Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:24:10.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The “Catholic Tradition” of Christianity and the “Religion of the Republic”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Richard E. Wentz*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University

Abstract

This essay explores the theology of the Religion of the Republic (what Robert N. Bellah called civil religion in America) in order to compare it with elements in the catholic tradition of Christianity. The assumption is that the Religion of the Republic has much in common with the consensual religiosity of American evangelicalism.

Using John Williamson Nevin's “Catholicism” of the Mercersburg theology, the author provides a critique of the theology of the Republic and suggests a principle of radical catholicity which offers a profound role for the church in the destiny of the American Republic.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).Google Scholar

2 Mead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 55.Google Scholar

3 Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York: Harper & Brothers, 19371945), 4:415.Google Scholar

4 Mead, Sidney E., The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 28, 69, 76.Google Scholar

5 See Nichols, James Hasting, Romanticism in American Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961);Google Scholar also Binkley, Luther J., The Mercersburg Theology (Lancaster: Franklin and Marshall College, 1953);Google Scholar and Wentz, Richard E., “John Williamson Nevin and American Nationalism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58/4 (Winter 1990): 617–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Bellah, Robert N., “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96/1 (Winter 1967): 1.Google Scholar

7 Wilson, John F., Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

8 Brian Wilson, in a lecture delivered at Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nagoya, Japan, 1985 (notes taken by the author).

9 Beecher, Lyman, Sermons Delivered on Various Occasions (Boston: T. R. Mervin, 1828), 301–05.Google Scholar

10 May, Henry F., “Intellectual History and Religious History” in his Ideas, Faiths, and Feelings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 149.Google Scholar

11 Mead, , Nation, 118;Google Scholar see also May, , “The Religion of the Republic,” in Ideas, Faiths, and Feelings, 115–71.Google Scholar

12 May, “The Decline of Providence?” in ibid., 136-37.

13 Farrer, Austin, A Faith of Our Own (Cleveland: World, 1960), 7576.Google Scholar

14 See Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, 1967).Google Scholar

15 Cousins, Norman, ed., In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 42.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 66.

17 Quoted in Wolf, William J., The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Seabury, 1963), 158–59.Google Scholar

18 Mead, , Lively Experiment, 80.Google Scholar

19 Cousins, , In God We Trust, 19.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 63.

21 Ibid., 42 (from letter to Ezra Stiles).

22 Ibid., 35 (from Franklin's autobiography).

23 Notes on the State of Virginia” in Peterson, Merrill D., ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Viking, 1989), 286–87.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 287.

25 Gaustad, Edwin S., A Documentary History of Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 1:263.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 63.

27 Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967, 1982), 97.Google Scholar

28 Cousins, , In God We Trust, 123.Google Scholar

29 Bellah, Robert N. and Hammond, Phillip E., Varieties of Civil Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 170.Google Scholar Ralph Ketcham has recently demonstrated that Americans have tended to see their freedom and fulfillment in proportion to a lack of public burden or intrusion. There has been no great reverence for culture and nation, except as they enhance individual claims. The liberal tradition tends to validate a wild confusion of interests, passions, and impulses in which politics is a fractured process (Ketcham, Ralph, Individualism and Public Life [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987]Google Scholar).

30 Newman, John Henry, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960 [1845]);Google ScholarSchaff, Philip, The Principle of Protestantism (Chambersburg, PA: Reformed Church Publishing, 1845);Google Scholar and Nevin, John Williamson, The Mystical Presence (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1846).Google Scholar

31 Gaustad, Edwin S., Faith of Our Fathers (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 109.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 57 (my emphasis).

33 Bellah, and Hammond, , Varieties of Civil Religion, 170–71.Google Scholar

34 Bellah, Robert W., Broken Covenant (New York: Seabury, 1975), 2324.Google Scholar

35 Nevin, John Williamson, “The Sect System” (first article), Mercersburg Review 1/5 (September 1849): 499.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 497.

37 Ibid., 494.

38 Ibid., 496.

39 Nevin, John Williamson, “The Sect System” (second article), Mercersburg Review 1/7 (November 1849): 526.Google Scholar

40 Nevin, John Williamson, The Anxious Bench in Yrigoyen, Charles Jr., and Bricker, George H., eds., Catholic and Reformed Selected Theological Writings of John Williamson Nevin (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978), 106.Google Scholar

41 Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Destiny of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939, 1948), 114, 164.Google Scholar

42 Mead, , Lively Experiment, 135.Google Scholar

43 Santayana, George, Reason in Religion in Alston, William P., Religious Belief and Philosophical Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 567.Google Scholar

44 Nevin, , “Sect System,” (first article) 500–01.Google Scholar

45 See Marty, Martin E., “Scripturality: The Bible as Icon in the Republic” in his Religion & Republic (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 140–65.Google Scholar

46 Nevin, John Williamson, “Catholicism,” Mercersburg Review 3/1 (January 1851): 4.Google Scholar

47 Ibid., 5.

48 Ibid., 12.

49 Nevin, , “Catholicism,” 19.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 18.

51 Ibid., 14.

52 Nevin, John Williamson, “The Year 1848,” Mercersburg Review 1/1 (January 1849): 1044.Google Scholar