This post was inspired by a Brew Theology conversation held at Aardwolf Brewing Co a week ago. While I share my personal views in this post, there is a Brew Theology discussion guide which presents this information a little more objectively. If you’d like resources to talk about civil religion, hit up our facebook page and give the guide a look!

In its broadest sense, “religion” is the values, rituals, symbols, and stories which define our identities and connect us to something larger than ourselves. Normally, when we hear the word religion, we think of major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so on), but what if religion goes beyond these categories? Can you have a personal religion or a community religion? Can a favorite karaoke song or an annual neighborhood cookout take on religious significance? Can a country develop its own religion?

Regarding that last one, Thomas Jefferson believed so. A student of the Enlightenment era of philosophy who identified as more deist than Christian, Jefferson drew heavy influence from the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for an idea called “civil religion.” A tool to unite a country’s people on a spiritual level, civil religion has four core tenets:

(1) an undefined creator god (with inter-religious appeal)
(2) the promise of some sort of afterlife
(3) a concept of justice based on rewarding value and punishing vice
(4) tolerance of all major world religions

Rousseau believed that a country’s values, rituals, symbols, and myths would emerge naturally, but a leader who understood and cultivated civil religion could do even more to inspire a country. As such, Jefferson baked principles of civil religion directly into the Declaration of Independence, appealing to a vague creator god and establishing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as foundational American principles. Other early American leaders bought into the concept as well. Ben Franklin and James Madison saw civil religion as an important asset, and Thomas Paine, the most radical of the bunch, even believed civil religion would eventually replace world religions. Throughout America’s history, other leaders have drawn on this idea (whether intentionally or not). Some examples include appeals to “manifest destiny” to promote American expansion, the insertion of “under God” into the pledge of allegiance, and virtually every utterance of the phrase “God bless America” ever. In fact, once you know about civil religion, it’s hard not to see it all over American culture:

We have our values: independence, individualism, integrity, bravery, liberty, the American Dream

We have our rituals: presidential inaugurations, Memorial Day commemorations, Fourth of July fireworks

We have our symbols: the eagle, the flag, our armed forces, our national landmarks

We have our myths: George Washington’s cherry tree, Abe Lincoln’s honesty, William Prescott’s famous “Don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes!“— whether these stories literally happened is less important than the virtues they convey.

If the items on this list resonate with you, then they’re doing exactly what the components of a religion are supposed to do: foster a sense of belonging among participants and connect us to something bigger than ourselves (in this case, America). But now that we’ve identified some elements of American civil religion, we have to ask the unsettling question: Can Christianity and civil religion coexist? Christian leaders have been divided on the issue for centuries. Puritan colonists spoke of America as a new Promised Land, and American Evangelicals (the Falwells and Grahams for example) have utilized civil religion as a rallying cry for decades. On the other hand, leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. regarded civil religion as a form of idolatry, and the modern Progressive Christian movement seems largely opposed to it.

Personally, I choose to keep civil religion at arm’s length. After all, when mixed with major world religions, civil religion has a way of watering them down. Besides, when you really break down the key tenets civil religion, they don’t mesh all that well with Christianity:

The distant, passive creator god of civil religion
sounds little like the fiercely relational God of Christianity.

The vague, remembrance-based afterlife of civil religion
looks nothing like the eternal Kingdom described in Christianity.

The consequence-based justice system of civil religion
in no way resembles the boundless mercy of Jesus.

Even the religious tolerance espoused in civil religion is more about blurring religions together and smoothing over differences,
while real religious dialogue celebrates what makes each religion unique.

Ultimately, I love America. Those values, symbols, rituals, and myths I listed earlier are all important to me; however, I find our civil religion pretty mediocre by comparison to Christ’s Kingdom. I’m still proud to be an American. I still celebrate the 4th of July. I still love cookouts. I even tolerate fireworks (even though they’re the bane of dog owners everywhere). I love my country, and I will always seek to make it a better place, but I hold it with an open hand because of my Christian faith. After all, there will come a time when America is no more —a time when countries and civilizations as we know them cease to be—, and in that time, it won’t really matter who was an American. The only citizenship that will matter is with Christ.