From Civic Religion to Political Religion
How devotion to ideology evolves over time. (incomplete)
If you read the writings of the founding fathers, it is evident that it was their intention to create a civil religion that promoted the ideas of republicanism, liberalism, civil rights, self-determinism1, and individualism while denouncing authoritarianism, collectivism, and globalism2. By making a moral compass for the fledgling nation, the civil religion of the United States was to create a unifying element to the culturally diverse union.
Most nations on Earth follow the nation state model since the treaty of Westphalia3. This model sees that a nation is a state entity representing the common interests of an ethnic or cultural group of people. This is why Russia is called the protector of the Slavic people4, the People’s Republic of China claims any land Chinese people live in, and why countries like Switzerland are named as such because it is the land of the Swiss.
The founding fathers recognized that the United States would be unique, however; being a nation of many cultures, the founding fathers chose to unite the people under a common idea. The American culture is different than most in that it is not mutually exclusive with most other cultures. The idea of separating a culture from infringing on the individual’s personal culture is vital in uniting a disparate population.
If you look at the Balkans, you see a Jackson Pollock painting5 of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. The Habsburgs tried, the Ottomans tried, and the Serbians tried, but nobody was successful in uniting the Bosnians, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Serbs, Albanians, and Montenegrins. That was the case, until Josip Tito. The only time the Yugoslavians had ever been united and stable was when Tito’s brutal regime enforced a single culture and suppressed the various nationalist movements.
Unlike the Yugoslavians SSR, the United States does not suppress the individual’s culture, but rather it adds a second culture. This is evident by the United States intentionally lacking an official state language or religion. Every United States citizen is an American and no American is any more American than any other. Americans celebrate their heritage and share their American experience with those of cultures from all around the world.
Be it the Scandinavian-Americans and German-Americans in the Midwest, the Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans in the South, the French-Americans in Louisiana, or the English-Americans of the East Coast, there is no single ethnic group that can be called American. Being an American is the give and take of sharing one’s culture with and understanding the culture of others. This is why America is exceptional amongst all the other nations in the world, because it represents an idea rather than an ethnicity.
Connecting People
From its inception, the United States was susceptible to internal strife. The cultural divide in the nation grew steadily as time got further from the unifying moment of the revolution. A rivalry was borne out of the difference in lifestyle between the distant states. An agricultural South became dependent on slavery while its Northern counter-part industrialized without slaves. Slowly, the culture of the states was drifting.
The cultural divide came to a head during the Civil War and, following the abolition of slavery, the degenerate lifestyle of the plantation owners had been eradicated. Not only had the bloody war divided the culture, but also the botched attempt at reconstruction acted to deepen resentment in the South. It is hard to justify a union of equals when the North had burned down cities in the South.
The end of the war lead to a stronger union due via force. Even with the harsh consequences of the war and reconstruction, the nation managed to get back to a status quo. It wasn’t until the United States’ entry into the Great War that major leaps in unification were made. A common enemy is one of the strongest unifiers.
The strongest unifier, however, is connecting people. The reason cultures diverge in the first place is due to a lack of connection between them. Whenever distance or geography separates groups of people, they are bound to go different ways. Rome could only be as large as its roads could take it.
When President Eisenhower introduced the Interstate Highway Act, the cultural divide in the states could finally be bridged. States that used to be hard to reach could now be visited in hours. People could move across the country and interact with a wide variety of cultures.
The impact of building highways between the states is immeasurable. From the integration of the state’s commerce to the spread of regional dialects, the highways acted as a bonding agent for the national culture. The borders of the states became porous and the barrier between their lifestyles had shattered.
Ideas and Identity
A major issue with the nation state model is that the foundation of the state is based on a cultural similarity. Once a nation state gets large enough, the national identity begins to represent fewer and fewer people. This puts an upper limit on the size of a nation before it becomes a vehicle for oppression.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the United States is in the adherence to an idea rather than ethnicity. By using a common ideological framework as a unifier, the upper limit of a nation’s size disappears. Instead of creating an “us versus them” mentality as seen in ethnostates, a common ideology is only able to be divided politically rather than by any immutable characteristics of the individual.
With an adequate political framework, the divisions of ideology can be safely put to duke it out in a fair and legal battleground. Debate becomes the only battle and ideas of all people are capable of making an impact. This is the ideal scenario, but in reality the divisions in politics quickly adopt identities outside the realm of the mind and instead in the same characteristics that plague nation states.
Time and time again, the political landscape devolves into a tribal system. When identity is tied to political belief, the entire system becomes that of a nation state. The return to the “us versus them” mentality is so easy and tempting to those who seek short-term benefit. Why debate a policy on its merits when attacking the person who espouses it is so much easier.
The idea that an individual should be able to set their own course in life and pursue their own aspirations.
Many of the founding father’s theories involve the idea of isolationism and remaining removed from European affairs. While isolationism is present in the early political theories, aversion to globalism is more of my own interpretation of these ideas in a modern context.