Imagining E Pluribus Unum: Narrating the Nation through Mediated American Civil Religion
Book
Overview
abstract
The United States has become severely polarized over the last five years with some commentators even comparing this time of entrenched division to the Civil War era. However, the impulse to unify or to make one out of many (e pluribus unum) has existed in the country from the nation’s founding and continues to echo today as politicians and social leaders call for the U.S. to come together again. American civil religion (ACR), as introduced by Bellah in 1967, is supposed to be the unifying faith tradition of the nation. Following the election of Donald Trump, scholars of U.S. religious history and public opinion writers called for a restoration of ACR, arguing that the nation needed a common faith or narrative now more than ever.; ; This dissertation responds to those calls to restore ACR by interrogating the foundation of the concept in relation to white, Protestant hegemony or the myth of the American center in the United States. Specifically, this project introduces a new approach to examining American civil religion as a set of mediated narratives that participate in the meaning-making processes about the nation, self, and other. In theorizing mediated American civil religion, this project interrogates how narratives inform thinking, feeling, and behavior about the United States as stories (re)present the nation through circulation.; ; The theory of mediated American civil religion is applied to three case studies: the progressive interfaith policy activism of a faith-based organization, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and their contemporary reimaginings, and the personal narratives of activists, politicians, and artists. In analyzing these cases a discursive tension within ACR narratives emerges. American civil religion narratives exist within a contested space that struggles between the dream of America that people articulate as the nation’s values of equality, justice, and liberty and the myth of the American center that requires assimilation to the norms and practices of the white, Protestant moral community. This research moves beyond previous work on American civil religion to take seriously the impact of media in the (re)formation of national imaginaries and to interrogate the affordances of ACR in bringing together the nation.
