UC San Diego

The tradition of American civil religion is core to American national identity and political thought. It has traditionally been studied in terms of how it works to integrate some groups into the American political community while excluding others. It has rarely been engaged with in a substantive fashion, taking into account the content and historical development of the civil religious tradition in America. In this dissertation, I argue that American civil religion is a continuous rhetorical tradition with a defined set of symbols, rituals, and tropes. Moreover, it is a level of discourse in American politics at which the issues of political sin and virtue, perfectibility, national telos, and ultimate ideals are addressed. It depicts the United States as having a particular relationship with God, akin to that depicted in the Old Testament between God and the ancient Israelites. An important difference between my work and the great majority of scholarship on American civil religion is the fact that it is more aligned with the legacy of Max Weber than it is with that of Emil Durkheim. Though I do not ignore questions of inclusion and exclusion in the American political community, my focus is on the ways in which a civil religious framework structures the way in which political figures act in the political sphere. Taking into account social, political, and theological influences, I examine in detail the speech of four pivotal figures in the post-Jacksonian development of American civil religion: John L. O'Sullivan, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and William Jennings Bryan. I structure my examination of the civil religious framework of each of these men within three primary questions. One, does the individual prioritize liberty over equality, or vice versa? Two, where does he locate sin, and what is his understanding of that sin? Three, does he believe that the United States is obligated to model democracy to the world, or that the nation has a responsibility to actively proselytize democratic government? My dissertation is organized with a chapter on each of the above four men, except for Lincoln, the central figure in the American civil religious tradition. On Lincoln, I write two chapters, dividing his speech into priestly and prophetic strains, following the typology of Max Weber as adapted by Martin E. Marty