A Service of Tribute ...

Andrew Sullivan rightly calls the final tribute to Ronald Reagan this week in Washington, D. C., an exercise in civil religion. The notion of civil religion had its origin in Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract in 1762. In 1967, the sociologist Robert N. Bellah published"Civil Religion in America" in Daedalus and launched a continuing discussion about whether a religion is necessary to the coherence of a society, whether traditional religions nurture common values in a democratic society, and whether a civil religion exists alongside and, by degrees, in tension with traditional religions.

American civil religion has its own hallowed calendar, creeds, heroes, locations, rituals, symbols, and texts. I was reminded of that some years ago when I was the pastor for a summer of a small Presbyterian church in central Kentucky. One of my pious church members was telling me about her recent visit to the nation's capitol."I thought I was walking on holy ground," she said. It was clear that she had invested ultimate meaning in the national experience, without any sense that its claims stood in distinct tension with those of her Christianity. I should have asked her when Jesus walked, taught, and worked miracles on the Potomac.

The nation's farewell to Ronald Reagan mixed elements of a Christian faith with those of singularly American values. Perhaps only in an Episcopal cathedral, with its legacy from an English establishment, could the Lord's Prayer be said and the resurrection affirmed in so easy a celebration of Ronald Reagan's single-handed American triumph over the Soviet Union. His body lay in state under a dome which depicts the apotheosis of George Washington and was delivered to a national cathedral, where the nation's political leadership celebrated Ronald Reagan's own deliverance unto the Lord.

It was telling that John Danforth should preside at the celebration in the national cathedral. A former United States Senator and an ordained Episcopal priest, Danforth is also the Bush administration's nominee to succeed John Negroponte as the United States Representative to the United Nations. As Negroponte becomes our chief representative in Iraq, Danforth becomes our chief spokesman to the assembled nations. Even at the national cathedral, however, the service was a remarkably partisan affair. Had it been a truly common service, some Democrat would have had a role in the service. It was a final reminder that, however often we are reminded how genial he was, the Reagan version of the American civil religion is a hard edged, partisan one. You would think that when the Lord sits in final judgment, He will separate Republicans from Democrats.