/11/0' to /'IA ; R1c;4v 295 "A CIVIC RELIGION OF THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE" "A Civic Religion of the American Way of Life" 18:1 T he "new-time religion" in the land had to do with the nation itself. Of course, believers practiced their old-time religions in old and new ways in church and synagogue, at home and work and military camp. But after the Second World War and during the Cold War, the new-time religion of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and many secularists was in new ways a religion not only of the American Way of Life but of America itself. Although such a re-ligious outlook and practice had a prehistory reaching back for centuries, the emergence itself turned out to be a peculiar mid-century development. In 1955 the Jewish theologian Will Herberg, while busy defining the American world of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, worked his way through a thesaurus of terms to give an appropriate name to what he was finding. His book Protestant-Catholic-Jew included notions of a "common faith," "democracy as religion," "the democratic faith," and "the common religion," among others. Such a faith or religion was inevitable, he thought, and had its creative side. But representing as it did "a radical break with the fundamental presuppositions of both Judaism and Chris-tianity," he thought that to those who professed biblical faith "it must appear as a particularly insidious kind of idolatry." Herberg settled on the term civic faith or a "civic religion of the American Way of Life" to describe this. 18:2 With all others who spelled out this civic faith or this civic reli gion, Herberg found its chief priest in the person of a Cold Warera United States chief executive, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Should historians of American religion use presidencies to mark periods of development in the faith of the public? Ordinarily one might answer no. No one speaks of the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover-era civic religion, and few would write of Roosevelt's or Truman's elaboration of civic faith as representing a period of special development. But something new came in 1952, and it is certainly proper to speak of "the Eisenhower era" as a period and its fabrications as an incident in the unfolding of American creeds, liturgies, and practices. This contention may seem strange and hard to sustain, since the much-liked "Ike," the easily victorious generalturned-president for two terms between 1952 and 1960, seemed hardly a charismatic sort, not a likely exemplar of a faith. Reporters liked to collect his bland and meandering sayings-for instance, "Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before." Herberg was not wasting his time or ruining his focus, however,when listening to Eisenhower's use of the bully pulpit that was the White House or when watching the thirty-fourth president meander through civic rituals. Herberg, himself turning ever more politically conservative through these years, was not offended by the administration of Ike. But he had to be wary when he read the Republican National Committee's official resolution of February 17, 1955, which said that the president "in every sense of the word, is not only the political leader, but the spiritual leader of our times." The spiritual leader. Such a fusion of political and spiritual leadership in the person of an elected leader in a republic, Herberg said, was "in accord with neither the American democratic idea nor the tradition of Jewish-Christian faith." Yet few seemed to mind, and many welcomed that fusion. The political exploitation of the "President's religion" aroused little comment. If religion was the "spiritual" side of being an American, Herberg asked, "why should not the President of the United States be hailed as the ,spiritual leader of our times'?" America's spiritual leader could have gotten nowhere had the 18: president come across to anyone as a rival to the leadership of church and synagogue. Even a popular president would have been in trouble had his faith been perceived by ordinary citizens as a competitor of the faiths professed by men, women, and children in the new suburbs, the changing cities, the old-time towns and country. Herberg even reported on Eisenhower's delighting in 294296 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 297 "A CIVIC RELIGION OF THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE" bragging about church religion. In 1954 the president told the Evanston, Illinois, assembly of the World Council of Churches, and thus religious leaders far beyond America, that "contrary to what many people think, the percentage of our population belong-ing to churches [has] steadily increased. In a hundred years, that percentage has multiplied more than three times." Yet Eisenhower was not needed in the crowded rank of ministers, priests, and rabbis within formal religious institutions and organized religion. His priesthood was part of his role as leader of a "crusade," as he called it, against "godless Communism" abroad and "corruption and materialism" at home. Not since Woodrow Wilson had such language of crusading idealism in the name of faith been heard in the White House. "The things that make us proud to be Americans are of the soul and of the spirit," Eisenhower declared. And being American, for a president who was baptized and who joined a church for the first time after having been elected, meant being a theist. For the American Legion's "Back to God" campaign in 1955 Eisenhower argued that "Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life." 18:5 Should theism be a part of the law of the land? What council could provide the creed or code to spell it out? The final arbiter was the United States Supreme Court, speaking for the judicial branch of government. And define it did. Ironically, it was this Court that for a moment at mid-century had made a theistic reference in the very years when many church members thought it was turning too humanistic. But just as Eisenhower was broadening Woodrow Wilson's notion that America was a "Christian nation" to his own claim that it was a "religious nation," so the Supreme Court was also instinctively widening its claims. In 1931 in United States v. Macintosh their predecessors had written for a last time, "We are a Christian people." Now in 1952 a dictum of Justice William O. Douglas, seen as a humanist and secularist by Court critics, was included in a ruling concerning "released-time"