Thinking this Memorial Day about American civil religion and something it seems we’ve lost over the last few years – something essential to who we once liked to believe we are.

For better or worse, we take for granted a certain amount of ceremonial deism in public life: In God We Trust, God Bless the USA, etc. But for sociologist Robert Bellah, who shaped how we now use the term, American civil religion ran deeper.

The marriage of religious nationalism and corporate interests that made us “One Nation Under God” in the 1950s, as @KevinMKruse explains, is a different story. American civil religion for Bellah was primarily about sacrifice.

As Bellah first described it in 1967, since the entwined tragedies of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, many Americans have viewed the nation’s story through the far older religious narrative of those that die so others might live.

The 20th century provided further examples: WWI, WWII, JFK, MLK, RFK… Stories of American martyrs drew on Christian tradition but were not precisely Christian stories; they were rather moments allowing religious themes to be applied to national mythology.

For Bellah, Memorial Day was the high holiday of American civil religion. At the height of its popular observance, it was a national ritual of sacrifice. Americans pausing to reflect upon the war dead provided a somber counterpoint to the pure celebration of Independence Day.

With covid there are few parades this weekend but it seems the spirit of Memorial Day as Bellah described it ended long before now. Though it's been some time coming, the recent reason is obvious: Trumpism knows no sacrifice. Obsessed with winning, it finds no meaning in loss.

This presents a problem for the crisis we now face, because the only way forward is acknowledgement of sacrifice. This is not an argument about what should be done, but a recognition that none of the paths available is easy. There is no way out without loss.

In normal times one of two things might happen now: First, the president could say, “I know this is hard. Staying at home for weeks or months more is a sacrifice. But we do it because it will save lives, including our most vulnerable. We do this for them.”

Or, the president could say, “I know this is hard. Reopening the country will mean more people will die. But if we don’t do it we'll experience economic hardships with ripples effects that will also include more deaths. So we will do it as cautiously as we can.”

It’s easy to imagine any other president saying either of these things - think of Reagan after the Challenger disaster or Obama singing Amazing Grace – because all drew on American civil religion’s understanding of sacrifice. But Trump sees experiencing loss only as losing.

If only doing exactly what you want when you want is winning, then wearing a mask is losing. Social distancing is losing. Being inconvenienced in any way is losing. This is the heart of the reopen protests. When did patriotism start to mean being a jerk and calling it freedom?

Memorial Day was never about winning. Instead it asks: What do we do with loss? How do we struggle with it & remember the dead in ways that help the living build a better nation? That’s the core of American civil religion, and I fear it's a faith we’re losing every day. /END