In Uno Plures:
From "Civil Religion" to Civic Response-Ability
Stephen M. Johnson
Montclair State University
(NOTE: "In Uno, Plures:
From Civil Religion to Civic Responsibility" first appeared in (and
was copyrighted by) Popular Culture Review VI.2 (summer 95), 5-18.
It argues that scholars no more than other citizens should take for granted
the fragile achievements and protections of American civic tradition, imperfect
but invaluable. For better and worse, the historical symbols, popular rituals,
and prophets of this civic tradition provide American lenses for focussing
civic discourse and democratic life. This is the lasting value of Bellah's
1967 insight into what he called "American civil religion." Both
conservatives and liberals must re-learn how to nurture national faith
and community. For re-constructing Bellah's overly academic, Christian,
white, male, and Northern perspective on "American civil religion,"
see Stephen M. Johnson's "Reconstructing American In(ter)dependence,"
as it appeared in Public Affairs Quarterly, 1.10.96 More is forthcoming
in Johnson's book, American Matters: Civil Religion and Other Natural Faiths
by Which We Live.)
Two important addresses were delivered by visiting heads of state in
July of 1994. In Philadelphia, Czech President Vaclav Havel addressed American
dignitaries and intellectuals on the 218th anniversary of their Declaration
of Independence; two days later, President Clinton addressed the citizens
of recently-independent Latvia in Riga's Freedom Square. The addresses
were unsurprising to those familiar with the intellectual dissident-turned-hero
of Czechoslovakian independence and with the American civil and rhetorical
traditions on which Mr. Clinton drew. Their audiences' uncomprehending
responses, however, were noteworthy.
Two Speeches, Poorly Received
As reported by the national press, 35,000 Latvians loudly cheered and
waved American flags when Clinton hailed Latvian independence and promised
to rejoice "with you when the last of the foreign troops vanish from
your homeland." But when he continued by saying that "[F]reedom
without tolerance is freedom unfulfilled. . . . [Since] there will always
live among you people of different backgrounds. . . [I urge] you to never
deny to others the justice and equality you fought so hard for and earned
for yourselves," not a single Latvian clapped. With 800,000 ethnic
Russians in their midst,
The Latvian [Balt] idea of fighting and earning is winner-take-all.
They live in the past, like Christian Serbs and Croats determined to wipe
out Bosnian Muslims. . . or Hutus in Rwanda or Armenians and Azerbaijanis
or Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland -- believing literally
in majority rule. . . .
The triumph of American democracy is not that the majority rules; it
is that multiple minorities are tolerated. Majority rule is easy to achieve,
but it is not so easy to prevent the majority from disenfranchising, suppressing,
driving out or killing minorities. . . . President Clinton, like most of
his fellow citizens, tends to take for granted and thus underrate the achievement
of the people who came together to make the United States of America.
Saying merely that "minorities are [to be] tolerated" might
well get commentator Richard Reeves clapped upside his head by politically
correct academics in America today; and far too many American conservatives
might share the selective double response of Clinton's Latvian audience.
But sometimes we can all learn from outsiders, including from Vaclav Havel's
surprising birthday-gift address to America. He reminded us that the American
founders' liberal democratic principles were rooted in eighteenth-century
religious ideas that now are "obsolete." In a postmodern period
where "everything is possible and almost nothing is certain,"
he sees on the surface of our lives an emerging single "interconnected
civilization," but under that surface a deep reassertion of local
cultures and popular clinging "to the ancient certainties of [the]
tribe." New political organizations and repeated calls for human rights
will therefore be meaningless unless grounded in an environment respecting
"the miracle of Being. . . of the universe. . . of our own existence."
Our only hope today, Havel suggested, lies in the "renewal of our
certainty that we are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the cosmos.
This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence,"
allowing multicultural societies to live in peace.
Response from academics presumably sympathetic to his goals was condescending:
"That the president of anything, especially of a small country,
would think of such things is amazing,". . . says sociologist Robert
Bellah. . . . "He has a vision, but vision alone is not enough"
. . . says Steven Tipton. . . . "It's too spiritual," says Amitai
Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian Network. "Values do not fly
about on wings. They need to be embodied. That's what church is about,
what secular institutions like marriage are about."
One hopes Bellah intended his comment more positively than Sam Johnson's
amazement at any dog's walking, no matter how well, on its hind legs. Tipton
and Etzioni surely are right that vision is not enough, and that Havel's
speech lacks emphasis on institutions that could ground his vision. But
pluralistic as Americans are, surely they realize that no one's "church"
-- or any eclectic collection of varied official Religious institutions
-- is sufficiently broad. An earlier Bellah would here have urged, for
American pilgrims on their collective journey toward the horizon of greater
and more universal democracy, the availability of such grounding and resources
in their shared secular traditions, which he summarized as functioning
like a "civil religion." Today, of course, any such reference
would invite hoots of disdain from theoretical postmodernists and hollers
of anger from multiculturalists unwilling to risk being duped by anything
resembling national faith or "unity."
Since even militant activists and liberals depend on the American ways
and rhetoric from which Clinton spoke, and patriotic conservatives need
the functional interdependence Havel described, it might be time to rethink
these things. Instead of imagining that new philosophical notions might
properly move our postmodern, multicultural peoples to new harmony, we
might try to see the ongoing function of the civil rhetoric we inherit
and the civic practices (e.g. Constitutional and legal) we functionally
take for granted. In short, it seems a good time to reconsider the stuff
(though probably not retain the name) of "civil religion." Besides
recent "takes" and new insights from veteran civil-religion discussants,
we can find enabling methodological insight from such valuable sources
as feminist writing. With such help we may yet learn to move from civil
religion to civic response-ability.
Feminist Criticism and Civic Empowerment
Activist, feminist, and respected epistemologist Sandra Harding does
not speak of civil religion, but she has relevantly and very wisely explored
the implications of everyone's multiple identities. Race, gender, ethnicity,
and sexuality do not designate any fixed set of essential qualities or
properties, but are "continuously defined and redefined" in terms
of each other. They are relational designations. The methodological directive
to "start thought from women's lives" therefore requires that
one start thinking "from multiple lives that are in many ways in conflict
with each other, and each of which itself has multiple and contradictory
commitments." Within every theoretically "one" group belong
many individuals; every one individual, moreover, exists in many different
relationships.
Harding understands that every white woman's whiteness or black woman's
blackness relationally specifies her femaleness and self-understanding,
as every straight or gay person's homo- or hetero-sexuality specifies his
or her racial identity, etc. Each of our profound relational identities
or group memberships transmogrifies "what would otherwise be"
our racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other identities. (There is of
course no human being otherwise than as variously racial, ethnic, sexual,
gendered, etc. -- no more, Aristotle would say, than "matter"
can be without "form.") But we also live in the context of some
national group or civic identity, wherein we be our multiply-constituted
selves, no matter how well or badly treated have been our selves or ancestors
in that place/group/relationship. In other words, the racial, ethnic, gender,
sexual, and other experience/understandings of every American citizen and
resident are profoundly specified, even transformed (for better and
worse) by their being American.
Because political and cultural empowerment of our minorities is far
from complete, some would deny or trivialize the hard-won real progress.
Because appeals to "nationalism" are so often oppressively intended
or effected, some would reject any and every civic unity, preferring the
limitless fragmentation of all against all. But mere pluralizing and polarizing
threaten us all -- especially in a competitive and increasingly comsumeristic
society that identifies all worth and value with money and possession of
things. Reinforcing such rampant centrifugalism, however good its motivation,
is the arrogant tendency of some "politically correct" colleagues
to dogmatically invalidate any statements about men and women because they
were made by men, or statements made about racial groups and issues because
they were uttered by whites, etc.
As Harding shows, "members of the dominant groups, too, can learn
how to see the world from the perspective of experiences and lives that
are not theirs" just as women "have had to learn to think from
perspectives about women's lives that were not initially visible to them."
As white women have had to learn to become anti-racist feminists, learning
"to take historical responsibility for their race, for the white skins
from which they speak and act," so all members of dominant groups
"can learn to take historic responsibility for the social locations
from which our speech and actions issue." The key word is learning,
and this learning is always relational. The customarily dominant or relatively
privileged within any group or category (rich white males, white male Americans,
white women, straight middle- class black women) need to be pressured into
such learning by the marginalized. But then the marginalized must realize
they are not the only members of their groups; that, relative to other
members, they may be dominant and presumptuous; and that all of them belong
as well to larger groups -- for whose definition and functioning they share
responsibility.
Thus, for practical, moral, and epistemological reasons, we must oppose
the militant blindness of minority and majority academics to the possibility
of "us" in this nation -- an ideological shortsightedness that
threatens us all. Granted, "them that has" too easily praise
"our pluralism" when they do not want to talk about real power.
That is daily far more important than many white conservatives want to
admit. But if the hopes of our disadvantaged rest on more of democracy
and more effective pluralism, they rest on values whose obviousness to
most in this country results from their being American.
Civic Empowerment and "Civil Religion"
Failure to see this leaves academics in such oddly unfocused discussions
as that carried by the Boston Review in late 1994. Though the best recent
"locus" for philosophical discussion of civic concerns, not one
of its participants mentions "civil religion," and only a handful
have absorbed its insights. Most of the distinguished discussants dispute
over an apparently forced choice between international cosmopolitanism
on the one hand, or lively but dangerous particularism on the other hand.
As if anyone embodies either of those exclusively! In fact, Martha Nussbaum
and others choosing "universal human" over "local person"
presume and act from civic predispositions that are, in their case and
context, specifically American. After holding the ancient Stoics up as
example, she warns that we must correct for their weakness on individual
"life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness."
Nussbaum thus ignores her own contextuality -- her nation's historical
commitment to the kind of cosmopolitan, supra-nationalistic and rational
principles she would have humanity embrace. Only reluctantly does she hear
Charles Taylor's endorsement of popular patriotism, referring to his acknowledgment
"that we frequently have no choice but to mobilize people at this
level." But Taylor is much more emphatic and realistic. He willingly
understands that "we cannot do without patriotism in the modern world."
We need popular patriotism as well as cosmopolitanism because "modern
democratic states are extremely exigent common enterprises in self-rule"
that require a great deal of their members. We demand "much greater
solidarity towards compatriots than towards humanity in general,"
because a successfully democratic state in the real world requires "strong
common identification." The task for cosmopolitans, postmoderns, internationalists,
and humanists is not to bemoan or oppose patriotism, but "to fight
for the kind of patriotism which is open to universal solidarities against
other, more closed kinds."
Though all patriotisms can and do go bad, American tradition has powers
of self- correction and therefore gives Americans their real-world, contextual
powers for nurturing good patriotism and civic culture. Benjamin R. Barber
quotes the English immigrant Frances Wright, herself unable to vote, to
the effect that they are Americans who "wed the principles of America's
declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens
practically to their lives." With all but the name "civil religion,"
Barber shares and eloquently describes the power and process of specifically
American civic faith:
The American trick was to use the fierce attachments of patriotic sentiment
to bond a people to high ideals. Our "tribal" sources from which
we derive our sense of national identity are the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Inaugural Addresses of our
Presidents, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King's sermon
at the 1963 March on Washington ("Free at Last") -- not so much
the documents themselves as the felt sentiments tying us to them, sentiments
that are rehearsed at July 4th parades and in Memorial Day speeches.
If popular patriotism can carry these ideals and sentiments broader
and deeper than Kantian or Stoic descriptions, he urges Nussbaum, recreating
such feeling among ordinary Americans is "more likely to strengthen
than to imperil the civic fabric and the American commitment to" them.
It is "precisely these ideals that give parochial America its global
appeal," and that carry what hope we have of making our multicultural
democracy work.
Of the thirty participants, Barber, Taylor, Sheldon Hackney, Leo Marx,
and Anthony Kronman are most helpfully on target. They sense the reality
of -- and the key difference made by -- American history, still affecting
Americans today, and effecting their specific chances for further improving
their democracy. With all their talk about our being embedded in context,
postmoderns should realize this. There is of course nothing specifically
American about abstract democratic or cosmopolitan or multicultural inclusivism
as ideas or "content." But the "historical struggle of the
American people to live up to their ideals and the sacrifices they have
made to protect and promote them" do make the ideals "peculiarly
American" for us. Our forebears' and our own struggles, conflicts,
and sacrifices, successes and failures, are emphatically and peculiarly
American:
They are historical facts, not philosophical abstractions. . . . They
are part of a national biography that is as distinctive as the biography
of any individual, and in these facts, these deeds, it is proper to feel
a pride that is uniquely our own.
Other historical facts, to be sure, make it proper to feel a shame uniquely
our own. But not everything in our history is shameful. There is much to
be proud of, much that is inspiring, and much that lays a burden on us
-- the living -- to redeem the sacrifices of the past by perfecting the
great vision for whose sake they were made. This pride, this inspiration,
this burden, is specifically American. . . .
It is through specifically American history (and its painful celebration
and its proud revision) that Americans can and may learn how to make civic
and democratic values their own -- because we really are historicized creatures.
Certainly we must learn from outsiders' criticisms as well as from fellow
participants' more committed criticisms; but neither is possible without
communal recollection. Postmodernists risk getting so enchanted by metaphorically
describing everything as "text" and any context or cultural message
as a "narrative" that they fail to appreciate the greater specificity
of actual historical narrative(s), the flesh-and-blood traditioning of
individual and collective autobiography.
So they stop showing Americans' smaller stories as pieces of the larger
American quilt, and they leave off teaching the civic skills of weaving
our different selves together in daily practice. As a result, the varied
young know little in common and lack context for the rest. After years
of Martin Luther King Day observances, many of our best (black and white)
college graduates assume of King, without faulting him for it, that "of
course he was just for his own people"! Seven years old at Reagan's
election, caught between the clarity of right-wing self-serving versions
of Americanism and the vagueness of left-wing commitments to everything
but America, they have been left rudderless. Smart as they are, they conclude
that Americans have nothing in common save competitive consumerism and
hostilities.
Civil Religion as Civic Call-and-Response
Cliches usually get that way for good reasons, so we academics must
really need reminders to look up, to smell the flowers not just the coffee,
etc. A colleague's wife years ago told of an annual meeting of philosophers
held at some lake or oceanfront hotel. One day she was pleasantly surprised
to discover that her husband and some colleagues had actually gotten out
of the conference hotel and down to the beach in swimming trunks. "They
even made it into the water!" she narrated. "I found them standing
there, knee deep -- three bearded guys with bowed heads, chin in hand,
analyzing away!"
Much well-intended analysis seems disconnected from physical and social
reality. Reading every context and cultural message as a "narrative"
may shed light but may obscure more, if the heavy thinkers miss the more
specific narratives shaping their real communities. Philosophers rightly
insist that only with civic culture can we harmoniously live as our pluralistically
many selves. But philosophical and communitarian abstractions do not produce
popular civic culture. The more widely shared and powerful materials needed
are available in popular understanding of traditional ideals and practices,
including the motto, e pluribus unum. Long symbolizing the ideal of American
democracy, "out of many one" earlier meant to too many of the
dominant WASP culture that all the new immigrants had to become absorbed
into the "melting pot," to become imitation wasps. But the immigrants
long ago taught them better, becoming Americans while retaining their distinctive
roots and fruits. The immigrants used the nation's better possibilities
and traditions to change the country's practices and deepen the meaning
of its very ideals.
Just as religious scriptures' most revealing words can inspire ever
newer and truer understandings, so can the most powerful ideals of our
secular national scriptures, the Declaration and the Constitution. The
command to "love your neighbor" certainly meant, in its original
context, to love every one of your fellow Jews. Jesus the Jew expanded
this to loving even the Samaritans, and Judaism and Christianity have been
expanding it ever since. Today the same words are everywhere taken to mean
we should love every person as our neighbor. The words remain identical,
but their meaning has changed. The same words' historico-cultural momentum
and intertextual power has helped expand humans' horizons.
Similarly, "all men are created equal" originally meant white
males to the American founders, but "they wrote better than they knew."
Through later Americans' dedicated efforts, sacrifice, and reinterpretation,
the words came to mean white and black males (and not, finally, in the
"separate but equal" version) and then to mean male and female.
Because of previous Americans' success at finding and making these newer
and truer meanings, we today are able to assume our civil rights as rights
while working to enact them more truly and expand them still further. More
and more Americans come to realize their real meaning must more effectively
include all races, and gay as well as straight men and women. Thus, the
reality and power of American tradition is no old idea unchanged, but the
living process of using our past to make better today and tomorrow.
This must be done, not simply because the empowerment of women or minorities
or gays demands it, but because evolving American identity and function
so require. Just as Harding sees that "a gender analysis -- one that
is from the perspective of women's lives -- must scrutinize gender as it
exists from the perspective of all women's lives," so must ongoing
American analysis and transformation. "There is no other defensible
choice" -- especially in a country whose civic tradition and secular
functioning are historically and rhetorically grounded on the claims of
the Declaration and the ways of the Constitution, developed in the words
and actions of Jefferson, Lincoln, King, etc. Harding is, of course, right
that "marginal subjectivity is exactly what the dominant groups cannot
permit" so long as they assume and hope to maintain their own dominance
and privilege-by-default. But this only highlights the importance to all
Americans of a civic tradition whose key components commit us to the continual
empowerment of marginal subjectivity. We are committed to the ongoing revolution
of such empowerment by sharing the civic grounds that the least of us are
"created equal," and are equally entitled to "life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness."
If we must live by myth and symbol, let us value and cultivate those
that nurture civic faith and culture. It is natural and good that people
other than politicians invoke them, as actor Michael Moriarty has in opposing
censorship. He naturally invokes "the promise of freedom" in
American national faith while urging that our the promise "has yet
to be realized." He sees the United States as "the cutting edge"
in defining "what it is to be a free human being," but "unless
we keep that definition going, we're going to step backward." Given
that we'll never lack redneck versions of "freedom" and abuse
of American symbols, it is good that the Moriartys feel freer than some
academics to invoke the more angelic forces of American civil faith. The
entertainment journal that carries his voice reaches people and places
that journal articles don't. Likewise it is good and important when film
icons from the "left" of our politics and culture affirm American
identity and commitments. In accepting the Jean Hersholt humanitarian award
at the 1994 Oscars, Paul Newman with simple eloquence suggested that "we're
reminded too frequently about the things that don't work in this country.
And not frequently enough about the things that do." He even dared
to add that, in his "estimation, the United States is the most generous
country on the face of the planet."
Nor was it only older actors who dared make affirmations too scary
for many academics. Accepting the same year's best-song award for "Streets
of Philadelphia," Bruce Springsteen said
You do your best work and you hope that it pulls out the best in your
audience, that some piece of it spills over into the real world, and into
people's everyday lives. That it takes the edge off the fear -- and allows
us to recognize each other through our veil of differences. I always thought
that was one of the things that popular art was supposed to be about, along
with the merchandizing and all the other stuff. But I just want to say
thank you, Jonathan [Demme], for having me as a part of your picture. Glad
my song has contributed to its ideas, and its acceptance. "The streets
of heaven are too crowded with angels," began Tom Hanks, accepting
best-actor award for his Philadelphia role as an Aids victim. Reminding
us of all that disease's real victims, he purposefully, eloquently echoed
classic American civic rhetoric: They finally rest in the warm embrace
of the gracious Creator of us all. A healing embrace, that cools their
fevers, and clears their skin -- and allows their eyes to see the simple,
self-evident, common-sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent
Creator of us all -- and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant
men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago. God bless you all,
God have mercy on us all, and God bless America.
So vital are these civic values that they rise to the lips even of
academics and activists debating their most important issues. During William
Buckley's "Firing Line" team-debate of the proposition that "the
modern women's movement has been a disaster," not one participant
was thinking about national faith or civil religion. But feminists and
opponents alike invoked both words and spirit of American founders and
guiding ideals. "Freedom of choice is part of the American ethos,"
declared Betty Friedan. Because of our "American birthright"
we have to seek a "new vision of community that transcends polarizations."
In discerning words equally applicable to American civic faith, she argued
that "[t]here is no `the' women's movement." Sure she's a "true
believer" in feminism, but she emphatically is "not politically
correct. And I hate that rigidity. Feminism has to have pluralism."
On "The Firing Line" and in neighborhood taverns, wherever
Americans argue long or deep about their social practices, they sooner
or later, explicitly or implicitly, invoke what Durkheim called rights
that we did not ourselves found. This is as natural as speaking a language
that we did not make. Equally unavoidable is what Friedan frankly acknowledged:
we are never either feminists or Americans, Latinas or Americans, etc.,
but -- precisely and importantly -- we always are both. 1) We are both
in simple fact. 2) Because we are American, our tribal identities are constitutionally
protected, all our varied tribal selves covenant-included in our country's
secular context. 3) Because such inclusions and protections do not always
follow as they theoretically should, it is a practical necessity to claim
our American-ness as well as our own tribal identity -- if only to help
make our common social context actually safe for its different tribes.
Conclusion
"Amul Thiossane Amul Dare," Senegal wisdom tells: if you
don't have tradition, you don't have anything. A very few years ago Soviet
citizens, both those satisfied and those critical, took for granted their
system's political survival. Neither they nor the rest of us could credit
how quickly and completely it collapsed. The dangerous turmoil that has
replaced it -- in their traditionally collective lands and cultural-sense
-- is mild compared to what will follow the collapse of traditional democratic
sense and practice in our hyper- competitive, individualistic, materialistic,
gun-crazed land. "Without your civic traditions, Americans, you will
have nothing." Too many contemporary Americans, especially academics,
resemble lobsters: if they've been in their pot of water since room temperature,
they don't notice they're being gradually brought to boiling death. More
threatening than particular battles between conservative and liberal forms
of national faith is both sides' forgetfulness that they are a community,
in a common pot that's heating up.
For the sake of our nation's continuing transformation, because common
language, symbols, and ideals are necessary to any flesh-and-blood historical
civic context, leftists, critics, and activists need to relearn how to
say "America!" And conservatives need to relearn "America's"
self-critical, ever-transformative meanings for today and tomorrow. The
only at-one-ment with each other acceptable to a genuinely pluralistic
nation, to our varied American peoples, is a unity that leaves them free
to be also their distinctive selves. American liberals and multiculturalists
must fight for bringing this about, and American conservatives and traditionalists
must work to accept, that the meaning of e pluribus unum has become in
uno, plures: We believe in that civic context which enables all our different
individuals and communities to be themselves. Equally entitled in this
national context, we become responsible for it. We accept the call to become
responsive, all to each other.
Notes
I am grateful to Montclair State for its separately-budgeted-research
support of this article.