Nation et religion aux États Unis / Nation and Religion in the United States

In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions: ASSR, Band 83, Heft 1, S. 11-24

Abstract

The 1787 Constitution and its first amendment guarantee Church-State separation and freedom of conscience for the citizens. Nevertheless the United States is not "laic" in the French way. The frontier between religion and politics is not that impervious for since the XVIIIth century's national creation a civic religion that sacralizes the Nation (rather the state which warrants the Nation's perenniality) has been giving citizens a common faith, having its own myths, its own rituals and its own saints. This civic religion has two primary functions: it legitimizes the Nation by giving it God as a protecting and guiding godfather; it concretizes the nation itself by taking the place of missing elements such as a territory, ancestors, a common history, a homogeneous culture, a common past.
Civic religion is diffused by the clergy of the revealed religions as well as by politicians. The ever tighter alliance between fundamentalist movements and political conservatives drives it over the very limits of Church-State separation.
Civic religion has overcome the shocks of recent American history (Watergate, Vietnam war, ...) that shook it momentarily but till now didn't find a way out in its attempts to transcend the contradictions of a multi-cultural society within which inequalities go deeper and deeper.