Date of Award
Spring 2023
Degree Type
Open Access Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Religion, MA
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Daniel Ramirez
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Tyler Reny
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2023 José Andrés Serrano
Keywords
Civil religion, Conservative, American Democracy, Liberal, Polarization, Theoretical
Subject Categories
Political Science | Religion
Abstract
This thesis seeks to build upon and provide a new interpretation of civil religion in the United States. In it, the history of civil religion from the 1960s, starting with Bellah, to the 2010s will be analyzed for any themes still used in the 2020s. Similarly, understanding what a religion is within this time frame will be broken apart and examined to see how it paralleled the evolution of political understanding. Building upon its history, the paper will break into four prominent chapters: Is American Democracy Like a Civil Religion?, Religious Characteristics in the American Government, American Democracy as a Civil Religion, and The Darkness of Civil Religion. Through this analysis, this thesis will definitively answer that the United States’ government is a civil religion.
ISBN
9798379900472
Recommended Citation
Serrano, José Andrés. (2023). Divine Democracy: Examining the Intersection of Religion and Politics in Civil Religion. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 559. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/559.
