The Holy Day of Our Civic Religion

That hardly anyone believes in or practices anymore, but there is real greatness there to be rediscovered and celebrated.

Happy Independence Day, America …

In America, today is Independence Day. Or simply, “The Fourth.” As a holiday, it’s been completely emptied of meaning. Now it’s just a day off work and an excuse to fire up the grill, drink beer, and watch fireworks. However, I am somehow old enough to have grown up in a time and place where it was still celebrated as the High Holy Day of our civic religion. If Washington’s birthday was our Christmas, then Independence Day was our Easter, the dawn of a new creation in which the will of heaven was brought into perfect alignment with the government of men.

Obviously, by the time I was being brought up in this civic religion, that golden age was a distant memory, but the faith itself was still strong and continued to claim the loyalty and affection of millions of Americans. We had our pantheon of heroic demigods, immortalized in our monuments, and we had our mythologized accounts of their heroic deeds. We had out holy texts, to wit, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, copies of which were proudly displayed like Torah scrolls in our public buildings. As schoolchildren, we memorized The Preamble to The Constitution and dutifully recited The Pledge of Allegiance like it was The Lord’s Prayer.

There were competing civic religions — Marxism and its kindred ideologies: Cynicism, Masochism, Diabolism, Faggotism, and Nihilism — that were worming their way into the culture from the beachheads they had established in California and New York. We were on the cusp of “winning the Cold War.” Sadly, it would be a Pyrrhic Victory. We were like the rabid dog in Old Yeller: we had won the fight against the Soviet cougar (or bear), only to find that during the struggle we had been infected with its deadly mind-virus of Bolshevism, and that our illness was terminal. Between the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed, we had become the very enemy we were purportedly fighting.

The most devastating civic religion of all was a heresy known as Consumerism, which hijacked the appeal of “Freedom” and applied it only to the acquisition and conspicuous consumption of status symbols, never to the pursuit of virtue or the exercise of strength. Eventually, acquisition was dropped — after all, how can you be “free” if you still have to pay for what you consume? — and all that remained was an increasingly gluttonous and insatiable appetite for consumption. Of course, the empty pursuit of carnal pleasures ends up in some really dark places. As the chorus of the Guns ‘N Roses song Mr. Brownstone says,

I used to do a little,

But a little wouldn’t do it,

So the little got more and more.

I just keep trying to get a little better,

Said a little better than before …

Eventually, when your entire life is based around the pleasure of mere consumption, it feeds a cycle of addiction that ends only in debauchery and decadence, and that has certainly been the case with America and our consumerist lifestyle. Consuming no longer produces the dopamine hit it once did. As another Guns ‘N Roses song puts it,

And when you’re high,

You never, ever want to come down …

Because when you come down from your mind-blowing (and character-destroying) high, you are confronted with the mess that your life has become during your long and reckless binge. And so it has been with the American people, as our wild night on Pleasure Island ended in a terrible hangover and ruined culture, wrecked infrastructure, and institutions occupied by an enemy cabal.

Why did all these heresies and poisonous ideologies take over? Because we had a child’s understanding of our civic religion.

It’s like a kid that grows up going to church and really believing it. He participates in all the rituals. He reads and rereads all the stories and performs in all the pageantry. He fasts when he’s supposed to fast and feasts when he’s supposed to feast. He’s really into it. But then he notices the discrepancies between what he observes in the church and what he reads about in the Gospels. He notices that if you really follow each platitude the church professes to its logical conclusion, you end up in a maze of contradictions. He asks questions — simple, natural, and innocent questions at first, but his good-faith questions are met with bad-faith sophistry, so he becomes more sophisticated and cynical in the kinds of questions he asks and objections he raises. Eventually, he becomes one of those annoyingly self-righteous and absurdly evangelical New Atheists. Having failed to find gold in a cesspool, he concludes that there is no such thing as gold and that it’s all shit, with some of the dried shit painted yellow and passed off as gold by unscrupulous con men. Of course, the kid’s new religious belief is just as ridiculous and empty as the one he is in revolt against, only worse: now he is not only stupidly naive, but he is smug and contemptuous to boot; not only does he identify with his beliefs, but now he identifies with how smart and clever his beliefs demonstrate him to be. Now he has an extra layer of Pride shielding him from Truth.

As Americans, when we deified our Founders and conflated the manifest destinies of God’s heavenly kingdom with our own earthly republic, we erred. But when we saw through the propaganda of “America First!” and then revolted against it by embracing the propaganda of “America Last!”, we erred even more. Whereas the provincial flag-waving simpletons may have been easy marks for the jingoism of war profiteers¹, the cynical simpletons who occupied Wall Street and marched for BLM have been an even easier mark for the Globohomo hypnotists. Not only did the cynics identify with a cartoonish ideology, but they identified even more strongly with how smart and sophisticated they were by virtue of their ideology. “The ignorant masses believe X, but I believe Y; believing in Y shows that I am clever and good!” But as it became obvious that (just like “X”) “Y” was based on harmful deceptions, many of these sophisticated cynics were unable to distance themselves from their belief in “Y,” because they identified too strongly with the sense of intellectual and moral superiority that their belief in “Y” gave them.

The reality is that America’s Founders were men, not gods, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t great men. Like all men, they had their flaws. Like all men, they sometimes acted selfishly and then rationalized their self-interest using high-flown moral language. But unlike most men, America’s Founders sometimes acted heroically and achieved great things in the face of extraordinary danger and hardship.

If we had lived in Pagan times, we might have found a more apt religious symbol, not in some biblical “city on a hill,” but in Mount Olympus. The British monarchy were like the Titans; the American Founders were like the gods who dethroned them. Perhaps the Titans had been good in their day, but their king, Cronus, had become a despot who had to be removed from power in order for Zues and his brethren to ascend to their divine destiny. Of course, Zues was far from perfect, but he was the hero of some grand epic sagas from his own revolutionary war, and his victory made possible a new golden age of high Hellenic culture.

Instead of Mount Olympus, we have Mount Rushmore, and at the head of our Rushmorian Pantheon we have George Washington. There are real heroic stories to be told of this great man. For example, in an excellent post comparing the military culture of our Pride-ful age with that of the Continental Army,

Chris Bray

recounts the tale of how Washington calmed the Newburgh Rebellion.² Here are some excerpts (but of course, you really must read the whole post):

The American Revolution ended in 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown, but it ended ended in 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was finally signed. That meant two years when the war was over but the war wasn’t over, and the Americans held their army in camp . . . sometimes being paid and supplied but more often not. Some were nearing personal ruin, burdened with debt from unpaid service and families abandoned for years on struggling farms.

So a group of Continental Army officers wrote to the Continental Congress in 1782 with a two-part warning about pay and postwar pensions: First, maybe they’d just give up and go home without waiting for a successful treaty, leaving the country unprotected; but second, maybe they wouldn’t disband when the treaty came back, remaining at the head of a large group of armed men in a new nation with weak institutions. Not a subtle hint, that last part . . .

An anonymous letter circulated, telling men that their new nation was sending them a message with its conduct: “Go, starve, and be forgotten!” The officers called a meeting to discuss their next moves against a government that was treating them with scandalous neglect.

Washington showed up. Uninvited, unexpected, he walked in and asked to speak. He’d prepared some written comments, and he read them to the assembled officers. But one of the things he said isn’t preserved in this handwritten document, because he added a gesture that wasn’t on the page, reported later by men who had seen it: He struggled to read the document, and pulled out his reading glasses — weakly, with his hand shaking. And he said, quietly, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.”

. . . [L]ater accounts suggest that men gasped and sobbed, overcome with shame. Of course you've suffered, Washington was telling them, and of course you’ve sacrificed, and of course people who haven’t been at your side through the trial don’t understand what you’ve done. He showed them: Their leader wore down his body without complaint, demonstrating forbearance and self-abnegation while serving in a profession of honor. He had grown almost blind in the service of his country, but he continued to serve. He was, what word am I looking for, a soldier.

There’s something familiar in that story that we also see in the anecdote of Napoleon facing the 5th Regiment and saying, “Soldiers, do you recognize me? If there is one amongst you who wishes to kill your Emperor, here I am,”³ and of course, rather than killing him, the soldiers embraced him in joyous celebration. Or maybe it’s like the scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus is reunited with Telemachus; though still essentially in exile, the reunion brings newfound hope and recommitment. You don’t command that type of loyalty and affection from your men without earning it.

America’s Founders were men, but they were truly great men. The Constitution is a manmade text, but it is a truly great manmade text. The American Experiment was a human creation, but it was a truly great human creation. And that greatness is still very much worth celebrating.

Happy Independence Day. As Alex Jones has frequently quipped, “The answer to 1984 is 1776.”

1. See, War Is a Racket by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, available at: https://archive.org/details/warisracket00smed_0

2. Sexy Battlefield Selfies

3. The Route Napoléon - napoleon.org: https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/places/the-route-napoleon/