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” But in between those majestic heights lay a murky swamp of complaints, which stick to the reader’s boots even today. One that especially troubled Congress was Jefferson’s diatribe against the British people, whom he accused of being “deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity,” despite “our former love for them,” necessitating “our everlasting Adieu!” Its romantic and false sentimentality aside, that passage shifted the focus of Americans’ anger away from the crown, while gratuitously insulting the British subjects who Congress hoped might pressure Parliament to change course. More bizarre still, Jefferson exonerated American slaveholders and Southern planters by blaming the British crown for African slavery. Since he cannot possibly have believed this canard, he must have been groping for some way to square the persistence of slavery with his postulate, “all men are created equal.” Congress retained the latter phrase for its ring, but otherwise saw the wisdom in taking its stand on particular abuses, not universal principles. So Congress deleted a full quarter of Jefferson’s draft, tweaked the rest, and appealed to Providence at the end—all to good effect. Nevertheless, Jefferson maintained that his text had been “mangled” and went into a funk that lasted all summer. But as Richard Henry Lee put it, so long as the declaration did no harm, its wording was less important than “the Thing itself.”
Still, “the Thing itself” was far from certain during the days when Jefferson worked on the draft, because as late as July 1, only nine colonies favored independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina split narrowly against it, Delaware deadlocked (with one member absent), and New York abstained. What happened next is uncertain, except that many comings and goings were made that thunderous summer evening. By hook or by crook, the three holdouts were brought into line. New York still abstained, but Congress proclaimed the vote unanimous on July 2, 1776.
The only event that occurred on the Fourth was official approval of the text of the Declaration. It was printed, widely distributed, read publicly on parade grounds, tavern steps, and village greens—cheered . . . and forgotten. Patriots had more pressing concerns. On July 3, General Howe began to land an army of thirty-two thousand redcoats and Hessians on Staten Island, just sixty miles from Philadelphia. No wonder Congress suppressed distribution of signed copies of its treasonous Declaration until the military situation improved somewhat in January 1777.
As we celebrate and commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we need to understand the historical context and the purpose of an act that, after all, was high treason from the point of view of the British. The colonists knew they could never prevail in a contest of arms against the mightiest empire in the world without substantial assistance from another European great power. They also knew that no European power was likely to risk going to war against Britain unless and until the Americans proved beyond doubt that they were ready to fight, if necessary to the bitter end. Hence the Declaration of Independence, whatever else it accomplished, was a war measure. In its wake, Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin to Paris, where his deft diplomacy persuaded the court of King Louis XVI to provide arms and money and finally a full-fledged military alliance that would tip the scales in favor of the American cause. “The 1776 Project” was all about liberty and independence; it was also as pragmatic as it was principled.
Like all great religions, the American civil religion only gradually developed its creeds, canonized its scriptures, inspired its hymns and liturgies, blessed its martyrs, commemorated its heroes, and sanctified its holidays. Indeed, Jefferson’s principal contributions were made when he founded the Democratic-Republican Party and served as third president of the United States, hence as the high priest of the civil religion. His 1801 inaugural address, following an especially contentious election campaign, was a brilliant summation of the creed and catechism of the republic. The first principle, as always, was unity, so Jefferson assured his national congregation that “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.” Next, he pronounced us a people “acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter.” Then, he told Americans what they revered:
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights . . . ; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor . . . ; a jealous care of the right of election by the people; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority . . . ; a well-disciplined militia . . . ; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in public expense . . . ; the honest payment of our debts . . . ; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid . . . ; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected. All these should be the creed of our political faith.
The Banquo’s Ghost in that republican creed was, of course, slavery, which belied Jefferson’s principle of equal justice and persisted because of his devotion to states’ rights. Americans both North and South were conscious of that scandal but chose to ignore it in the name of their highest principle, unity. For without unity there would be no “church” at all and surely no continental and global destiny under Providence. So Americans formed a conspiracy of silence over slavery that would last sixty years, long enough for the United States to annex Florida and Texas, occupy Oregon, and conquer California and New Mexico in the Mexican War. During those decades of expansion and Jacksonian democracy, the iconography of the American civil religion reflected both the flimsiness and the mighty ambitions of the Union. As yet, no official holidays were celebrated, and the only holidays unofficially celebrated were the Fourth of July and Washington’s Birthday (a republican version of the King’s Birthday). However, New England Puritans, who otherwise eschewed “popish” feasts such as Christmas and Easter, contributed four precocious examples of civil religious observance: Election Day (honoring the polity); Training Day (honoring the militia); Graduation Day (honoring education); and Thanksgiving Day (honoring the Lord’s blessings on America). As yet the only members of an American pantheon were Washington and Franklin. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” composed in 1814, grew popular, but another century would pass before it became the armed forces’ anthem in 1916 and the national anthem by act of Congress in 1931. Nor was Old Glory, the flag “dyed in the blood of our forefathers,” especially revered prior to its going abroad for the first time during the Mexican War. What did fire early Americans’ imaginations was the iconography of American civil religion. Illustrations, works of art, and patriotic displays invariably focused on symbols of liberty and liberty’s fruits, which were peace and prosperity. The eagle and goddess of liberty were especially ubiquitous, the former always protecting the latter. But by the 1830s, liberty was increasingly joined or even eclipsed by material images of boundless frontiers, bountiful crops, bustling ports, busy canals, boisterous machinery, booming exports, and boasts of more for generations yet unborn. In other words, the civil religion’s balance between God and Mammon began to tilt ominously in the direction of Mammon.
No wonder the Constitution, a compromise contract that preserved national unity but abided slavery, became the lodestone for Southerners and Northerners, Democrats and Whigs in the run-up to the Civil War, while the Declaration of Independence was squirreled away and largely forgotten. The actual document was nearly lost several times and nearly destroyed in the British army’s sack of Washington during the War of 1812. In the aftermath of that war, the document sat for years in the archives of the State Department until 1841, when it was put on modest display in the Patent Office. Only the great schism in the civil religion over slavery, secession, and the Civil War resurrected the Declaration of Independence and caused Americans in both the North and the South to revere the primary statement of the American Creed. At Gettysburg, Lincoln reminded the American people of what had happened “Four score and seven years ago,” trumped the Constitution’s states’ rights with “all men are created equal,” and bade Americans midwife “a new birth of freedom.”
Nevertheless, the physical document remained obscure except for a cameo appearance at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. By then the original parchment was frayed and faded. Only in 1921 did the Library of Congress fashion a shrine for the Declaration of Independence and study scientific means to preserve it. Only after 1941 did the U.S. government truly beatify the Declaration (and Constitution). Obviously, Americans during the Second World War and Cold War needed more than ever to recall what their nation stood for. So at last was the “American Scripture” proudly displayed in a chemically, climatically controlled tabernacle in the foyer of the National Archives building on the mall in Washington, D.C. It is ringed by a chancel rail over which endless queues of tourists (perhaps pilgrims) squint in reverence.
By the end of the twentieth century, the American civil religion’s “church calendar” had grown to encompass a veritable cycle of commemorations of those citizens, both past and present, who kindled and defended Americans’ faith. Beginning in January, it includes Martin Luther King Day, Presidents’ Day, Army Day, VE Day, Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Air Force Day, Coast Guard Day, VJ Day, Labor Day, Constitution Day, Columbus Day, Navy Day, Election Day, Marine Corps Day, Veterans’ Day, and Thanksgiving Day. Indeed, if there is a second candidate for high holy honors in the American civil religion, it is surely the Pilgrims’ original feast. For on Thanksgiving all Americans, whatever their sectarian creed, comfortably praise whomever they choose to name God for bearing their ancestors across the sea, forging them into a nation dedicated to propositions, and blessing them with unprecedented prosperity.
But the highest of all holy days is still the Fourth of July. After the Civil War it gained even more prominence, because Independence Day called Southerners and Northerners back to what had unified them in the first place: their faith in themselves, in God’s special providence, in their ancestors’ courage and sacrifice, and in the life, liberty, and happiness a unified federal republic made possible. Should the Fourth of July ever cease to be a day “set apart” for joy, pride, and community, then the text approved on that day will turn as cold as the body in Lenin’s tomb. But so, too, may it perish if the Fourth of July becomes nothing but a day of self-congratulation and pride. It is a day when Americans, especially young ones, need to reflect on how supremely implausible the birth of this nation was, how often its survival hung by a thread, and how its Founders were emboldened because—whether Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Deist, or Freemason—they believed that the Author of History meant them to succeed.
As we Americans reflect on these Providential events, perhaps we should try harder to embrace the virtue of humility. We have been sorely divided since the end of the Cold War, as “liberation” movements have sprung up and caused discord over ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and economics. We are today almost evenly divided between “red-state” citizens and “blue-state” citizens. We too often demonize our opponents and too seldom seek common ground. But we are still the heirs of our nation’s astounding founding and equally astounding Constitution, and we still have a great deal to live for. As the prophet Moses exhorted in the book of Deuteronomy: “Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art.
