{"id":36118,"date":"2017-01-09T08:10:49","date_gmt":"2017-01-09T13:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=36118"},"modified":"2017-01-09T21:11:21","modified_gmt":"2017-01-10T02:11:21","slug":"co-opting-secular-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2017\/01\/co-opting-secular-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-opting Secular Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It has often been noted that, in the United States, politics is our national religion.<\/p>\n

This is something my co-blogger Walker Wright covered at Difficult Run back in 2013<\/a>, citing Eran Shalev<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Through pseudo-biblicism the Bible became a living text, an ongoing scriptural venture which complemented and foritified notions of national chosenness and mission. This transformation occurred within a poisoned political culture which created \u201ctwo parallel imagined communities,\u201d namely the two political parties\u2014the Federalists and the Republicans\u2014that denied each other\u2019s legitimacy. This disposition\u2026created a political culture governed by a grammar of combat, which entailed a \u201cpolitics of anxious extremes.\u201d It fostered the intense employment and further construction of biblical politics, each side depicting the other as wrong-doing \u201cAdamites\u201d or \u201cJeffersonites.\u201d \u2026The pseudo-biblical language thus wove the Bible into American life and sanctified the young nation. American politics were transformed, in texts largely devoid of references to God, into the new religion of the republic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I came across another example of that sentiment this year, when reading Francis Fukuyama’s<\/a> The Origins of Political Order<\/span>. (Which I loved.<\/a>) In it, he writes:<\/p>\n

In building a modern state and overcoming clientelism, the United States had one big advantage over many contemporary developing countries: from the first days of the republic, it had a strong national identity that was rooted less in ethnicity or religion than in a set of political values centering around loyalty to its own democratic institutions. Americans in some sense worshiped their constitution, which embodied universalistic values, making the assimilation of new, culturally different immigrants relatively easy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s\u00a0a lot we could talk about in this quote, but here’s one idea I want to focus on in brief. If the United States has a political–and, in a sense, a secular–national religion, than one way to co-opt that religion and re-infuse theism into a specifically and authentically American viewpoint is to claim that the Constitution\u00a0itself<\/em> is actually a divine document in some sense.<\/p>\n

Which, of course, is precisely the claim that Mormons have long made.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Note: I inadvertently published an unfinished version of this post (missing the Evan Shalev quote) earlier today. Apologies for the\u00a0confusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has often been noted that, in the United States, politics is our national religion. This is something my co-blogger Walker Wright covered at Difficult Run back in 2013, citing Eran Shalev: Through pseudo-biblicism the Bible became a living text, an ongoing scriptural venture which complemented and foritified notions of national chosenness and mission. This transformation occurred within a poisoned political culture which created \u201ctwo parallel imagined communities,\u201d namely the two political parties\u2014the Federalists and the Republicans\u2014that denied each other\u2019s legitimacy. This disposition\u2026created a political culture governed by a grammar of combat, which entailed a \u201cpolitics of anxious extremes.\u201d It fostered the intense employment and further construction of biblical politics, each side depicting the other as wrong-doing \u201cAdamites\u201d or \u201cJeffersonites.\u201d \u2026The pseudo-biblical language thus wove the Bible into American life and sanctified the young nation. American politics were transformed, in texts largely devoid of references to God, into the new religion of the republic. I came across another example of that sentiment this year, when reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. (Which I loved.) In it, he writes: In building a modern state and overcoming clientelism, the United States had one big advantage over many contemporary developing countries: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1156,"featured_media":36129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Francis_Fukuyama_at_Fronteiras_do_Pensamento_S\u00e3o_Paulo-SMALLER.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36130,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36118\/revisions\/36130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}