Rites (and Wrongs) of Democracy

The Catholic Thing

I am not sad to be living abroad during this election season. The Atlantic may not be a complete buffer from all the silliness and vitriol swamping American democracy, but it's at least a filter.
My diagnosis of our civic decadence is hardly original: the connection between the increasing dysfunction of American public life and a decline in religious belief and practice is hard to overlook. Religion, after all, provides a horizon of meaning and values capable of transcending partisan conflicts. Since mailing in my ballot a few weeks ago, however, I've been reflecting on one particular dimension of American dysfunction. I'm a sacramental theologian, so I've been thinking about civic rituals.
Some sixteen thousand years ago, St. Augustine argued that visible rites are necessary to hold religious communities together. Take away such rites, he warned, and societies won't cohere. (Contra Faustum 19.11) Today we would call his observation "sociology of religion" rather than theology since he thought that it applied to both true and false religions. Over the past several decades an academic field dedicated to how and why rites work - ritual studies - has emerged, shaking off the anti-ritual biases of much 19th-century religious scholarship.
Augustine was writing specifically about religious communities, but his observations apply to civic life as well. Robert Bellah's 1967 article "Civil Religion in America" argued that American political society relies upon a common heritage of religious symbolism that overlaps with the diverse religious commitments of its citizens. This heritage includes beliefs, rhetoric, narratives, and a stock of civic ceremonies that strike spiritual chords - from singing the National Anthem at baseball games to invocations at the inauguration of presidents.
None of these, of course, are the equivalent of sacraments. Augustine's explanation gives one reason religious rituals are necessary, but it's hardly the most important. Civil religion can't promise salvation and, when it comes to ultimate meaning, is at best a supplement to the far richer spiritual life provided by genuine religious confessions. Part of the promise of the American republic, after all, is to protect the free expression of those confessions. But civil religion at least fosters common values necessary for a diverse people to live together as a nation.
So even if they're theologically thin, civil rites are necessary. Whether royal coronations or election night concession speeches, these rites help to legitimize the power that governments exercise over their people. For all our democratic rhetoric about the "will of the people," what exactly this phrase means is hardly self-evident. Receiving fifty percent of the votes plus one doesn't guarantee just governance.
Abraham Lincoln won the most consequential election in American history with just 39.8 percent of the popular vote. In Europe, parliamentary systems often empower losing parties. The Founding Fathers' instinct to shield our nation from the brute will of the people through a system of checks and balances - a republic, not pure democracy - seems especially sound today.
Whatever happens on November 5, the result will represent, at most, the grudging will of about half of us. We need a bit of ceremony to convince ourselves to go along with that.
Ceremony helps because ritual works through symbols; it places political actions into a symbolic framework that suggests a larger meaning. We may not be happy about the results of a particular election, but invoking the flag, sunrise over Fort McHenry, and the Constitution all help us to remember the larger project to which we are committed and of which any particular electoral result is but one moment.
One of our recent problems - neither the greatest nor the least - is that our past several elections have been ritual disasters. America's civic rites are rather spare - Habsburgs or Windsors we are not - but that makes the few we have even more e...