What is civil religion, particularly as it relates to the American culture?
RABOTEAU: Civil religion is a nebulous term, in part because civil religion is a very multifaceted and generalized reality. And there’s no church of, of civil religion, but it does have institutional forms and cultural forms. And basically civil religion is a looking at this nation as being, peculiar, as having a particular, privileged or blessed destiny under divine providence. In some periods that destiny has been very chauvinistic, you know, that this is a redeemer nation meant to spread democracy and Christianity around the globe. Other periods it’s been, it’s been more muted, but it’s an understanding that coalesces around a series of images and tropes. One of them is the one of Exodus, that one of the earliest tropes for immigration of Europeans to America, from the Puritans on, is the notion that this is a promised land. The old, the howling wilderness kind of aspects of it gets replaced by, you know, this being a promised land, and that what we are about is constructing a city
