A Supreme Court for our Civil Religion?

The hard case of post-WW2 American Jewish identity

In my Primer I summarized how our civil religion -- our body of public morality and rituals -- is a sort of pre-formal legal system:

Civility is also the unwritten law to which we’re expected to conform if we want to exercise our formal civil rights. It’s the law that allows you to be removed from a voting booth if you show up to vote in the nude.[iii] It’s the law that allows a judge to hold you in contempt, remove you from court, or even bind and gag you if you’re excessively disruptive during a criminal trial.[iv] It’s also the law under which journalists investigate, try, and punish you after you’re doxxed for posting the n-word on social media.

The civil religion maintains social equilibrium and a peaceful status quo so individuals can go about their daily lives without being bothered by having arbitrary group-level traits like race, religion, or caste ascribed to them by others.

I also summarized in that post and in later posts how the civil religion evolved from a system of toleration of group differences, provided they were privatized and subordinated to the civil religion, into a system of selective encouragement and validation of group identity to the public, i.e., a system of vicarious group narcissism. This happened for many reasons, some of which I’ve described as “imperial” in the pragmatic sense of the term. I’ll summarize three other reasons below.

First, groups will necessarily try to secure public validation of their parochial, grandiose group self-conceptions in the face of mere toleration. From the perspective of a group member, tolerance of difference is inherently intolerant, because it implies that his group identity is only conditionally legitimate to the extent it satisfies a form common and acceptable to all human groups, i.e., non-group members. Obviously, this is an unsatisfactory compromise for the group narcissist. Toleration may initially be a satisfactory form of validation, as it was for Christians and Jews under Islamic domination, but once the existential concerns surrounding persecution fall away, the group self-image demands more than mere tolerance.

Second, the virtue of charity to others so essential to our civil religion can paradoxically reinforce anti-individualistic intolerance. Our civil religion elevates charity in the form of tolerance and civility above group identity, creating a situation where individuals who buy into the civil religion engage in self-effacing deference toward outgroup identities, resulting in the paradoxical public validation of group narcissism in violation of our individualistic civil religion.

Third, entanglement of group self-images creates an incentive for groups to promote the grandiose self-images of other entangled groups, such that groups sometimes end up unintentionally “ganging up” on the civil religion. Many of our most prominent group identities define themselves in terms of other groups, such as Black and White, Christian and Jew, and Straight and Gay (the last pair only recently becoming important with the advent of gender fluidity and transgender group narcissism). To the extent a group’s self-image depends upon the truth of another group’s self-image, the group will have an incentive to publicly validate the other group’s self-image.

This isn’t an indictment of the civil religion. Every man-made law is riven by paradoxes, with the most primordial being the existential self-referential paradox of formal state law, whereby a state can legally destroy itself by strict adherence to the letter of its own law. Such paradoxes only become harmful when people misconstrue strict legality to be more legitimate than the state itself. In healthier states, paradoxes are resolved by the decisions of sovereigns or judges based upon “creative” re-interpretations of the law, or prophetic innovation.

Historically, the Black and Jewish communities in America have catalyzed and been associated with the public legitimation of group identity, strengthening rather than resolving these civil-religious paradoxes. In various posts, I’ve documented attitude shifts among elite opinion- and policy-makers in publicly promoting the grandiosity of groups like Blacks and Jews, and toward embracing the “dreams” and group supremacy of women and other non-white/western peoples.

I’ll be returning to the Black case soon, but for now I want to look at the Jewish case, which also means the Christian case.

In the 20th century prior to World War 2 (WW2), the dominant civil religious refrain surrounding American Jews was assimilation, either through total secularization and mixing or conversion to America’s privatized and tolerant variants of Christianity. The sociologist John Murray Cuddihy describes this in his book No Offense. Other options for non-orthodox Jews ranged from more moderate forms of assimilation to uncivil radicalism, including Zionism, Reform Judaism, and Marxism.

After WW2, Reform Judaism and Zionism remained options while Marxism was obviously delegitimized. However, while Zionism was initially triumphant in that it secured a Jewish state for reasons I explored here, it was the Reform Judaism perspective that came to dominate our civil religion. This shift ended the pre-WW2 assimilationist goal for American group identities.

In “The Psychology of Prejudice and the Future of Anti-Semitism in America,” published in 1965 in The European Journal of Sociology, professor D.H. Wrong described this shift:

since World War II Jews have been, as it were, themselves institutionalized as part of American society. The elevating of Judaism to equal status with Protestantism and Catholicism as the third "official" religious division in American society has largely taken place since the war. Characterizations of our civilization as " Judeo-Christian" have become standard during the same period. [320]

For Wrong, this transition was catalyzed by American reactions to the Holocaust and “sympathy with Israel” and was implemented through concerted efforts (charity) of elite individuals and institutions, whom we’ll designate as our Civil Religion Supreme Court (CRSC):

This institutionalization of the Jews has clearly been a policy on the part of powerful elite groups in government at all levels, the political parties, the churches, professional associations and the mass communications industries. [320]

The effects of this reform attitude for Wrong were to assure Jews of “continuing visibility in American society” and to “reduce pressure” on Jews to “abandon their Jewish identities.” [320] In this respect, Wrong observes that American Jews had in a sense regressed to an earlier 19th-century emancipated state, stating that Jews

have completed a full cycle, returning, with the acculturation of the East European immigrants, to the outlook of the late nineteenth century American Jewish community of largely German origin and Reform persuasion, which saw itself as a marginally differentiated religious grouping within the context of relatively complete acculturation to the larger American society.

What this means for us is that civil religious toleration of Jews as individuals apart from their ethnoreligious identity had transformed into civil religious toleration of Jews as adherents to a publicly legitimate religion akin to Catholicism. One component of the Jewish private identity had been legitimized and brought forth into the public sphere for all Americans to respect and validate, although the Jewish religion remained optional and accidental like a gentile’s Christian denomination.

Notably, this holding delegitimizes core elements of Zionism. Zionism offered a final solution to anti-semitism in the form of a homeland for all Jews, predicated upon a secularized version of Jewish identity. In contrast, our CRSC’s holding reduced Jewish identity to an accidental religious belief of individuals and promised that diaspora Jews could be free of anti-semitism while still embracing their identity, which all Americans were bound to respect as they respected Catholicism and sundry Protestant denominations.

The CRSC’s decision to take this route with Jewish identity was understandable given the consequences of German anti-semitism during WW2, and was consistent with its treatment of Protestant and Catholic denominationalism.

For Wrong, the holding was not necessarily right!