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63 RethinkingtheCivilReligion Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies Jay Mechling Several years ago I inherited from my good friend and colleague, David S. Wilson, an undergraduate course entitled “Religion in American Lives.” I had been teaching an undergraduate course on “Technology, Science, and American Culture,” which examines science as a belief system and compares that belief system with other systems of belief and practices, including religion. Murphey’s essay “On the Relation between Science and Religion,” which argues that the culture critic has no meaningful grounds for making a distinction between the two systems, governs my perspective in teaching the science and technology course, so taking on the religion course meant teaching the same idea, but entering the network of systems through another door.1 The title of the course, “Religion in American Lives,” wonderfully captures the William Jamesian approach begun by my colleague and continued in my teaching. Just as James was interested in the multiple “varieties of religious experience ,” from the ordinary to the extraordinary, I am interested in students ’ understanding the broad range of experiences we should count as “religious .”2 The sociology of knowledge and belief provides the theoretical base for the course, represented (for example) by the work of sociologist Peter L. Berger, but also by folklorists and others who do the ethnographic, microsociological study of the ways people construct and maintain knowledge and practices that the people consider religious. The goals of the course reflect this orientation as well as my view that American Studies should be defined as a way of thinking about American materials rather than as a field defined by the materials. I do not aim to “cover” American religion(s) through some checklist of facts the students must acquire. Being clear on the goals of a course goes a long way toward imagining how to make selections about course readings, nonverbal texts, writing assignments, and other learning activities. The interdisciplinary study of religious experiences has had an uneven 64 JAY MECHLING history within American Studies scholarship and teaching. While historians of American religion were instrumental in founding the field at schools like Yale and in the pages of the American Quarterly, only a relatively small cadre of teachers and scholars continues the tradition in the 1990s. Many American Studies teachers largely ignore a cultural system of beliefs and practices that the majority of Americans testify is the most important thing in their everyday lives. Nor is the rising stock of cultural studies within American Studies very promising for the study of religion. The absence of religion in most cultural studies is all the more puzzling when one realizes that a central question in postcolonial, post-nationalist American Studies is the viability of “the nation” itself as the proper category for understanding world cultures. Perhaps the same Marxian roots that lead cultural critics to look at global capitalism as a transnational engine of culture also lead to the purposeful neglect or, worse, disdain of religion as mere superstructure to the more important base of the political economy. Still, one would think that the transnational nature of most major religions would make their study an appropriate topic for a post-nationalist American Cultural Studies. Actually, there is a growing body of scholarship on the ways particular religions cross borders, but most of this work does not ask some of the synthetic and integrative questions that American Studies scholars are inclined to pose.3 My aim in this essay is to place the study of religion at the heart of the emerging post-nationalist American Studies. I propose here a conceptual map for organizing work on religion from several disciplines. A workable notion of the “civil religion” in the United States and in other societies needs to be at the center of our thinking about religion in a postnationalist , postmodern world. A post-nationalist notion of the American civil religion sets aside the older, nationalist understandings of American “exceptionalism” but is not afraid to ask whether there are some “religious” aspects of the narratives that dominate public discourse in the United States. The scholar searching for a post-nationalist understanding of the civil religion also might look for certain ideas shared across the particular religious systems practiced in the United States. A post-nationalist notion of the civil religion also recognizes that religious communities often are transnational, crossing borders and interrupting all sorts of generalizations the scholar might want to make about “national” cultures.4...

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