Civil Religion - Except Islam? Robert Bellah's "Civil Religion in America" and the Politics of Racial Exclusion
By Luke Kim
According to Robert Bellah, civil religion refers to a set of collective beliefs, symbols, and ideas that form a sense of social cohesion under the banner of “America”, from the invocation of God in the Pledge of Allegiance to the ritualistic behavior of inauguration (1967:8). However, Bellah emphasizes that this American civil religion - while drawing much influence from Christianity - is not the same as any specific religious sect or denomination.
And while this is important, something particularly interesting is Bellah’s comment about how typical religious polemics tend to “[...] take as criteria the best in their own religious tradition and as typical the worst in the tradition of the civil religion.” (1967:12) The article itself refers to this in critiques of civil religion, but the images above suggest that civil religion similarly uses a polemic of self-evaluated criteria against Islam. Note that in the second image, it isn’t the Christian God but an American flag invoked against “Islamization”, imbued with a religious power that allows it to be a collective counter to Islam. Thus, although Bellah is correct in noting that American civil religion is not the same as Christianity, an important caveat must be added in that civil religion is not universally unitarian and still predicates itself on the exclusion of Others, consistent with Durkheim on crime existing even in a society of saints (see Stuart Hall on the term “ethnic” for more).
Contrary to Bellah’s article, racial exclusion is not a distortion, but fundamental to American civil religion. For example, in the first image, Allah's - Arabic for “God” and used by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike - "Otherness" symbolically represents that Christian identity is not enough to surpass civil religion’s (racial) barriers to the body politic, further separating the two and foregrounding the inherent undercurrent of white supremacy in the U.S.
Works Cited
Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus
96(1): 1-27.
Gay, Eric. June 10, 2017. “Untitled.” From aljazeera.com. Retrieved March 21, 2022
(https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/6/10/how-us-groups-spread-hate-via-th
Tama, Mario. September 10, 2010. . “Protests And Proponents At Site Of Proposed
This is very interesting. When I read Bellah I felt that he emphasized rituals in his discussion of civil religion. I fully agree that America has promoted exclusion since its inception, however I wonder what Bellah would have to say as regards to what rituals symbolize this and from what 'time of trial' this came from. For example, Bellah argues that American independence defined civil religion with executing God's will for man's fundamental rights and in the civil war the notion of sacrifice and martyrdom came into America's new self understanding. What time of trial did exclusion come from and are there events that mark our calendars which commemorate this value? Or is this criteria even important considering how strong the sentiment of exclusion is felt across the nation?
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