Civil Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy: New at Reason

In the June issue of Reason magazine, Daniel McCarthy critiques The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, by Walter A. McDougall:

Never mind the First Amendment; the United States has an official religion after all. It’s a civil religion, and the deity’s role is to bestow blessings on the state. The “Supreme Architect,” “the Almighty Being,” “the Infinite Power,” and “the Being Who Regulates the Destiny of Nations” are just a few of the sobriquets that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison gave to the nation’s nondenominational guardian spirit.

For some the civil religion might be mere symbolism; others might conflate it with Christianity. Either way, it helps give the nation a sense of purpose, or so historian Walter McDougall contends.

In The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, McDougall traces how changes in the American civil religion (or “ACR”) have shaped the country’s attitudes toward war and peace. From the founding until the Spanish-American War of 1898, what McDougall calls the “Classical ACR” (or “Neo-Classical ACR” after the Civil War) prevailed. It was a faith of national expansion on the North American continent, but it did not, in the words of John Quincy Adams, “go forth in search of monsters to destroy” overseas. A new faith took hold in the last decade of the 19th century: the “Progressive American Civil Religion,” which became an even more firmly entrenched “Neo-Progressive ACR” during the Cold War. This was a militant faith that conceived of the nation’s mission as being, in George W. Bush’s words, to “end tyranny in our world.” Today a third faith, the “Millennial ACR,” aspires to unite the world through a global economy and regime of universal rights. It too has roots in the Cold War, though McDougall identifies it primarily with presidents Clinton and Obama.

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