CIVIL RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

...Out of the traditional Puritan myth of an elect people on God's errand to find a perfect society came a new myth that soon was taken up in the middle and southern colonies because it responded to their needs as well as those of New England...

...The Camera of My Fam|ll CATHERINE HANF NOREN Knop/, $20 Hannah's Daughters: ~|x Generations of ass American Family: 1876.1976 DOROTHY GA~AG~R Crowell, $10.95 SAM BASS WARNER, JrR...

...Albanese's use of the methodology 30 September 1977:628 and language of the history of religions is illuminating but seems overdrawn at times in applying categories developed from the study of pre-logical societies to an advanced one like the United States...

...Albanese is quite aware of this, yet there is still a somewhat static quality to the Puritan myth that she sets up in contrast to the new myth that replaced it...

...Both artfully...

...Sons o/ the Fathers is an attempt to explore the genesis of the peculiar national identity that our forefathers made for us through the experience of the Revolution...

...The liberty tree was the chief religious symbol in the establishment of the myth and the Sons of Liberty the missionaries for spreading the civil religion of the Revolution...

...The religion had its demonology also...

...Unfortunately her natural style is somewhat marred by an overuse of the turgid jargon of the disciplines she utilizes, creating at times the two-in-one effect that Albanese finds so prevalent in the paradoxical character of Americans...

...222) This rings particularly true in the aftermath of the rites of self-celebration that preoccupied us during the Bicentennial...

...She is a gifted writer whose language has a freshness to it that matches the originality of her approach...

...The myth grew basically out of the Puritan tradition but transcended it...

...The Constitution was the embodiment of the New Covenant that we had made, not with God, but with ourselves (This all seems to make the Constitution church, scripture, and sacrament...

...Emory Elliott has recently examined the struggles of the second and third generations of Puritans to free themselves from a filiopietism that condemned the sons for being unfaithful to the heroic ways of their fathers (Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England...

...In the past decade a good deal of scholarly heat has been generated over the nature and content of this religion, its relationship to traditional religions, its present vitality, and indeed its very existence...

...What she illuminates about the civil religion of the Revolution is that it is largely idolatrous in passing off what is man-made as transcendent...

...In fact the real God was man...

...Liberty became interchangeable as a value with property, which now became a man-made transcendent, having the sacred character previously associated with divine beings...

...The new myth described the new order of the ages that Americans saw themselves inaugurating as the first colonial people in modern history to win their independence and to establish a government on the principle that the people could rule themselves...

...It seems significant that it took us two years to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of our birth as a nation whereas England, a much older and deeper rooted nation, found a week adequate time to mark the silver jubilee of its national personification, Elizabeth II...

...Understanding religion as the fundamental way in which one orients oneself to the world, the author sees the American Revolution as constituting in itself a religious experience which provided the fundamental basis for the national faith which academicians now denote as civil religion...

...The use of totemism for instance, to explain the relationship between Washington and his countrymen, fails to convince, particularly in light of the ambiguous evidence she cites regarding his popularity...

...The new myth was essentially man-centered...

...One wonders too whether that man-centered myth established itself as dominantly as she suggests...

...The Patriots succeeded because, among other things, they had a better story to tell than the Loyalists...

...Albanese shows that the jeremiad was alive and well in mideighteenth century America...

...Militarism became the form of a new conversion experience that transported Americans into a religious universe that centered on American society and demanded the ultimate sacrifice as a proof of loyalty to the national sovereignty...

...Sons o/ the Fathers is another reminder of the subtle ways we have of making God in our own image...

...Although she handles her materials with sophistication and weaves an intricate account of the genesis of this religion, one wonders whether she has sufficiently caught the complexity of the shift of consciousness that produced the communal sense of being American...

...The secular character of the Constitution underscores for the author the essential humanocentric character of the new religion which the Constitution institutionalized...

...The Revolution thus became the Exodus by which the sons freed themselves from the fathers to become canters of power and authority in their own right...

...Albanese's study is valuable for showing that American civil religion during this formative period very much had its own content...

...Catherine Noren's The Camera o~ My Family is a book of family pictures with a text of letters and a little connecting nar, rative...

...The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are, in Albanese's exposition, not the sacred scriptures but the chief sacraments of the new religion insofar as they ensure the continual regeneration of the republic...

...George Washington thus became not only the metaphorical father of his country but the collective symbol of the divinity that is in all Americans, a first among equals...

...That myth, she argues persuasively, had great power in providing a center for identification and compelling Americans to action...

...She cites the appropriateness of applying disciplines associated with the study of primitives inasmuch as the United States is finding itself more and more in a primifive-like situation in which the explicit religious dimension occupies a smaller and smaller compartment of people's lives while the implicit religious dimension gives individuals their basic identity and values...

...For instance, she makes much of the universal consciousness of the Revolutionary generation in contrast to their Englishminded ancestors, which does not seem to do justice to the universalist dimensions within American Puritanism itself as John Winthrop's famous symbol of the city on the hill connotes...

...An important part of that business by the third quarter of the eighteenth century was securing their independence, not only from England but from the myth of their fathers...

...Standing as a deposit of faith against which all future experience would be judged, the Constitution, Albanese concludes, was simply Liberty Tree reborn in a form to endure through time...

...Dorothy Gallagher's Hannah's Daughters, is an edited series of interviews with a few family pictures...

...Noren's family are German Jews, victims and escapees of the Nazi holocaust...

...Albanese sets out an inner history of the national consciousness that emerged under the pressure of the events that made us a separate people...

...Oallagher's family consists of six generations of American women who are fodder for our nation's urbanization...

...These are two highly readable and moving books in the modern genre of do-it-yourself history...

...Any religion worth its salt represents some~ing more than a "social construction of reality," some other that transcends our experience...

...The ostensible god of the new religion was Nature's God, the divinity of reason who as the Great Commonweal: 627 Governor was predisposed to leave the disposition of human events to men themselves who acted in accordance with natural law...

...Utility became the chief value and useful knowledge became the summum bonum of education in the new republic...

...Such moralism had implications for self-reliance and individualism that would shape the patriots' attitude toward the political confrontation that began with the Stamp Act crisis in 1763...

...The sons were still walking very much in the fathers' shadows, but paradoxically the jeremiad was psychologically freeing them, as it had freed their ancestors of the late seventeenth century, to pursue their own business...

...So she analyzes spoken word and written, ballads, rituals, toasts and other artifacts of the period to tap the hidden assumptions of late eighteenth century Americans and to trace the subtle shift in consciousness and sensibilities that produced the myth of the Revolution...

...When one considers that a majority of the Continental Congress and 52 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons, one can agree with Albanese that the Brotherhood "subtly operated as a vehicle for the promulgation of a new religious structure" which emphasized virtue, self-fulfillment and the exaltation of reason...

...Where this leaves the Masons I'm not sure...

...Sons o/ the Fathers is a major contribution to the literature...

...The new religion was above all concerned with human rights and values...

...Those who were the greatest threats to American liberty and property, the British as well as American traitors like Benedict Arnold, filled the satanic roles...

...This process, as Elliott and Sacvan Bercovitch have shown, began long before the Revolution...

...Although the first book is primarily pictures, the second primary text, and although one concerns the German haute bourgeoisie, the other the American working poor, both powerfully evoke a sense of individual integrity and personal heroism...

...By the era of the Revolution both revivalism and liberalism--the two eighteenth century movements that carried the shattered components of the original Puritan synthesis of heart and head--were laying the groundwork for a new synthesis by their common concern for virtue...

...If this is not the core of the civil religion we have inherited, it is a pious fraud that deserves to suffer the mass apostasy that some observers have detected since the late sixties...

...BOOKS , i CIVIL RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA R. EMMETT CURRAN Soaz of the Fathers: The ClvU RelQltom of the American R ~ ~ CATHERINE L. ALBANESE Temple, $12.50 "A people who are new and rootless," the author of this impressive book reminds us, "must expend huge amounts of energy in maintaining their identity...

...Washington stands as the archetypal American in the new dispensation...

...Catherine Albanese secures a fresh angle of vision on the subject (and in the process gives us a fresh look at ourselves) by utilizing the methodologies and categories of such disciplines as cultural anthropology, structural linguistics, and the history of religions, particularly the latter...

...Robert Bellah ten years ago first called attention to the fact that "there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institufionalized civil religion in America...

...Albanese offers Freemasonry as the church of the religion of the Revolution...