For me, God can not be limited to our thinking that rewards and punishes the objects of his creation. Figuring out how to remove personal information from internet sites and data brokers can be a real chore, It can be unnerving to enter your own name into a search engine and see results about you that may include your address, age, phone number and more. Can you remember the best of the best from that era? An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place and of its polemical use on the slavery issue, which corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era. Until the Civil War, the American civil religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The national magistrate, whatever his private religious views, operates under the rubrics of the civil religion as long as he is in his official capacity, as we have already seen in the case of Kennedy.

I am not at all convinced that the leaders of the churches have consistently represented a higher level of religious insight than the spokesmen of the civil religion. The churches opposed neither the Revolution nor the establishment of democratic institutions. The great number of the war dead required the establishment of a number of national cemeteries. Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Memorial Day, which grew out of the Civil War, gave ritual expression to the themes we have been discussing. With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the new civil religion. Just three years ago we participated in a vivid reenactment of the sacrifice theme in connection with the funeral of our assassinated President. It is the site of the one important new symbol to come out of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; more recently it has become the site of the tomb of another martyred President and its symbolic eternal flame.

It’s not easy being on top, but it’s also not easy to pick out an outfit. If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity. At its height, the group was believed to have as many as seventy million followers; a 2017 Freedom House estimates that seven to twenty million people continue to practice despite nearly two decades of persecution. Two identical snowflakes: statistical hokum? Non-Muslims are also not aware of the fact thatin Islam, there are two major sects which are Shia and Sunni. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. But inevitably the issue of slavery as the deeper cause of the conflict had to be faced.

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the American republic has never really been tried and that victory in the Revolutionary War was more the result of British preoccupation elsewhere and the presence of a powerful ally than of any great military success of the Americans.