Secular State, Religious Nation? American ‘Civil Religion’ and the Paradox of Democratic Belonging

Abstract

One way that Americans have understood themselves collectively is in terms of the category ‘religion.’ Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s reading of the American Declaration of Independence, I argue that the quest for extra-democratic sources of political legitimacy, including those said to belong to ‘American civil religion,’ is motivated by the structural impossibility of providing any justification from within the democratic process for the violence required to found and regulate access to democratic states. While emphasizing the limits of civil religion, I conclude that the space historically occupied in the American imagination by the category of ‘religion’ cannot be left empty.