Building the City on a Hill: Reviewing "American Covenant"

Philip Gorski's book on American civil religion, “American Covenant,” is hardly a collection of pious poetry, but it does show the marks of an intellectual “lumper” (who harmonizes apparently incompatible topics for the sake of a larger good) as opposed to a “splitter” (who makes fine distinctions). Mr. Gorski, a sociology professor at Yale University, hopes to overcome the continuing antagonism between American believers and skeptics and to find the kind of “vital center” proposed in 1949 by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The author creates a canon of American thinkers—he calls them “republican prophets”—that combined the best of national religious and political ideals. His list runs through American history and includes George Washington,Frederick Douglass,Reinhold Niebuhr,John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams,Hannah Arendt,Martin Luther King Jr., John Courtney Murray and Barack Obama.