Finding folk religion or animism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does seem more difficult. Might there be a connection between the healing practices of folk religions and faith healing? That’s just a guess, but that’s where I would start looking.

But I’m still unsure of to what degree that civil religion can be considered folk religion. If official religions are the veneer foisted upon a resistant, superstitious lower sort who hold onto magic, rituals, and traditions, then folk religion is a grassroots sort of movement emanating from the lowly rather than the elites. American civil religion seems much the opposite, being a construction of political parties during the early Republic who turned the Founding Fathers into secular saints and the American people into a new chosen people.

This in no way undercuts your broader point that civil religion and evangelicalism are syncretic. I could not agree with you more.

But in answer to the question you pose in your comment: I see the point you’re trying to make; certainly scholars have been debating the function of civil religion for decades. I would say that, in my assessment, civil religion does operate “outside the ‘forms of the official religion,’” especially in many fundamentalist and evangelical communities. For instance, in Bellah’s assessment of civil religion as “the official religion itself (in a cultural sense),” he argues that the term “God” functions not necessarily in describing the Judeo-Christian deity (Jehovah) but as a sort of generic term for a higher power. Yet as civil religion functions (in its Christian nationalism sense, within the “official religion” of Christian evangelical Protestantism), the term “God” certain has a more concrete and specific meaning. So even has “He” (God) blesses the nation, “He” also blesses specifically those who confess being “born again.” In this sense, civil religion functions within the “official religion,” rather than outside of it.

Of course, all this depends upon how we qualify Christian nationalist tendencies within American evangelicalism, so my point is certainly up for debate.

I’m not sure though if civil religion fits the definition of animism as the belief that all of nature is inhabited by spirits that have influence over human affairs. I would quickly agree with you that civil religion is a powerful force in American society. I’m not sure how civil religion would fits exactly. Is it a folk religion, outside the “forms of the official religion”? Or is it the official religion itself (in a cultural sense)?

Food for thought. Thanks for the contribution!

I’m curious about how we perceive this folk religion in U.S. Protestantism as problematic. Certainly within one of the fields I study (Anabaptism), scholars and theologians find the contemporary conflation of Christianity and American nationalism troubling. But should those within non-Anabaptist traditions (i.e., those traditions without a clearly defined two-kingdom theology) find such confluence similarly troubling? And without a doubt Anabaptists have their own problematic folk religions/civil religions (for more on this, see Goshen College professor Steve Miller’s essay at Religion in American History – http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2010/03/goshen-college-gets-civil-religion.html) that need to be addressed.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post!