Common Sense Philosophy and American Political Theology: Preliminary Considerations

A "political theology," as I use the term here, is a society's understanding of its ultimate meaning in the context of reality as a whole, and in particular in light of what is taken to be divine or ultimate reality. Because human beings collectively as well as individually need their lives to have meaning, they will have a political theology of some sort, whether explicit or implicit, whether shaped according to religion in the traditional sense or according to the religion of man, in which the ultimate reality is "the people" or "the state" or, in the last resort, "the free individual," whose personalized quest for meaning is facilitated by the state's protection. This theologically informed societal self-interpretation may be fundamentally sound and socially uplifting or it may be dangerously distorted and destructive. To be activated and made socially effective for good or ill, political theology must take the form of what Robert Bellah once called a "civil religion," "a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity."1 [1] I take civil religion to be just political theology made operative. My basic argument in this paper is that, generally speaking, political theology and the civil religion that comes out of it will be sound to the degree they are rooted in common sense, and unsound to the extent they are not. An examination of American political theology and civil religion and their relation to American common sense will show in a concrete way, I think, the