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how many kids who have gone to school in the last 10-15 years have had any serious exposure to this American civil religion?

Probably all of them!

It’s amazing how powerful & all-pervasive American civil religion is.

Our school district is so liberal the nurses at the elementary school felt perfectly comfortable putting up the George-Bush-Curious-George printout on the wall in their office, and yet immediately after 9-11 classes were not only saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but by fourth grade a couple of years later they were starting every day singing Lee Greenwood’s “I’m proud to be an American.”

“I’m proud to be an American / Where at least I know I’m free”: that’s American civil religion.

This idea snuck up on me with my husband.

We were doing all this political battling, and meanwhile he was gobbling down books on Roosevelt in WWII & taking our son to baseball games.

Baseball games are the church of American civil religion, and when I finally got to go to one with the two of them–on a Sunday, no less–I realized my husband had “got religion.”

He has, too.

He himself says baseball games are religious experiences: he feels this consciously.

He was always a left-liberal college professor; now he’s a civil co-religionist.

Probably all Americans have civil religion, whether they want to or not. They might react against it, but they’ve got it. That’s probably the reason why dissenting liberals are so often defensive about their patriotism. Nobody’s calling them unpatriotic, they just feel unpatriotic.

The reason they feel unpatriotic is that the things they’re doing and saying go against their religion.