At The Immanent Frame, Richard Amesbury explores the role of denominationalism in the formation of religious identities and configurations of “civic belonging” in the United States:

[...] what is replacing the conception of the United States as a “Christian nation” is not a post-Durkheimian imaginary but an alternative “neo-Durkheimian” one, which portrays America as a religious nation, understood quasi-pluralistically. This difference between the United States and Europe is due not merely to the absence in the U.S. of an established church – a feature often cited by secularization theorists to explain certain religious dimensions of “American exceptionalism” – but to the presence of an alternative ecclesial structure.

In what Taylor calls “paleo-Durkheimian” societies, such as those found in pre-modern Europe, the dominant ecclesial form was that of the church. A church, as Weber and Troeltsch defined it, aspires to encompass the whole of a population – saints as well as sinners. The Roman Catholic Church’s claim to universality was of course challenged by the Reformation, one result of which was the emergence of Protestant sects, which aimed to include only the elect, and whose efforts to distance themselves from the established church necessarily had implications for the political belonging of their adherents. Yet, the fragmentation of Christendom resulted not in the demise of the “church type,” but rather in its proliferation. The theo-logic of divine sovereignty intersected with the Westphalian logic of state sovereignty to ensure that, while there could be many churches in the world – and indeed multiple religions – there could be no more than one per nation: cuius regio, eius religio.

But in the United States, where establishment was prohibited by the First Amendment, the church structure morphed into something novel: namely, denominationalism. Whereas churches are compulsory institutions, denominations are free associations, existing only in the plural. Unlike sects, however, denominations carry on the role of integrating national and religious identity. Indeed, as a voluntary form of association, the “denomination type” seems prima facie better calibrated than the “church type” to mediate the religious identity of a constitutional republic that has been mobilized into existence and conceives of itself as underwritten by a social contract. In this way, Protestant denominationalism provided a distinctively American means of maintaining a link between God and nation.

Continue reading “Multi-religious denominationalism and American identity” at The Immanent Frame.