Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 62

MODERN AGE

pictured also the soldiers of General McClel-
lan's Army of the Potomac whom she, James
Freeman Clarke, and Massachusetts governor
John Andrew and his wife had seen the day
before. But she also drew upon the romantic
nationalism she cultivated in Europe and the
liberal Unitarianism she learned under Bos-
ton's most important theological transcen-
dentalists. Her hymn's "universality," while
used in later years in ways that perhaps she
could not have imagined, nevertheless gets to
the core of what the poem had always been.
The religious nationalism of the Battle Hymn
of the Republic came from a close observer
and passionate advocate of the European
wars of liberation who also promoted a radi-
cally reformed, creedless, activist Christianity
dedicated to ending oppression at home and
abroad.

A

t the end of his landmark 1967 essay
"Civil Religion in America," sociolo-
gist Robert N. Bellah turned from scholarly
analysis to prophetic vision.19 He anticipated
nothing less than the birth of a global civil reli-
gion if America emerged victorious through
its third time of national crisis. America's first
two defining crises, the Revolution and the
Civil War, produced, he wrote, "the major
symbols of the American civil religion." The
third crisis, this time played out on a global
scale, tested America's fidelity to its calling to
build an international order of democracy,
prosperity, progress, and peace. The nation
faced, Bellah wrote, "the problem of respon-
sible action in a revolutionary world, a world
seeking to attain many of the things, material
and spiritual, that we have already attained."
Like the previous American crises, this
one too "would precipitate a major new
set of symbolic forms." "The emergence
of a genuine transnational sovereignty," he
continued, "would necessitate the incorpo-
ration of vital international symbolism into
62

FALL 2014

our civil religion, or, perhaps a better way
of putting it, it would result in American
civil religion becoming simply one part of
a new civil religion of the world." Such a
new, global civil religion, Bellah assured the
readers of Daedalus, "could be accepted as a
fulfillment and not a denial of American civil
religion. Indeed, such an outcome has been
the eschatological hope of American civil
religion from the beginning. To deny such
an outcome would be to deny the meaning
of America itself."20
There are so many questions Bellah's last
paragraphs beg and raise: Has there in fact
been such a strong continuity in American
civil religion? Has the national faith been
propelled by such a potent internal teleol-
ogy? Has America's "eschatological hope"
indeed been global from the beginning?
What does it say about the accuracy of Bel-
lah's history of the American civil religion
that he mobilizes his analysis to this end?
And is the "meaning of America" so obvious
and uncontested? What ought to be obvi-
ous at least is that far from a dispassionate
observer and analyst of the American civil
religion, Bellah was actually a participant
in that faith who sought to perpetuate the
nation's civil religion. He was a contributor
to civil religion who appropriated a national
civil religion for internationalist ends.
The problem is not so much Bellah's pre-
sentism, teleology, or liberal international-
ism. It is his assumption that something
would have to be done to the American
civil religion in the 1960s in order to inter-
nationalize it. This claim presupposes that
an embarrassingly provincial or "primitive"
civil religion had to change and incorporate
new symbols to become global and progres-
sive. Contra Bellah, the main doctrines of
the American civil religion were not national
ideals that needed to be universalized in
order to endure but rather internationalist
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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