“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”

In dealing somewhat lightheartedly with the issue of the deification of Washington, I don’t mean to downplay the importance of American civic religion. In a country that has eschewed an established church (at the federal level in 1791, but only later in some states), and therefore lacks the unifying power of, for example, the Orthodox church in Russia or Islam in Saudi Arabia, that civic “religion” has been important in building the sense of an American nation.

In this more-cynical age, the civic religion idea has lost much of its power. There are those who argue that there is a dark side to it. While I think we’ve lost something valuable that way, with consequences for our national polity, I have to agree that some expressions of it have been a bit over-the-top. And, of course, for those of us who are adherents of monotheistic religions, making gods of our civic leaders borders on the blasphemous.