Civil Religion, The Tea Party, and the Constitution

In our chapter on civic culture, we discuss the concepts of civil religion and American exceptionalism. In The New York Times, Samuel Freedman applies these ideas to the "tea party" movement:

Rather than viewing the Tea Party as a political phenomenon — rather than wondering if it is populist or Republican or reactionary — one might better understand it through the prism of religion.

Seen through such a frame, the Constitution is the Tea Party’s bible, and that holy book is embraced as an inerrant text. The denunciations of the Progressive movement, the New Deal and the Great Society by the Tea Party and its de facto televangelist, Glenn Beck, recall the religious battles throughout American history between literalists and interpreters of Scripture.

And this conflation of civic and sacred, this expression of what scholars call “Constitution worship,” has roots that long predate the Tea Party. Some trace back to the implicit spirituality of America’s self-image as a chosen people, the image of this nation as a city on a hill. Others, paradoxically, derive from the founding fathers’ decision not to establish a state religion, which left a certain kind of belief or faith looking to attach itself to something else nationalistic.

“There’s a strong strand of divine-guidance thinking, thinking about American exceptionalism,” said Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at Cornell University. “People have certainly seen the texts of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the equivalent of a secular religion, with the idea then that you can’t challenge these texts.”