The first Catholic
president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, started his inaugural speech by declaring
that he has sworn before the American people and Almighty God, and he ended by calling
for God's blessing on the American nation, "knowing that here on earth
God's work must truly be our own."
The American civil
religion has its own "holy scriptures," the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution, which are treasured and venerated like the
Tables of the Law. It has its own prophets, such as the Pilgrim Fathers. It
celebrates its own sacred heroes such as George Washington, the "American
Moses" who freed the "new people of Israel" from slavery under
the English and led them to the Promised Land of freedom, independence, and
democracy. It venerates its martyrs, such as Abraham Lincoln, the sacrificial
victim assassinated on Good Friday of 1865, after the American nation had been
subjected to the purifying fires of a cruel civil war to expiate its guilt and
reestablish the hallowed nature of its unity and mission. John Kennedy and
Martin Luther King Jr. then became further examples of martyrdom for this civil
religion, alongside the figure of Lincoln. Like all religions, this civil
religion has its own temples for the veneration of its leading figures, such as
the monument to Washington, the Lincoln Memorial, and Arlington Cemetery, where
the tomb of the Unknown Soldier is revered as a symbol for the citizens who
fell to save their nation. Finally, the civil religion has its sermons and
liturgy: the presidential inaugural speeches, Independence Day on 4 July,
Thanksgiving Day, Memorial Day when the war dead are commemorated, and other
collective ceremonies that celebrate personalities and events in American
history turned by myth into a "sacred history" of a nation elected by
God to fulfill its particular mission in the world.
The American civil
religion is the first historical example of a religion of politics in the
modern era. The civil religion of the United States derived from Protestantism,
and for more than a century it displayed the unmistakable imprint of Puritanism
and the biblical tradition. As time went on, however, it began to differentiate
itself and became an explicit and direct reference point and a purely civic
credo that coexisted with both Christian and non-Christian confessions. Given
the freedom that the state accords all religions, the American civil religion
respects all traditional religions, whether or not they are Christian.
Then came Fascism,
here, the myth of the totalitarian, State obtained a decisive position. The
initiatives, the choices, the behavioral pattern, the achievements, the ideals
of fascism refer constantly, in the diversified attitudes of men and historical
situations, to the realization of the totalitarian State. The relationship
between myths and organizations in the history of fascism derived from this
dominant goal. This relationship was not always coherent in its obvious forms.
Nevertheless, it held together thanks to a precise totalitarian and fascist
rationale, which rose above the surface of inconsistency and actual
circumstance. The centralization of the myth of the state clearly distinguished
fascist totalitarianism from Nazi and communist totalitarianism. While for
Nazis and communists the State was considered an instrument to achieve race
supremacy or a classless society, fascism considered the totalitarian State a
value and an end in itself.
Their basic judgement
was also to define American civilization as a degenerate derivation of European
civilization. According to this concept, America, born out of the rebellion
against the European mother-culture, had developed and radicalized in the new
world the ideologies of Protestant sectarianism, of democratic liberalism and
of materialistic hedonism, ideologies which had already undermined the
classical order of Roman and Catholic tradition in the Old Continent.
For Fascism claimed
it was a modern movement-regime which provided new solutions to the pressing
problems of an ever changing world. Fascism claimed it was accomplishing the
national revolution initiated with the Risorgimento, the regeneration, the
creator of the "New Man" that had
been envisioned by Mazzini.
Fascism was a
political religion with a coherent system of beliefs, myths, rites and symbols,
with a 'sacred history' and a vision of mystical community. Its most
conspicuous symbolic and dramatic representation was the Lictorian
cult. Here, 'sacred' and 'secular' stood side-by-side and more often than not
intermingled to disseminate and reinforce faith in the fascist religion.
Fascists were
convinced, as if possessed by an oneiric rapture, that they had a will-power
which could rise above all limitations and the resistance of objective reality,
to mold reality and the nature of man in the image of its own myth. The fascist
"New Man" was quite different from the "New Man" most young
opponents to "gialittisma" had expected.
When the latter spoke of a "New Man" they meant a free man able to
master his own destiny. The fascist "New Man," on the contrary, was a
man devoid of any individual autonomy and responsibility, who would had been
trained to consider himself as a mere instrument of the State, and prepared to
sacrifice his life for it. In accordance with its aims, fascism led the Italian
people to the Second World War.
The various versions
of fascist anti-Americanism agreed that American civilization was inferior and
hostile to European civilization. For fascists, American economic and political
imperialism was less dangerous than the moral contagion engendered by the
fascination which the 'American way of life' exerted on Europe. This was the
main target of moralistic anti-Americanism, which was perhaps the most
widespread. It denounced the imitation of the American lifestyle or the
preference for American products, considering these alarming symptoms of an
incipient infection, which corrupted Italian customs and had negative economic
consequences…
We should point out
that the prejudices against Americanism as a mechanical and dehumanizing
civilization, inferior to European civilization because it was devoid of
culture, tradition and history, were also shared by non-fascist or anti-fascist
intellectuals, although for different reasons. In fact like we detailed last
month, this is a perception that somehow
still is of influence, in Europa today. Protestantism, individualism, liberalism,
bureaucratic collectivism were the stages which marked the development of
Nordic modernity against Mediterranean, Latin and Catholic civilization. For
Catholic reactionaries like Giovanni Papini and Domenico Giuliotti,
the discovery of America had been willed by God 'as a
repressive and preventative punishment for all the other great discoveries of
the Renaissance: i.e. gunpowder, humanism and Protestantism'. (Papini/Giuliotti, Oizionario dell 'Omo salvati co,Florence,
1923, p. 149.)
Some fascist
intellectuals advocated a united front of European nations, or even of the
Latin countries of Europe and America, against American imperialism. (G. Baldazzi, 'La Latiniti't in lotta
nell'America', Augustea, 17
July 1928.)
The greed for wealth,
the craze for speculation, individualistic hedonism, the neurotic 'search for
happiness' were typical traits of Americanism and the main causes of degenerate
American modernity. Individualism and capitalism, behind the hypocritical
facade of liberalism and egalitarianism, celebrated the greatest triumph of 'an
excessive and insatiable greed for material goods, a devouring and destructive
lust', to the extent that even the Bolshevik danger paled before the threat of
Americanism, 'the incarnation of the anti-Christian revolution of our time'.
America was a 'star-spangled Babylon. (L. Olivero, La Babilonia
stellata. Gioventu americana d' oggi
, Milan, 1941).
The United
States was represented as the home of financial capitalism dominated by Jews
who for a long time had been plotting the downfall of European civilization:
'To destroy Europe, and establish the dictatorship of money throughout the
world, means to promote the world-wide dictatorship of the Jewish race',
claimed a leaflet of the National Institute of Fascist Culture. (Plutocrazia e bolscevismo, Rome
1942, p. 13.)
For the even more
extreme German version of this (including graphics), see our previous case study:
Thus the war of
the Axis against the United States was seen as the crusade of 'blood' against
'gold' for the salvation of Europe from the plans of conquest of Anglo-Saxon
plutocratic Judaism, led by the United States. (P. Cavallo, 'Sangue contro oro. Le immagini dei paesi
nemici nel teatro fascista di propaganda' in A. Lepre (ed.), La guerra
immaginata, Napels 1989, 137-46.)
According to famous
Italian historian Emilio Gentile for followers of integral traditionalism
like Julius Evola, American civilization represented
the incarnation of an “impending modernity”.(Gentile, The Struggle For
Moderity,2003,p.165.) For Evola, Americanism was an
even more dangerous kind of barbarism than Bolshevism, because in the United
States the last stage of the 'sanctification of the temporal and the
secularization of the sacred' was being completed, the catastrophic conclusion
of the cycle of degeneration of the human organism, begun by the Protestant
revolt, with the advent of mass man, the 'beast without a face'. (J. Evola, 'Due facce del nazionalismo', Vita itaUana,
March 1931; 'Americanismo e Bolscevismo',
Nuova Antologia, May-June 1929.)
For our case study about
post WWII integral traditionalism
and extremism see:
In fact many
essential elements of fascist culture, along with anticommunism, anti liberalism, antiparliamentarianism, and antiegalitarianism, in the form of for example the Movimenta Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, MSI) have survived the
humiliating defeat of fascist ambitions since the 1950s. The MSI's younger
members, who had not directly experienced the fascist period, were attracted by
its zealous sense of nationalism, by its idealistic activism, and by its
revolutionary and antidemocratic mythology. Yet although postwar right wing
nationalism has never denied its fascist roots, it has not accepted its
heritage completely. For instance, the militia party, the totalitarian State,
the new civilization, and the mania for mass organizations were buried under
the rubble of the fascist regime, There is another remarkable difference in the
neofascist attitude towards modernity. The strengthening of liberal
democracies, the unbounded expansion of technology, the ever-increasing mass
conformity to fashion, and the search for well being
have radically changed the nationalist perception of modernity.
But after the fall of
communism, Americanism again, has become the main enemy for most neofascists,
such as the left wing of the MSI, which denounces the moral contagion
engendered by the fascination that the American way of life exerts on Europe. They
identify modernity with Americanism, that is, materialism, hedonism, the cult
of wealth, ruthless capitalism, urban neurosis, and dehumanizing technology
that transforms human beings into cogs in a machine. Right wing radicalism
actually flees from modernity toward an ideal world remote from mass society
and technology.
Recently also, the
adoption of symbols and rituals, the establishment of national holidays, and
the organization of parades and large collective ceremonies were an important
feature of the sacralization of politics in new African and Asian states, and
were certainly the most visible ones. But equally important was the development
of a system of ideas, principles, and values with the purpose of providing a
set of shared beliefs on the meaning and purpose of collective life to give a
sense of political identity and national consciousness to heterogeneous
populations in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and language, whose cultures
still retained the identification of power with the sacred.
In the majority of
new states, democracy was short-lived or stillborn. The prevailing regime in
Africa and Asia, even in noncommunist countries, was an authoritarian political
system, which in some cases replicated the characteristics of a totalitarian
state: the attribution of the monopoly of political power to a single party,
the dominance of a charismatic leader, a repressive and terrorist police
apparatus, the organization of the masses for their control and indoctrination,
a planned anthropological revolution to regenerate and mold the nation in
accordance with the principles and values of an ideology presented as an
absolute and indisputable truth and, as has already been said, the
establishment of a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that
sacralize the new nation, its history, and its institutions, while demanding
devotion and loyalty from the ruled. See our case study:
This last feature was
common to all the new states, even those governed by democratic regimes like
Israel. Another common feature appears to have been the role of the charismatic
leader, at least during the period of achieving independence and founding the
new state: Ben Gurion in Israel, Bourguiba in Tunisia, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah
in Ghana, Senghor in Senegal, Nyerere in Tanzania, Sekou Toure
in Guinea, and Sukarno in Indonesia. All these personalities were invested with
charismatic authority and became, often intentionally, the center of a system
of myths, rituals, and symbols that conferred an aura of sacredness upon the
new state, its origins, its institutions, and its policies although not all of
them demanded to be deified as did Kwame Nkrumah. The majority of charismatic
leaders not only symbolized the unity of the nation, but also carried out the
role of theologians and teachers. They took on the task of developing the
principles, values, and commandments of the doctrine that defined the meaning
and sense of collective life, interpreted the history and will of the new
nation, and indicated goals that needed to be achieved by the population. And
the sacralization of the power through the figure of the leader had a
fundamental role in reconciling religious tradition with modern politics. (See
D. E. Apter, "Nkrumah, Charisma and the
Coup," in D. A. Rustow (ed.), Philosophers and
Kings: Studies in Leadership, New York 1970, pp. 112-47.)
What counts is the
deification of the power, the religious dimension that it takes on, and the
allusions it evokes, but not the origin, nature, and specificity of this
sacralization, as long it has been Africanized. God, Allah, Imana and even Karl
Marx can provide the necessary scale for the leader's power, if Sekou Toure or Julius Nyerere naturalize them as Africans. It
matters little which text inspires the leader; it matters only the passion of
that inspiration. Thus, the continuous expansion on the black continent of two
great monotheist religions not only has not upset the traditional realities of
black power, but has not provoked the violent clashes that have occurred
elsewhere. As Africanized religion became dissociated from political power in a
growing number of societies, it became this syncretic melting pot that
reconciled not only Yahweh and Allah, but also God and Caesar. If you examine
some of the basic texts reflecting Nkrumah's power, particularly the litanies
dedicated to Osagye fo
Kwame Nkrumah, you will find an incredible fusion of animism, Judaism,
Islamism, Christianity, Marxism, and techniques of power developed by the inventors
of totalitarianism.
The relationship
between religious tradition and modern politics had a decisive role in attempts
to construct secular religions and often determined their outcomes. As we have
seen, this was very much the case in Western states where the deification of
politics took place after secularization, and was therefore even truer of new
states in the Third World, where secularization had not yet commenced and
traditional religions continued to be the sole source for legitimizing power. The
results of the encounter between traditional religion and new secular religion
were varied and gave rise to different experiences of the sacralization of
politics that are difficult to generalize. In some cases, the attempt to
establish a civil religion by reconciling religious tradition and modern
politics, in accordance with the needs of the new state, became bogged down
because of hostility from the dominant religion, as occurred in Malaysia. (See
D. Regan, "Islam, Intellectuals and Civil Religion in Malaysia,"
Sociological Analysis, 2,1976, pp. 95-110.)
In other cases, such
as Sri Lanka following the establishment of the republic in 1972, the civil
religion was grafted onto the Buddhist tradition and even incorporated mythical
and ritual elements handed down from ancient political traditions that still
survived in Singhalese popular culture. Thus the sacralization of politics
appeared to conform with the population's religious confessions and its most
ancient and venerable beliefs. (See H. L. Seneviratne, "Continuity of
Civil Religion in Sri Lanka," Religion, 1, 1984, pp. 1-14.)
61.Akmed Sukarno's
regime (1959-1965) carried out a similar experiment in the form of "guided
democracy." A great deal of energy was expended in inventive slogans,
symbols, and rituals to unify Indonesian national consciousness among a mainly
Muslim population that was scattered over thousands of islands. Sukarno
proposed the doctrine of Pantja Sila
as the foundation for a civil religion that exalted the Indonesian nation as an
example to humanity. Pantja Sila
was based on five principles: nationalism, internationalism (or
humanitarianism), democracy (or consent), social prosperity, and faith in God.
He felt he had found an effective formula for the coexistence of civil religion
and traditional religion by making faith in the existence of God the common
principle. However, the experiment does not appear to have had lasting results
after he was deposed in 1965 for his communist sympathies. (See D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, London 1972, pp. 184
ff. 62, and; S. S. Purdy, "The Civil Religion Thesis as It Applies to a
Pluralistic Society: Pancasila Democracy in Indonesia (1945-1965),"
Journal of International Affairs, 2, 1982-83, pp. 307-16.)
In other new states
such the Union of South Africa, the religious tradition was the principal
factor in the construction of an Afrikaner civil religion, following
independence in 1948. In this case, the sacralization of politics involved
interpreting the history and destiny of the Boers as a people chosen by God.
The Calvinist religion was used to assert that a sacred pact had been
established between God and the people who, having suffered under British
domination through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had finally reached
the promised land of independence with a republican constitution that
implemented the divine will to assert and preserve the primacy of the white and
Christian race. (See T. D. Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid,
and the Afrikaner Civil Religion, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1975; L. Thompson, II mito politico dell'apartheid
(1985), Turin 1989; B. Cauthen, The Myth of Divine Election and Afrikaner
Ethnogenesis, in G. Hosking, G. Schopflin (ed.),
Myths and Nationhood, London 1997, pp. 107-31.)
Sacralization of
politics in the state of Israel was wholly unique. It passed through various
phases involving various types of civil religion, which can be distinguished
mainly by their attitudes toward religious tradition, the Diaspora, and the
Holocaust, as well as different ways of understanding the nature of the new
state. (See C. S. Liebman, E. Don-Yehiya, Religion in
Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, Berkeley
1983.) See also our case study about
religious Zionism:
Political religion
thus, confers sacredness on the state, the regime, and the leader, it provides a
mythical representation of a glorious past and sanctifies the conquest of
independence, after a period of decadence and suffering, as a regenerative
event or "rebirth" that demands the nation free itself of its legacy
of decadence so that it can take on its appropriate role in the world. The
purpose of political religion in new nations is to confer a sacred nature on
authority and achieve unity of the state by removing all the divisions that it
had inherited from the past to create a healthy and harmonious community in
which each individual lives and works for the good of the nation. Parliamentary
democracy, from this point of view, is rejected as a Western colonialist
institution foreign to the culture and traditions of the new nations, as it is
a system of government based on division and conflict between parties, and
therefore considered unsuited to the requirements of a new state that has to
assert and develop its own unity. The leader, the party, and the political
religion are institutions that embody unity of the nation, express its will,
and define its meaning and the ultimate aim of its collective existence. The
task of political religion is to provide a sense of belonging and identity and
to maintain the unity of the nation through a state of permanent mobilization
to achieve its political objectives: for this reason it demands the total
politicization of collective life, absolute faith in the leader's authority,
and the individual's devotion to the nation to the point of sacrificing his or
her life. In this sense, the strictly religious nature of political religions
is the provision of an interpretation and definition of the meaning and purpose
of life by promising immortality to individual lives devoted to the achievement
of the nation's transcendent aims, while the nation itself is perceived as a
collective entity that is eternal. This, however, reveals factors that, produce
the decline of political religion: the inability to provide an effective
response to existential problems and the fate of the individual faced with
death; flagging enthusiasm for the myths of regeneration and the national
mission in the face of material failures; the advent of new generations that
did not take part in the revolutionary fervor of the nation's founders and who
are more inclined toward pragmatic and individualistic concepts of life, are
impatient of authoritarianism, demand freedom to decide their own destiny, and
do not believe their rulers' idealistic appeals. All this makes rebellion
against the political religion inevitable or at least means that it cannot
last. "If revolt against church religion is iconoclastic, the revolt
against political religion tends to be cynical." (See D. E. Apter, "Political Religion in the New Nations,"
in C. Geertz (ed.), Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in
Asia and Africa, London 1963, p. 96.)
After the Second
World War, the sacralization of politics also continued to exist in the Western
world, and manifested itself in the mythical, ritual, and symbolic forms that
it had taken on during the nineteenth century and the early decades of the
twentieth.
In other Western
democratic states, the sacralization of politics depended mainly on whether or
not there was a tradition of civil religion and on the different configurations
of the relationship between the religious and political dimensions, especially
in relation to the autonomy of political institutions from the traditional
religion and the Established Church. In England, for example, the head of state
and head of the Anglican Church continued to be the same throughout the second
half of the twentieth century, an indissoluble bond between religion and
politics in their traditional meanings, thus making it practically impossible
at a national level to create an autonomous religious dimension of politics qua
politics, as occurred in the United States and France. However, religious
pluralism and nonconfessional recognition of the
civil role of the monarchy as the symbolic embodiment of the nation has
favored, according to some scholars, the formation of a civil religion that is
distinct from the religious confessions in that its prime object is the cult of
the nation itself, its history, its traditions, its heroes, its war dead, and
its institutions, as well as observance of moral, social, and political values
that are acknowledged by the majority of citizens, whatever church they belong
to, as the essential constituent principles of British unity and collective
identity. This civil religion finds its symbolic unitary center in the
monarchy's national role, and its most solemn ritual is the coronation, by
which the nation carries out an act of collective communion through its
sovereign and reconsecrates its unity by reasserting its loyalty to shared
values.
In continental Europe,
there were other monarchical states in which traditional religion continued in
the second half of the last century to fulfill the role of legitimizing the
political order through the consecration of the monarch, even though society,
culture, and politics had undergone a process of secularization. But it appears
that even in these states, which include Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland,
the development of secularization and nationalism led to the emergence of some
elements of a civil religion, with myths, rituals, and symbols that legitimize
the institutions and represent the nation as an entity that is perpetual and
transcends the life of individual citizens, and to which citizens have a duty
of loyalty and devotion. But in these cases, as in the English case, it is
reasonable to ask whether the presence of a civil religion currently
constitutes an effective source of legitimization of the political order and a
viable representation of shared common values.
As far as European
democratic republics are concerned, consistent traces of the sacralization of
politics during the twentieth century can be found only in France, where there
was a varied tradition of civil religiosity that, commencing with the
glorification of the French Revolution as the great founding event of modern
France, developed after the Great War the symbiosis between religion of the
fatherland and cult of the republic founded on the principles of individual
freedom and equality of the citizens, in spite of having experienced bitter and
divisive religious and ideological conflicts. Following the lacerating
experience of the Vichy regime (1940-1944), the republican myth that emerged
from the long internecine war definitively asserted its hegemony as a
"true civil religion," complete with its own Pantheon, martyrology,
hagiography, varied and omnipresent liturgy, and "prolific
polytheism," in which its sacred nature associates the living and the
dead. It invented its own myths and rituals, established its own altars and
temples, and using a public symbolism created a "permanent educative
show" consisting of statues, frescoes, toponymy, and school textbooks. The
celebration of national holidays and the liturgy of commemoration helped
consolidate the republican myth in spite of the troubled events of the Fourth
Republic (1946-1958) and the ideological conflicts of the Cold War, which also
involved contrasting perceptions of the tradition of the Revolution and the
myth of the republic.
We can therefore
speak of a "civil religion a la francaise, which
passes through various metamorphoses and manages eventually to find a form of
syncretic coexistence between civil religiosity of the republican fatherland
and popular Christian religiosity. This phenomenon particularly typified the
presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958-1968). Catholic and nationalist, but also
an exponent of the values of revolutionary and republican France, de Gaulle was
the prime mover behind the new civil religion now reconciled with the Catholic
tradition. He believed in the "religion of French greatness,"76 and
his idea of France had a sacred majesty: "France has emerged from the
depths of the past. She is a living entity. She responds to the call of the
centuries. Yet she remains herself through time." co Since 18 June 1940,
when he took on the task of delivering his nation from defeat and the shame of
the collaborationist government of Vichy, de Gaulle was convinced that he had
maintained the greatness of France in the world. As president, he represented
very effectively his mystical concept of the nation through the mastery of his
prose and oratory, compelling symbolic gestures, and the impressiveness of his
tall and domineering figure. This left a clear imprint on the symbolic
representation of the national political liturgy.
Francois Mitterrand,
who was a tireless opponent of de Gaulle, became president (1981-1995) and
inherited the general's sense of the dramatic and the theatrical in the
liturgical representation of the president's role as the high priest of the
nation and the republic, while clearly adapting it to his own personality of
sophisticated intellectual and socialist politician. A ritual event to display
the civil religion occurred on 21 May 1981 shortly after Mitterrand's election
to the presidency of the republic when he visited the Pantheon, the most
important temple of the republican religion. He went there on his own with the
bearing of a pious man engaged in a solemn homage to great men venerated by a
grateful nation. Eight years later at the celebrations of the second centenary
of the Revolution, the republic made a gesture of syncretic reconciliation
between the republican civil religion and popular Christianity by transferring
the remains of Abbot Henri Baptiste Gregoire to the Pantheon. The Catholic prelate
had been the acknowledged leader of the Constitutional Church after the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy (1790), although his reburial in the Pantheon did
not meet with the approval of the church hierarchy.
It was in fact
precisely during the fifties that the religious dimension to American politics
was considerably bolstered by the portrayal of the Cold War as a crusade
against atheist communism, and the exaltation of the American nation's
universal mission. God had entrusted the United States with the task of
revitalizing humanity by spreading democracy throughout the world. At the same
time, the myths, rituals, and symbols of the civil religion continued to be an
integral part of the citizens' collective life, or rather part of the life of
the American population that felt integrated into society and the political
order. This climate of renewed enthusiasm for religious patriotism was the
setting for the popular anticommunist campaign that Senator Joseph McCarthy
initiated in 1950 during the democratic presidency of Harry Spencer Truman
(1945-1953) and which continued until 1954. Favored by the crusading spirit of
Cold War anticommunism, the sacralization of politics gained considerable
momentum under the republican presidency of Eisenhower (1953-1961), a man of
sincere religious feelings who was convinced that "our form of government
has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't
care what it is." It was under his administration that the United States
Congress adopted "In God We Trust" as the official motto of the
American nation and added the phrase "A Nation under God" to the
pledge of allegiance to the flag.
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