Between Religious Nationalism and Radical Secularism

The partisanship of 1989 seems quaint to those of us observing Washington politics in 2017. As I write this, Representative Steve Scalise is in critical condition after a gunman opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball team as they practiced for their annual charity game with the Democrats. Philip Gorski, in his new book American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present, calls attention to the dangers that hyper-partisanship—religious nationalism on the right, radical secularism on the left—poses to our republic. If the American experiment is going to work at all, Gorski argues, the “vital center” must be recovered. This vital center is moored to “a common vision of the American project that is grounded in America's civil religious tradition.”