Imagining E Pluribus Unum:
Narrating the Nation Through Mediated American Civil Religion
An impulse to unify, or make one out of many, has informed the national imaginary and narrative since its inception from Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” print to the idea of the nation as a “melting pot” of cultures. Since the election of Donald J. Trump, entrenched polarization makes national unity appear to be a thing of the past, especially with rising debates over the meaning of core symbols and values of the U.S.––the flag, equality, and opportunity. Most scholars of American civil religion (ACR), including Robert Bellah, Philip Gorski, and Richard T. Hughes, have argued it is a tradition that transcends religious and sectarian differences to unify the nation within “a heritage of moral and religious experience” found in U.S. history and its democratic values (Bellah 1967). This research sees the nation as requiring a restoration of American civil religion in order to remedy increasing divisions (Gorski 2016; Carlson 2017). Other scholarship, with the aim of formulating a more inclusive ACR, notes how American civil religion does not always include the many of the United States (Demerath & Williams 1985; Hughes 2003; McDonald 2013). Both sets of scholarship emphasize the rhetorical expressions of American civil religion within institutions of power and historical remembering. However, they have not addressed the question of whether American civil religion, at its foundation, perpetuates narratives and systems of power that reinforce exclusion and division rather than unify the nation. These discourses, thus far, have also overlooked the role of media and the embodied practices of citizenship in the (re)construction of American civil religion. The lacuna of mediation in studies on ACR ignores the reality that media is central to contemporary culture, politics, and the social constructions of worldviews.
My dissertation attends to these gaps by analyzing American civil religion as a social practice of knowledge production about the nation, self, and other through public mediation and embodiment. In particular, I examine ACR as a set of narratives that are entangled with an American myth of the center where white, Protestant norms are universalized.[1] I employ textual analysis, participant observation, and ethnographic interviews within a hybrid theoretical frame that incorporates cultural studies, mediation theory, and affect theory. These methods and theories allow me to attend to the affordances of American civil religion in its capacity as a producer of imaginaries through narratives depicted in media and enacted in civil society. I conclude that a discursive tensions exists within American civil religion narratives that wrestles with attempts to realize the values and principles of the nation’s founding as the dream of America while reckoning with the country’s past and the white, Protestant hegemony that often frames national discourses.
I analyze the place of American civil religion in media constructions of national imaginaries and their embodied productions through three case studies: the progressive religious policy activism of an organization in a major U.S. city, the artwork of Norman Rockwell and Shepard Fairey, and the personal narratives and media consumptions of activists and artists. I argue that these three cases offer a holistic understanding of the role of media and embodied practice in the production and circulation of American civil religion’s myth of the center.
This project is organized into three sections––a preface, the body of the dissertation, and reflexive interludes. The preface accounts for two seminal moments in current events that took place during my research and how they provide opportunities to expand the project’s analysis. The introduction grounds the research within the context of a post-2016 United States while also outlining important terminology and the project’s methodology. Chapter Two outlines the interdisciplinary theoretical model that accounts for (1) the role of media in the production of knowledge and reproduction of power, (2) the importance of narrative and storytelling in mediated American civil religion, and (3) the place of American civil religion in public civil society and performances of citizenship. Chapter Three situates American civil religion within the tradition of American religious history and highlights the dominance of a Protestant imaginary within U.S. scholarship on religion and within in ACR literature. The next three chapters present and analyze the case studies. The first case study analyzes examines expressions of organized civic activity in the work of a progressive interfaith organization. The second case study interrogates the work of Norman Rockwell to interrogate visual narratives of the United States. The final case explores how individuals narrate the U.S. and affectively understand their place within the nation. Each case attends to tensions of inclusion and exclusion.
The interludes that precede each case study serve as spaces to locate myself within my research. This recognizes the emic nature of my work and positions me as the researcher and scholar within the influence of American civil religion. I attend to the ways my position as a privileges U.S. citizen impacts my research through these interludes.
This project’s critique of American civil religion argues that this seemingly unifying tradition actually universalizes the particular, challenging the reality of the contemporary U.S. as a nation of multiple imaginaries. In short, I claim that American civil religion exists within a contested space that wants to imagine the nation as a collective rather than as a union of assimilation. The discursive tension within American civil religion narratives confronts the idea of the one from the many in order to re-imagine the nation in terms of its values and principles divorced from white, Protestant hegemony.