The Roots of America’s Civil Religion

The Origins of American Civil Religion and the Speaker’s Background

We have Dr. Richard Gamble, who is a history professor at Hillsdale College. He's also an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He has a website, richardmgamble .com, where you can find all his books.

In fact, I have two of them sitting right here. I have a Fiery Gospels, and this is a book that I picked up a year ago and started reading, and I thought, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, the social justice issue that we talk about today is very similar to the reform movements that happened in the 19th century.

It's a very similar battle that's going on in the church. I started reading this last week, another book by Richard Gamble called In Search of a City on a Hill, and I thought, I have to have this guy on because he's way smarter than me on these topics.

This is an area that I think we have touched on, we've teased, we haven't really gone fully into, and that is civil religion on the right, on the left. We talk about it on the left a lot on this podcast, but we're going to talk about it some more.

Does America have a civil religion? If so, is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? What should we as Christians, Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Christians, how should we navigate this? Thank you so much, Dr. Richard Gamble, for joining me.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, John. It's a privilege to be with you, get to know you, and certainly a privilege to be able to talk to an interested audience who understands maybe what's at stake in these conversations.

There's so much at stake, and I just feel, actually, like I wish I had 10 hours with you because there's so much that we haven't been told, not that we haven't been told, it's not like there's a sinister conspiracy, it's just forgotten.

History is so often, I find, used for political purposes today that we don't have an understanding of the past as much as we ought to. You're someone who seems to understand the past, respect the past, and you view it as a foreign country.

You leave it. You don't try to impose presentism, the assumptions of today, which I appreciate so much. First question for you. So this topic of America's civil religion, in the fiery gospel, you talk about the battle of the republic, in a city on a hill, you talk about John Winthrop's speech, a city on a hill speech, they call it now, and you trace these things, and you show how these biblical images are used so often in political discourse on both the right and the left.

What made you interested in that? That's just not a topic I see most people writing about.

The Liberal Social Gospel, World War I, and the Problem of Christian Nationalism

I'll have to do some archeology, some intellectual archeology here, John, to answer you. My interest in the problem of how scripture gets reused, gets appropriated, the way that the identity of the church gets appropriated for the purposes of the state, that goes back more than 30 years for me, and maybe in some ways back into my childhood.

But when I first started graduate school, my PhD program at the University of South Carolina, I was looking for a topic, what did I want to study for my dissertation? And I was interested broadly in the question of modernity, of theological modernism, of the liberal movement.

In a lot of ways, I was on a pilgrimage myself toward confessional reform, Presbyterianism, and coming to understand what that meant for the life of the church, my own place within the church. And I hit upon the idea of looking at the liberal clergy in America and wrestling with the problem of why the liberal social gospel clergy in America, who emerged in the post Civil War generation, who talked about world peace and humanity and brotherhood and justice, and yet became some of the most jingoistic supporters of Woodrow Wilson and intervention into World War I.

So I wanted to understand their minds, what made it possible for them to continue to see themselves as advocates of world peace, of permanent world peace, but also be interventionists, warriors, frustrated, sometimes frustrated with Woodrow Wilson, that he wasn't going far enough, fast enough.

And that's what I worked on. That became my first book, The War for Righteousness, which you can add to your list. And that came out about 20 years ago now, but it's really based on work from about 30 years ago.

Well, you have, I haven't read that particular book, but you have some excellent lectures out there. And I did listen to one that was hosted on the Abbeville Institute website from like 10 years ago, where you talk about this.

And I saw another one on YouTube where you talk about this. And I find that fascinating. World War I is fascinating. And so if we have time, maybe we can talk a little bit about that. You'd go back, though, even farther.

You go back to the Puritans. Is that where this began? Where does this American civil religion, for lack of a better term, where does that start? Sure.

You got to let me know, John, if I go off in too many directions simultaneously here. I'm going to try to map this out. Some of my views have changed over the last 30 years. It would be a shame if I didn't keep learning.

And I want to revisit this question of the Puritan understanding of church and society or church and state loosely, or the whole question of being God's new Israel, having a messianic identity. I have rethought some of that, and I'll come back to that.

But probably a fundamental question is what do we actually mean by civil religion? And this phrase gets used in two ways that are compatible with each other. But I think we need to keep them distinct.

And I have more objections to one as a Christian, as an American, as a conservative, than I do to the other. The more benign form of what we call civil religion is the affirmation of principles, heroes, experiences that bind us together as an American people.

I, to think back to, you know, the colonial period would talk about the need to return to first principles. Virginia talked about this in the Virginia Bill of Rights. So what are those first principles?

And there's a sense in which those first principles help bind us together, give us a sense of community, of a common cause, a common life together. And if we take the original meaning of the word religion from the Latin, it means to bind together.

So if that's all we mean by civil religion, that we want to affirm those principles, experiences, ways of living, our heroes, we want to affirm the things that bind us together, then I have no quarrel with civil religion.

But it never ends there. And we have to think of this in contrast to the appropriation of the Bible and making it a civil religion for the purposes of our own nation state, our own identity, for our own consciousness as a people, for our own sense of what our role is in the world, what we owe ourselves and other people.

If we take on the identity of the church, and particularly of the mission of Christ, then that's something that Christians have to be alert to, aware of, on guard against, and shouldn't feel awkward or be made to feel awkward or unpatriotic if they defend those boundaries.

I'll add one other nuance to this. There's a way in which the affirmation, that first category I talked about, that first way of understanding civil religion, there's a way that affirmation of principles or documents like the Declaration of Independence or an ideology, an ideological point from the 19th century or from Cold War America, there's a sense in which that can be elevated to the level of the sacred on a level that competes with our Christian faith, or an affirmation of a principle that's actually found nowhere in Scripture or nowhere within our tradition, and yet we embrace it and defend it as if it were a fundamental part of our faith.

So this gets messy, but I think all this is going on simultaneously, and we need to be aware of what we actually mean by civil religion, and those who dismiss any concern about it, make light of it as if we're just being too fussy about things, they might be thinking of civil religion in that more benign sense.

As someone said to me recently, well, do you really have a choice? Do you really have a choice? You're stuck with civil religion. And I thought, well, I do have a choice, and I'm not stuck with certain manifestations of civil religion, and I've called for this in print recently, we need to go back through American history and tell the story.

It's never been told. Tell the story of those who resisted the construction of a civil religion that competed with the Christian faith. That story is out there, and that story needs to be told.

Christian Nationalism, Patriotism, and the Left’s Fusion of State and Faith

That's excellent, and I'm glad that you wanted to define things before we jumped into the lineage here of where this idea came from. I think it would be good for me to just share for the context and for the audience, for their interest, kind of where we're approaching this from, our historical context, because right now we have a controversy over Christian nationalism, as you know.

Whatever that is, there's a spectrum, and I've read a number of the books, and they're not all the same. But it seems to me, you could correct me if I'm wrong, that those on the left, including the evangelical left, seem to react every time there's any fusion of American symbolism or patriotism with Christianity in any sense.

To the point that you get the impression they want a secular public square where we just don't even have in God we trust in courtrooms. I remember doing some of my early research on this topic and going back to Jim Wallace and Ron Sider and some of these guys who signed the Chicago Declaration back in the 70s.

That was their main beef, was that there was this false religion. The first issue of the Post-American, which became Sojourners, was Jesus with a crown of thorns and this American flag draped over him.

This was a horrible thing, that we're combining these things. They wanted to return, in their minds, to the purity of a first-century Christianity that was devoid of this influence. Yet they could not see in themselves how they were probably ten times worse in fusing the power of the state and their own, I guess, leftist tradition in American history with their own Christianity.

That's what we have today, in my opinion, is we have this knee-jerk reaction against anything that's pro-American or patriotic, even the most benign things. This adoption, though, of things like we have a temple of democracy in D .C., which shall not be violated by the one-washed masses on January 6th.

It's like, what is that? One final example. I remember Sam Smith, who I studied under at Liberty University, pointed out to me. He goes, start talking about dividing the United States up, that some regions shouldn't be with other regions, perhaps, because they can't get along.

He said, you will have both sides come after you as a traitor. Why is that? Think about it. It's weird, isn't it? It's odd that we view the Union as something sacred at the level in which we would view, perhaps, most of our dearly felt theological concerns.

I hope I'm tracking right with what you're saying, but these are some concrete examples of what I see happening in regards to civil religion out there. Yes.

John, you're right that there are so many things at play all at once right now. I've gotten involved in controversy over Christian nationalism, what we mean by it. One of the most difficult things in trying to communicate with others and trying to teach is the nuances of questions and how we're using words like Christian nationalism and where this came from.

I can make a point, raise a concern about the way Christians talk about their nation or the way they worship in their churches and sometimes seem to be worshiping America. I can sound like the left. One of the things that's been frustrating for me and I think so urgently needed is we need to open up space for a patriotic Americanism that is also very guarded in what it says about the identity of America, that polices the boundary between our Christian faith and our love for America, that is able to understand hierarchies of love and we don't love America the same way we love Jesus and we don't love it the same way we love our families.

To open up a space in which Christians can talk about the demands that the nation makes upon them, that the politicians make upon them, that civil religion makes upon them and distinguish that from their own Christian faith and not feel guilty or I should say not feel forced into a position of defending America in extreme terms because the left is condemning it in extreme terms.

There have to be other options out there. There have to be other options in which serious, orthodox, confessional Christians who love their country can talk in a way that is historically informed, can talk intelligently and to be alert to what's really going on and I can say more too.

If you want to follow up on this, there's a blind spot out there now. Thinking back to my work on World War I, so many people think or pretend to think that Christian nationalism is somehow a recent invention of the Christian right.

It's only MAGA Republicans who are now guilty of this, of Christian nationalism, when it would be so easy to demonstrate that the things that they object to the most were actually part of their movement and in another way, strange way, kind of still are part of their movement, but going all the way back to left-wing evangelicalism in 19th century America, those guys perfected Christian nationalism and the left needs to own that, needs to be forced to own that, that the things that they worry so much about are actually, a lot of it is a product of the left.

Well, I was doing some research on this, just on Google Books, looking back to see what's the earliest time we can see that term used and it seems to be the most popular, I think it was an Ngram search I did where you see the term used and there's this little blip in the early 1900s and people were using Christian nationalism and then you don't see it for a while and now, of course, now you see it all over the place.

I wondered what was that little rise at the beginning of the 20th century and it's these Bellamy clubs that were about socialists and they use the term Christian nationalists of themselves and I thought, well, that's curious because that seems like the opposite of what we're being told it is now, at least.

Man, I want to trace the lines a little with you and I know we don't have time to get into detail on everything, but, and as a good American, right, I want the good guys, bad guys, the black and white, which I need to fight because there isn't clear cut lines on that, but I'd love to know where you think this springs from on both the left and the right, this fusion, this syncretism, if you will.

Is it the Puritans? Does it go back before them? Is it some kind of mystical pietism? Where does this start the story?

Medieval and Puritan Roots of Sacralizing the Nation

John, how many days do we have here? Yeah, I know. Oh my goodness. You can find, I want to choose my words very carefully here and perhaps too carefully for the patience of your listeners, but there are elements of making the nation sacred that go way back into medieval Europe, late medieval, early modern.

You can read about how people were talking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England and her as the Deborah of her people, drawing from the Old Testament judges, talking about this little Israel in describing England of the reign of Elizabeth.

I think that phrase might even appear in the dedicatory preface of the Geneva Bible. And what to make of all that is not easy to know. And there's, you know, that was a time when there was an established church, controversy within the established church.

The queen was the head of the church on earth. There's a melding of identities already in place that made it very easy to speak that way. And some of that, the Puritans bring with them to North America.

I, and there's, I'm doing more work right now. One of the reasons I'm hemming and hawing right now is that I'm immersed in further work on the Puritans and what they brought with them, their understanding of themselves, of the church, of the Christian faith that they brought with them.

I think this is, this is my, this is my, this is current me. I might later disagree with current me, but my sense now is that in the 20th century, we started exaggerating the Puritan messianic consciousness in America.

My hypothesis is that the new left in the 1960s, in its opposition to the Vietnam war, in its counter-cultural movement, as they were, they went around diagnosing pathologies, the American pathologies and kind of self-loathing movement, rejecting America, rejecting what America had stood for.

There are lots of reasons to have lots of different views of Vietnam, but the hard left that tried to trace American involvement in Vietnam back to like the American DNA, the American genetic code, that this is who we've always been.

We've always been crusaders, messianic people. It's my hypothesis right now that a set of scholars in the 1960s, some books I've actually used in the past and used to depend on a lot, were actually creating, even if they didn't know it, were creating a false memory in America and ended up making the American messianic consciousness, just for a shorthand here, more typical of the American past than in fact it actually was, making manifest destiny more characteristic of the American past than it actually was.

Now to undo that narrative or to test that narrative would require a lot of work. And I think thanks to Perry Miller and others, the way they wrote about the Puritans in New England, they created a false, fake news, right?

They created fake news. And people get trapped in thinking, and I think this happened after starting in the 1960s as well, that because the left was attacking this story, this identity of messianic identity, manifest destiny, that there were those on the right who felt obligated to defend it, neither side realizing that we might've gotten the story wrong.

And that might be too complicated a line of inquiry for us to pursue right now. But this is my concern that we have been saddled with a fake story and that Americans were much more level-headed in the 19th century than we give them credit for.

We have gone back and quoted the most quotable, which is what we do all the time. It's just like current news. We go back in history and we quote the most quotable that proves our point. And we have missed the way ordinary Americans were actually thinking about their nation, their people, their place in the world.

That's fascinating. You point some of this out in A Search in the City on the Hill that it wasn't until, I don't remember what time, in the 20th century that people focus on that particular phrase, even calling it the city on a hill speech.

Whereas before that wasn't considered significant. We don't even know if it was delivered. We don't even know if this was actually a given as a speech. I always thought it was. I had this image in my mind of John Winthrop on this hill, almost like a sermon on the mount type situation.

And that may have never happened. You do, though, see in that some of the, I don't know, the roots of this, though, don't you, where he is fusing these understandings of the church and the community.

That the Puritans were establishing. Right. And certainly the ways in which that is going to be used. Right. And made a precedent. This is part of my point in that book and my subsequent thinking over the last 10 or 12 years.

The uses to which the model of Christian charity and Winthrop, the uses to which that will be put as a authenticating precedent for the way we're talking about America now. I think that's the real story.

John Winthrop and countless others of his generation do open the door for that. But one of the things to remember with Winthrop, and I hammer away at this with my students, is that he was talking to a tight-knit group, a highly homogeneous, tight-knit group of Christians for whom, and for him it was normal for him to address them as if they were a Christian congregation.

He was interested in catechizing them. In fact, my new line of inquiry about the model of Christian charity, that it's actually in the form of a doctrinal lecture. He begins with the doctrine of providence, and that he is drawing heavily from the catechisms, especially the catechisms on the 10 commandments, the very vocabulary.

I'm giving away my good stuff right now. I'm telling my secrets. That the very vocabulary that he uses in the model of Christian charity is coming right out of expositions of the 10 commandments. The whole section on giving, lending, forgiving, this is language.

It shows up later in the Westminster larger and shorter catechism. He's drawing from a common heritage there. So to answer your question, he thought of himself as giving pious advice to a Christian community about how to live together as brothers and sisters within the bonds of Christ.

Now, what gets done with that is another story entirely. And as I said, I think the story of what gets done with that and the way that gets secularized or reappropriated, the way Winthrop gets reinvented in the 19th century, that's the big story for American civil religion.

And as you know from the book, nobody read the model of Christian charity for 208 years. It's not until 1838 that it was published. So it's not even part of our American consciousness. Zero, zip. Tocqueville doesn't know about it because it hasn't been published yet when he's in America and writing about the Puritans.

New England, Sectional Nationalism, and the Puritan Narrative of America

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Really, the models that are focused on as far as the founders of the country, the first examples. When you had the Dutch, you had preceding them in Virginia, the colony there. You already had the Spanish in Florida, not that they were as influential, but it's not like the Puritans were the first.

Plymouth predated them. I don't understand exactly why that still carries so much water. I don't know if we have time to explore that fully, but is that because of what you just said, I'm wondering, because it was useful to appropriate their language for modern.

Political purposes. Yes. This is one of my favorite topics. Another one of my favorite topics. You may have heard of the book. Sam Smith may have recommended this to you. Carrie Roberts is a big fan of this book by Harlow Shidley called Sectional Nationalism.

I highly recommend that book. She there shows without a doubt the way that Boston, the publishing world, the academic world, the textbook world in New England mobilized in the early 19th century to tell a story about America that began with the Puritans.

This would be the only true authentic story. Part of this, it's a response to the embarrassment of New England's resistance to the War of 1812 and the convening of the Hartford Convention. They did everything they could so they wouldn't be remembered as the first secessionists.

And they deliberately consciously wrote American history in a way to prove that they were 100 the real authentic America and the other regions were deviations from that real America. That takes hold in the 19th century and we still, it's still in all of our textbooks today.

Chronology doesn't get in the way because you got to talk about the Puritans of 1630 before you talk about the Virginians of 1607. Tocqueville perpetuates this in Democracy in America. He says that American civilization shined out like a beacon from New England.

This idea becomes the dominant narrative and it is incredibly misleading and it does an injustice, as you said, to the Dutch, to the Scots-Irish, to Southern Anglicans. It does an injustice to so many other.

Groups. Well, and one final thing on this thread, since I know I want to get back to the civil religion aspect of this, but in recent years, as you probably well know, there's been this, some people call it young restless reform movement.

Now that they're not so young, it's more like 20 years ago that I guess that was really starting. I think the most probably recognizable figure in promoting the Puritans would be John Piper in that and getting people to read Jonathan Edwards and George Marston's biography of him.

This seems to dovetail with some of that in my mind. I don't know exactly how, but the Puritans, not that we shouldn't study them, not that, I mean, you're studying them, not that there aren't things to glean, but they become exclusively the authorities on theology.

So not just what being an American is, but also on what being a Christian is for many reform people today. I don't know if you have a comment on that before.

We get back to the Yeah. And I think we need a better understanding of the breadth of what we call the Puritan tradition. It's one of those labels that is so easily misused. As you well know, and your listeners know, Puritan was used as a pejorative label for narrow mindedness, sectarianism.

But if we look at the broader reform tradition in England, we discover, and this is some really recent research, which is exciting, how indebted English Puritanism was to continental reform thought. We knew about some of the Lutheran influence, but if now we're understanding that like the Heidelberg Catechism or Sinus, other Dutch theologians, there is a broader tradition.

And I think that broader tradition was actually brought to America. That's one of the things I want to demonstrate. More was brought to America than what you're talking about, than a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a Puritan.

And there's a distinction between sort of an American character to the Puritans, and then that broader so-called Puritan tradition in England, and then its indebtedness back to continental European thought.

I'd love to explore that more, but that's for another podcast. So thanks for giving all your secrets all away. So now someone else can pick up these threads and throw your thunder. All right. So we have the Puritans.

We just talked about them briefly, and they opened the door, as you said, for some of this civil religion thinking. More so, I would assume, than those in Virginia, the Anglicans down there, the Presbyterians.

And so that gets, as we chronologically go through the 19th century, does that translate into the Second Great Awakening and some of the reform movements like, I'm thinking, abolitionism, women's suffrage, prohibition, anti-masonry?

I mean, are these things also, do they come directly from that or?

The Second Great Awakening, Reform Movements, and Romantic Nationalism

John, you know, I can't give you a straight answer.

I know, I know. Just give me the best you can.

All right. Let me think how to come at this. And part of the complexity for me here is just how my own way of organizing this in my head is under assault right now. And I'm struggling.

I just spilled paint on your very finely written papers, haven't I?

Right. Yeah. And to circle back to an earlier point, too, I think it's been my argument in the piece I published in October. I argue that there's an unexplored way to figure out where American civil religion came from.

And my recommendation is that we find the points at which civil religion was being resisted, and that will help us see it in action, see it being created in real time. Now, we know about the big wars.

The civil religion was a factory of American civil religion, America's redemptive identity, messianic America. That's where so much of it came from. But I think we can find it. You're right, that there's an element of this in the second Great Awakening.

There's an element of it in reform movements, in a certain understanding of what it meant to have a Christian nation, and Christianizing the nation through these reform movements that a Christian America would not have any alcohol, tobacco.

It would not have capital punishment or certain kinds of prisons, all those reform movements. I think there's an element there that is easily woven into, or not woven into, but is evidence for, demonstrates a certain conception of a nation, what a nation is.

And to complicate your life and my life, we also have to throw in here that we have to deal with the rise of romantic nationalism in the 19th century, and the impact of European ideology on Americans who were eager to embrace that ideology.

And a lot of the key people of the abolitionist movement in New England were also great admirers of the romantic nationalist movements in Europe. And I think there's another one of my hypotheses, giving away my stuff.

I think that they consciously, some of them, some of the theologians and philosophers and literary people, consciously wanted to endow America with a European romantic nationalist understanding of itself.

Too many adjectives there. So to make America more European in its nationalist identity, that's never been, well, it's been explored in some ways, but not from the angle I'm mentioning. So if we have a certain kind of civic religion and a certain kind of Christian nationalism, we have to do a careful study of nationalism and how that is actually fighting against a federated republic in the 19th century.

And here's one of my ideas I'll tease you with. Can you have a robust civil religion in a federated republic? You need one. Are you asking me? Yeah, I'm just asking you to ponder.

This. Can you have a run that by me one more time? I'm trying to process it. I mean, let me.

Federate a republic where states have sovereignty, you're saying. So a decentralized federated republic, does that require a robust civil religion in the way a nation state does? No, it shouldn't. It shouldn't.

It shouldn't. So I think this is a factor as well, that people who promote civil religion are much more likely to be centralizer nationalist types because they know that they need civil religion to glue all the pieces together, the way Italy needed one, the way Prussia needed one.

Yeah. I see what you're saying. Yeah. So.

We have the illusion in our country of a federal republic, but it's not really that. And this is part of the reason it's not that. If PhD students are listening, trying to consider what dissertation topic to pick, I think you've given them about five different things that haven't been written on.

So there you go. That's our free service to you. I like exporting my ideas. I don't like exporting.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Civil War, and the Culture of Victory

Democracy, but I like exporting my ideas. Well, in this book, A Fiery Gospel, I just want to talk about this briefly since we're on the 19th century right now and we don't have much more time anyway. And I think that's originally what I e-mailed you about was let's talk about this book, which we haven't talked about yet.

You do trace the use of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I found the opening pages, like the term that's used out there now is red pill. I was red pilled. I was reading these and I was thinking like, oh my goodness, this is what I'm...

I feel like I'm hearing the same exact thing today from the woke left in social justice evangelicals. It's just change a few words. And so the idea of we're going to mobilize the church to support the war effort through these hymns that are now sung like every 4th of July, even in places like Mississippi.

I was surprised I was there. I'm like, why are you singing this hymn? But it has nothing to do with, or little to do with Christ and biblical theology has everything to do with the war effort. And this is now just ingrained in our American psyche, a Christian psyche, even in the United States to a point where you can't even challenge that.

There's probably people listening right now who are offended that I even just said something mildly criticizing. So yeah, I was just, I guess I should probably ask a question in this little diatribe. What, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic and everything that surrounded that, that first war movement, preceding World War I, our first, I guess, national righteous war, do you think that we're still in that same conflict, that that conflict never really resolved itself?

Because I'm wondering that, are we still in a civil war over these same issues? And it is in a civil religion on one side and a decentralized form of government on the other. Give me the complex answer.

It doesn't have to be simple.

I should just let you put a period at the end of that instead of a question mark. And you know how it is. I mean, I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't want to be misquoted. There is a sense in which the civil war has been an unending civil war about much more than questions of, even more than questions of the Southern identity, of questions about slavery and so on.

And there's a reason why, yeah, I'm thinking on my feet here. There's a reason why the civil war became so important, so useful for the construction of a civil religion, why Abraham Lincoln became the figure, even among the New South representatives like Grady and others in the South of the pushing the New South agenda.

Lincoln was this central iconic figure who was going to bind America together, that he perfectly combined the Puritan and the Cavalier into the true American. That started to happen right away. And you add that with the battle hymn of the Republic and other aspects of that war.