ReligionDispatches.org

For some scholars, "religion" gives the social cohesion and moral purpose without which a merely self-interested and fragmenting liberalism could not survive. Others see how, at moments of crisis, figures like Lincoln---or now we might argue Obama---draw on biblical language to call a special nation to its higher and redemptive purpose, and thus name common purposes that mobilize nation-building or rebuilding. In 1968, Bellah linked civil religion not only to consensus but to dissent: he invoked the examples of William Lloyd Garrison and Eugene Debs to argue that critics of racism or empire must speak in widely resonant, biblical terms, or they risk cultural marginality and political impotence. Critics who do not invoke "any genuinely American pattern of values," the "better instincts of American patriotism" or indeed "the deeper moral instincts of Americans," he argues, will fail, and a corporate and imperial regime will continue to "undermine essential American values and constitutional order."