To suggest that faith in progress has become the most widely
accepted civil religion of the modern industrial world, as I’ve done in these
essays, is to say something at once subtler and more specific than a first
glance might suggest. It’s important to keep in mind, as I pointed out in last
week’s post, that “religion” isn’t a specific thing with a specific definition;
rather, it’s a label for a category constructed by human minds—an abstraction,
in other words, meant to help sort out the blooming, buzzing confusion of the
cosmos into patterns that make some kind of sense to us.
To say that Americanism, Communism, and faith in progress
are religions, after all, is simply a way of focusing attention on similarities
that these three things share with the other things we put in the same
category. It doesn’t deny that there are
also differences, just as there are differences between one theist religion and
another, or one civil religion and another.
Yet the similarities are worth discussing: like theist religions, for
example, the civil religions I’ve named each embody a set of emotionally
appealing narratives that claim to reveal enduring meaning in the chaos of
everyday existence, assign believers a privileged status vis-a-vis the rest of
humanity, and teach the faithful to see themselves as participants in the grand
process by which transcendent values become manifest in the world.
Just as devout Christians are taught to see themselves as
members of the mystical Body of Christ and participants in their faith’s core
narrative of fall and redemption, the civil religion of Americanism teaches its
faithful believers to see their citizenship as a quasi-mystical participation
in a richly mythologized national history that portrays America as the
incarnation of liberty in a benighted world. It’s of a piece with the religious
nature of Americanism that liberty here doesn’t refer in practice to any
particular constellation of human rights; instead, it’s a cluster of vague but
luminous images that, to the believer, are charged with immense emotional
power. When people say they believe in
America, they don’t usually mean they’ve intellectually accepted a set of
propositions about the United States; they mean that they have embraced the
sacred symbols and narratives of the national faith.
The case of Communism is at least as susceptible to such an
analysis, and in some ways even more revealing. Most of the ideas that became
central to the civil religion of Communism were the work of Friedrich Engels,
Marx’s friend and patron, who took over the task of completing the second and
third volumes of Das Kapital on Marx’s death. It’s from
Engels that we get the grand historical myth of the Communist movement, and
it’s been pointed out many times already that every part of that myth has a
precise equivalent in the Lutheran faith in which Engels was raised. Primitive
communism is Eden; the invention of private property is the Fall; the stages of
society thereafter are the different dispensations of sacred history; Marx is
Jesus, the First International his apostles and disciples, the international
Communist movement the Church, proletarian revolution the Second Coming,
socialism the Millennium, and communism the New Jerusalem which descends from heaven
in the last two chapters of the Book of Revelations.
The devout Communist, in turn, participates in that sweeping
vision of past, present and future in exactly the same way that the devout
Christian participates in the sacred history of Christianity. To be a Communist
of the old school is not simply to accept a certain set of economic theories or
predictions about the future development of industrial society; it’s to enlist
on the winning side in the struggle that will bring about the fulfillment of human
history, and to belong to a secular church with its own saints, martyrs, holy
days, and passionate theological disputes. It was thus well placed to appeal to
European working classes which, during the heyday of Communism in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, were rarely more than a generation removed from the
richly structured religious life of rural Europe. In precisely the same way, Americanism
appealed to people raised within the framework of traditional American
Christianity, with its focus on personal commitment and renewal and its
tendency to focus on the purportedly timeless rather than on a particular
sequence of sacred history.
If this suggests a certain dependence of civil religions on
some older theist religion, it should. So far, I’ve talked mostly about the
category “religion” and the ways in which assigning civil religions to that
category casts light on some of their otherwise perplexing aspects. Still, the
modifier “civil” deserves as much attention as the noun “religion.” If, as I’ve
argued, civil religions can be understood a little better if they’re included
in the broad category of religions in general, they also have distinctive
features of their own, and one of them—the most important for the present
purpose—is that they’re derivative; it would not be excessive, in fact, to call
them parasitic.
The derivative nature of civil religions reaches out in two
directions. First, where theist religions in literate urban societies generally
have an institutional infrastructure set apart for their use—places of worship,
places of instruction, organizations of religious professionals, and so
on—civil religions most often don’t.
They make use of existing infrastructure in a distinctly ad hoc fashion.
In the civil religion of Americanism, for example, there are sacred shrines to
which believers make pilgrimages. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where the
Continental army under George Washington spent the decisive winter of the
Revolutionary War, is a good example.
Among believers in Americanism, the phrase “Valley Forge” is
one to conjure with. While pilgrimage sites of theist religions are normally
under the management of religious organizations, though, and are set apart for
specifically religious uses, Valley Forge is an ordinary national park. Those
who go there to steep themselves in the memory of the Revolution can count on
rubbing elbows with birdwatchers, cyclists, families on camping vacations, and
plenty of other people for whom Valley Forge is simply one of the largest
public parks in southeastern Pennsylvania.
There’s a local convention and visitors bureau with a lavish website
headlined “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fun,” which may suggest the degree
of reverence surrounding the site these days.
In the same way, it’s hard to speak of the priesthood of a
civil religion in other than metaphorical terms; those who take an active role
in promoting a civil religion rarely have the opportunity to make that a full
time job. A great many civil religions,
in fact, are folk religions, sustained by the voluntary efforts of ordinary
believers. The existing political system
may encourage these efforts, or it may make every effort to stamp the civil
religion out of existence, but the fate of civil religions are rarely dependent
on the actions of governments. Communism
again is a case in point; as a civil religion, it came under heavy persecution
in those countries that did not have Communist governments, and received ample
state support in those countries that did. Just as the persecutions usually
failed to lessen the appeal of Communism to those who had not seen it in
action, the state support ultimately failed to maintain its appeal to those who
had.
The dependence of civil religions on infrastructure borrowed
from nonreligious sources, in turn, is paralleled by an equivalent dependence
on ideas borrowed from older theist religions. I’ve already discussed the way
that the civil religion of Americanism derives its basic outlook from what used
to be the mainstream of American Protestant Christianity, and the
point-for-point equivalences between the theory of the Communist civil religion
and the older sacred history of European Christianity. The same thing can be
traced in other examples of civil religion—for example, the way that the civil
religion of the late Roman world derived its theory and practice across the
board from older traditions of classical Paganism. There’s a reason for this
dependence, and it brings us back to Nietzsche, kneeling in the street with his
arms around the neck of a half-dead horse.
Civil religions emerge when traditional theist religions
implode. In 19th-century Europe and America, the collapse of traditional social
patterns and the long-term impact of the Enlightenment cult of reason made
uncritical acceptance of the teachings of the historic Christian creeds
increasingly difficult, both for educated people and for the mass of newly
urbanized factory workers and their families. Nietzsche, whose upbringing in
rapidly industrializing Germany gave him a ringside seat for that process, saw
the ongoing failure of the Western world’s faith in Christian revelation as the
dawn of an age of tremendous crisis: the death of God, to use his trenchant
phrase, would inevitably be followed by cataclysmic struggles to determine who
or what would take his place.
In these impending conflicts, Nietzsche himself was anything
but a disinterested bystander. He had
his own preferred candidate, the Overman: a human being of a kind that had
never before existed, and could never have existed except by very occasional
accident as long as religious belief provided an unquestioned basis for human
values. The Overman was not a successor species to today’s humanity, as some of
Nietzsche’s less thoughtful interpreters have suggested, nor some biologically
superior subset of human beings, as Nietzsche’s tenth-rate plagiarists in the
Nazi Party liked to pretend. As Nietzsche envisioned him, the Overman was an
individual human being—always and irreducibly individual—who has become his own
creator, reinventing himself moment by moment in the image of values that he
himself has created.
Nietzsche was perceptive enough, though, to take note of the
other contenders for God’s empty throne, and sympathetic enough to recognize
the importance and value of theist religion for those who could still find a
way to believe in it. In the prologue to Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, the first person Nietzsche’s alter ego Zarathustra meets
as he descends from the mountains is an old hermit, who spends his days
praising God. Zarathustra goes his way, being careful to do nothing to
challenge the hermit’s faith, and only when he is alone again does he
reflect: “Can it be possible? This old
saint in the forest hasn’t yet heard that God is dead!”
For the Overman’s rivals in the struggle to replace God,
Nietzsche had less patience. One
alternative that he discussed at great length and greater heat was German
nationalism, the local variant of the same civil religion that became
Americanism on this side of the ocean.
The state was to him a “cold monster” that claimed the right to replace
the Christian deity as the source of values and the object of public worship;
he hated it partly because of its real flaws, and partly because it stood in
the way of his preferred candidate. “There, where the state ends—look there, my
brothers. Don’t you see it—the rainbow, and the bridges to the Overman?”
Socialism was another alternative Nietzsche noted; here
again, his assault on it was partly a harsh but by no means inaccurate analysis
of its failings, and partly a matter of brushing another contender aside to
make way for the Overman. Still, another rival attracted more of his attention,
and it was the ersatz deity with which this series of posts is principally
concerned: progress, the belief that humanity is moving inevitably onward and
upward toward some glorious destiny.
The challenge that Nietzsche leveled against belief in
progress will be discussed later on, as it needs to be understood in the
context of the most difficult dimension of his philosophy, and that in turn
needs to be put into its own much broader context, one that will require more
than a little explanation of its own. Still, the point I want to make here is
that Nietzsche’s identification of faith in progress as an attempted
replacement for faith in God is at least as valid now as it was in his own day.
Compare the civil religion of progress to the others
discussed in this and last week’s post and the parallels are hard to miss.
Like other civil religions, to begin with, the religion of progress has
repeatedly proven its ability to call forth passions and motivate sacrifices as
great as those mobilized by theist religions. From the researchers who have
risked their lives, and not infrequently lost them, to further the progress of
science and technology, to the moral crusaders who have done the same thing in
the name of political or economic progress, straight on through to the ordinary
people who have willingly given up things they valued because they felt, or had
been encouraged to believe, that the cause of progress demanded that sacrifice
from them, the religion of progress has no shortage of saints and martyrs. It
has inspired its share of art, architecture, music and literature, covering the
usual scale from the heights of creative genius to the depths of kitsch; it has
driven immense social changes, and made a mark on the modern world considerably
greater than that of contemporary theist religions.
The relationships between the civil religion of progress and
theist religions, to pass to the second point raised last week, have been at
least as problematic as those involving the civil religions we’ve already
examined. The religion of progress has its own internal divisions, its own
sects and denominations, and it bears noting that these have responded
differently to the various theist faiths of the modern world. On the one hand,
there have been plenty of efforts, more or less successful, to coopt Jesus, the
Jewish prophets, and an assortment of other religious figures as crusaders for
progress of one kind or another. On the
other hand, there have been any number of holy wars declared against theist
faiths by true believers in progress who hold that belief in one or more gods
is “primitive,” “backward,” and “outdated”—in the jargon of the religion of
progress, please note, these and terms like them mean roughly what “sinful”
means in the jargon of Christianity.
The civil religion of progress also has its antireligion,
which is the belief in apocalypse. Like
the antireligions of other faiths, the apocalyptic antireligion embraces the
core presuppositions of the faith it opposes—in this case, above all else, the
vision of history as a straight line leading inexorably toward a goal that can
only be defined in superlatives—but inverts all the value signs. Where the
religion of progress likes to imagine the past as an abyss of squalor and
misery, its antireligion paints some suitably ancient time in the colors of the
Golden Age; where the religion of progress seeks to portray history as an
uneven but unstoppable progress toward better things, its antireligion prefers
to envision history as an equally uneven and equally unstoppable process of
degeneration and decay; where the religion of progress loves to picture the
future in the most utopian terms available, its antireligion uses the future as
a screen on which to project lurid images of universal destruction.
The diverse sects and denominations of the religion of
progress, furthermore, have their exact equivalent in the antireligion of
apocalypse. There are forms of the antireligion that have coopted the language
and imagery of older, theist faiths, and other forms that angrily reject those
same faiths and everything related to them. Just as different versions of the
religion of progress squabble over what counts as progress, different versions
of the antireligion of apocalypse bicker over which kinds of degeneration
matter most and what form the inevitable apocalypse is going to take—and in
either case, as with other religions and their antireligions, the level of
hostility between different subsets of the same religion or antireligion quite
often exceeds the level that any branch of the religion directs at its
antireligion, or vice versa. The one
great divergence between most forms of the religion of progress and most forms
of its antireligion is that nowadays—matters have been different at other
points in history—very few believers in progress expect the utopian future
central to their faith to show up any time soon; most believers in the
antireligion of apocalypse, by contrast, place all their hopes on the imminent
arrival of cataclysm. Behind this divergence lies a complex historical
situation, which will be explored in a later post.
The civil religion of progress, finally, shares the pattern
of twofold dependence with the other civil religions we’ve examined. Like them, it is largely a folk religion,
supported by the voluntary efforts and contributions of its faithful believers,
by way of an ad hoc network of institutions that were mostly created to serve
other ends. Those who function as its priests and preachers have
day jobs—even so important a figure as the late Carl Sagan, who came as close
as anyone in recent times to filling the role of pope of the religion of
progress, spent most of his career as a tenured
professor of astronomy at Cornell University. Like most folk religions, it receives support
from a variety of institutions that find it useful, but routinely behaves in
ways that embarrass at least some of its sponsors.
