An Elliptical Glory: The Civil Religion and Christian Faith (midweek message)

The Civil Religion and Christian Faith

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

July 7, 2021

Sociologist Robert Bellah (1927-2013), in a landmark article published in 1960, identified what he called the “American Civil Religion,” a secular mix of feast days, sacred music, sacred texts, and doctrines that functioned as a quasi religion in support of the national life for all regardless of their own faith. Thanksgiving Day, the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, and Memorial Day were its high holy days; the National Anthem and America the Beautiful its hymns; The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution its scriptures; and affirmation of the sacred calling of this “one nation, under God” to be a city on a hill and a light to the nations its basic creed.

Bellah was a believing Christian, an Episcopalian, in fact, and while he could point out the benefits of Civil Religion, he also regularly pointed out its risks and harms. Taking civil religion too seriously, or taking it over and instead of authentic faith was for him a form of idolatry, a deadly one.

Last Sunday was the Fourth of July. We did not read the propers or scriptures for Independence Day, since the Feast of the Resurrection of our Lord that occurs every Sunday takes precedence over what is in our American Prayer Book a minor, lesser feast. The ones we did read talked about the Church, and the sending of ministers to spread Jesus’ Good News. Bella gave a homily at All Souls’ Berkeley on 25 January 2009 on the occasion of the installation of a New Rector and the Inauguration of a New President (Barack Obama) that spoke eloquently to the question of the ministry of the Church and its role in our secular society. I offer here a slightly abridged form of it for your consideration:

“[T]he church has never forgotten that we are members one of another, that we are one body, partakers of one bread and one cup, though this side of the Church’s teaching has not been carrying the day in the larger society. … [T]he theme of the common good, of concern for the inclusion of all, especially the weakest and most vulnerable, has been a constant one, expressed in word and deed. … But… the power of American individualism, … the default mode of American culture… makes it hard for some of our central teachings to be understood, the meaning of the church, for example. Criticizing the church, or as we say disparagingly, organized religion, is almost a reflex reaction, even among Episcopalians… [Even some Episcopalians have] advocated a direct “plugging into God” … A strange view for an Episcopalian, though not for an American. I fear that what would happen if one “plugged into” God with no mediation is that one would get electrocuted. The church, properly understood, is precisely the kind of structure of mediation that makes a divine/human relation possible at all.

“We have a suspicion of institutions and those with powerful positions within them, and well we might considering how badly they often function, the failures of leadership in politics, the economy, popular culture, and, of course the church. But in a complex modern society the idea that we could do without institutions makes no sense. We constantly need to criticize and improve them, but we cannot abolish them. People who say they are spiritual but not religious, by which they mean they do not go to church, may be fine for a while, but, among other things, what can they give to their children?

“Let me remind you of the Nicene Creed which we recite almost every Sunday (it was the legendary Bishop Pike … who said he didn’t believe the Creed when he read it but he did believe it when he sang it), which has four clauses that declare belief: we believe in one God; we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ; we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life; and we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. It was a Jesuit student of mine who reminded me of that fourth clause when I once made a disparaging remark about the church, an example, incidentally, of how a student can teach a teacher.

“Since few of the leaders or members of the Church are saints, it is not a perfect institution and it is legitimate to criticize it and try to reform it. But insofar as the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ and indeed is the Body of Christ, it participates, however inadequately, in the divine life. Without it we would not be here and we would have nothing to hand on to our children. In the teeth of a culture that despises all institutions even as it depends on them for its very life, we need to learn again and again to treasure the church and the heritage it provides for us, not passively, but actively as we deepen our sense of our own membership in it and our own responsibility in and through it.

“… There are many metaphors for the church and all of them have something to say to us. We are tempted to make the metaphor of the family primary: some American Christians virtually equate their religion with family values. But, though we are brothers and sisters in Christ, and family language is often appropriate, we cannot forget that Jesus himself called us to leave our families, even to hate them, if they stand in the way of our higher commitment as his followers. So the family metaphor can never be the only one. Another metaphor for the church, one I want to focus on today, is less popular but, I would argue, equally important. That is the metaphor of the church as school.

“…The church is that community that began when Jesus chose the twelve disciples and began to preach, that is to teach, all who would listen. When we speak of believing in one holy, catholic (we use a small c for the sense of catholic as universal), and apostolic church, we mean by apostolic that we are a community in continuous relation to the original apostles, that our priests are in the apostolic succession (even though Rome decided that we weren’t), and that, through them, all of us are baptized into that unbroken, continuous community. What I want to say today is that that community is an educational community, concerned with the formation of all its members, young and old, clergy and laity….

“In Obama’s Inaugural address he quoted from the great passage in 1 Corinthians 13 that concludes with the affirmation of the three focal Christian virtues: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love, but what Obama chose to cite was another part of that passage, when Paul called us to set aside childish things. It is time, in other words, for us, all of us, whatever our age, to grow up. And we need to work on understanding what a grown up Christian is.

“It is important to remember that we are all teachers and we are all students. For me, that has involved being a professor all my adult life. But parents teach; in any job when we mentor a newcomer we teach; and when we act well in any situation we teach all who observe us. And we are always students as well. My students have taught me a great deal over forty years of teaching. One thing I learned over the course of a life spent as a university professor is that we teach not just with the knowledge we have accumulated through reading and research, but with our whole selves. Our students learn as much from who we are as from what we say.

“Though I want to emphasize that we are all teachers and all learners all our lives, in the church where what we learn is often so different from what our culture tells us, leadership in such teaching and learning is essential. We need bishops and priests in part because they are connected with the larger church in a way most of us are not. They help to pull us beyond our own private lives, even the life of our own parish, into the larger life of the church and the world. …

“… The priest helps us remember and deepen our own faith through worship and its central acts of Word and Sacrament. It is easy to dismiss the once a week hour as “mere ritual.” Yet worship at its best gives us the focus and center of our lives; it radiates out into all the rest of the week and into our thoughts and actions as well.

“In the Christian tradition God is revealed to us everywhere, but in particular, and normatively, in worship: in the Sacrament, especially the Eucharist, and in the Word, which means the Bible, but especially the words of Jesus. …

“Nowhere is the meaning of the Eucharist clearer than in Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians, 10.16-17, which the King James Version translates as “The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not the communion [Greek koinonia] of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we, being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” Other versions use different English words to translate Koinonia. But it is the same word whether translated as communion, participation, or sharing and all these translations are getting at a part of the meaning… [When we send] out the lay Eucharistic ministers to take the Eucharist to those who are too old or sick to come to church, the congregation responds, “Though we are many, we are one body because we all share one bread and one cup.”

“… And I have to remind you of something that the secularists have somehow missed: that the Episcopal Church is the de facto established church in the United States. Where was the prayer service on Inaugural morning attended by President Bush and President-elect Obama, neither of whom are Episcopalians? St. Johns Episcopal Church, said to be the “traditional church” for such events. And where was the interdenominational prayer service held on the morning of Obama’s first day in office? The National Cathedral, that is the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul,which stands on the highest point in the District of Columbia and is the only building in the district higher than the Capitol. Somehow the press can write “national cathedral” without ever asking how come we have a national cathedral. And St, John the Divine is the Cathedral of New York, just as Grace Cathedral is the Cathedral of San Francisco. I have lived here forty years and know how often Grace Cathedral has been the focus of response to great events in our nation and city.

“In the spirit of our Gospel words this morning, the special place that our church has in our national life calls us above all to service, not to pride. And it also requires us to remember as firmly as we can that, though we want to be good citizens, the nation is not our church. Our Church is the universal Church, the holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and one of its primary obligations is to hold the nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God, to judgment and not to idolize them.

“[W]e are called to a new dedication of our own lives to our obligations as Christians. Service is a duty, but a joyful duty. We gain our lives by losing them; we are never more ourselves than when we are helping others. … We are not alone, isolated atoms fighting each other for survival, though much in our culture constantly teaches us that that is the truth of the human condition. If we know that we are really members of one body, that we need and are needed by each other, then our whole way of being in the world will change and perhaps we can in the church, which seems to many so marginal, serve as models for others, for the troubled nation and world in which we live…”