America’s Fighting Faith: The writer examines American civil religion and its influence on American foreign policy as these themes are related in the book, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest by Walter A. McDougall (Yale University Press, 2016). “Civil religion may once have described a kind of ecumenism. It now means little. It is a set of oratorical and political habits that developed in societies built around transcendent truths—religious societies. In our time, those truths have been jostled from public view by various secular principles, from hedonism to consumerism to human rights. The problem is that citizens are unlikely to rally to faddish principles as they once did to transcendent truths. Civil religion describes the effort to pass off the former as the latter. It cannot succeed indefinitely.”
