A Study On American Civil Religion In Three Critical Periods ——American Revolution,Civil War And Cold War

The research in the American Civil Religion(ACR)has been going on for over 50 years since Prof.Robert Bellah published his seminal article Civil Reigion in America in 1967.But scholars have not yet reached a consensus owing to their different academic backgrounds,their different approaches to defining religions,the use of partisan definitions of civil religion,thus the lack of a common foundation.This paper employs the Marxist view of religion to reveal the essence of religions and in turn,determines the essence of civil religions,which establishes a solid foundation for the study of civil religions througout history and facilitates academic dialogues of researchers of civil religions from different countries and regions.Based on the theories of Antonio Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony and Emilio Gentile's the Sacralization of Politics,this paper studies the ACR from the perspective of Marxist historical materialism.This paper diachronically examines the origins,components,functions and implications of the ACR in the three critical periods in American history and makes three major findings as follows.Firstly,ACR is a secular religion of politics and a means of sacralizing and absolutizing the capitalist ideology,providing a sacred canopy for the American political order,national origin and national missions.The ACR enhances American people's commitment to national values by bolstering the personal and social moral values underlying the faith system with a view to intergrating and binding together the society.Secondly,American civil religion is a "qualified consensus",covering up the gap between “deism-universalism” and “Anglo-Saxon Protestant elitism”,which is not a bottom-up and spontaneous national consensus,but a cooperative mechanism resulting from the confrontation and compromise between the fundamental class and other classes of society.Third,American civil religion,in different periods of time,combines different theologies and religious languages to justify national politics which is expedient in nature.As social productive forces develop,the national ideology as the superstructure changes accordingly and changes of this kind are particularly significant in critical transitional periods.The theoretical value of this study is the first attempt to apply the Dialectical Materialism and Gramsci's hegemony theory to the study of the ACR,which throws light to the essence of ACR as the cultural hegemony.The pratical value of this study is the vantage point it provides to observe the religiosity of American domestic and international politics which feaure the conflation of religion and politics and its impacts on American political and social life,especially their tendency to become increasingly absolute and polarized.