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Ages of Piety

“It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.”

The fourth year of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program is devoted to theology. EfM years equate to Richard Hooker’s classic Anglican three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason. The first two EfM years are on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the third year is on church history and tradition. The fourth year is theology year, which I like to think of as the year for reason.

Our group’s fourth year students are now reading Timothy Sedgwick’s The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Sedgwick ties the practices of Christian piety to the challenges in life that vary over time. He depicts three phases of American piety.

The first, he calls “traditional” and ties it to the society typical of the first half of the twentieth century. At that time community survival was crucial. Vine Maple Farm is my name for the farming community in which I grew up, immersed in what Sedgwick calls traditional piety.

Social interaction was a necessity, not a luxury. Neighbors had no choice but to get along and work together. Tasks like putting hay in the barn, thrashing grain, and harvesting potatoes took more concentrated labor than a single family could provide, but with the cooperation of willing neighbors, everyone could survive and sometimes prosper.

But cooperation doesn’t happen without reciprocity. Rules are required, like returning borrowed tools  in better condition than when received. Visiting, exchanging meals, celebrating birthdays, weddings, and funerals were necessary to keep communications lines open and the community working. This spirit of cooperation and mutual support was the vital characteristic of traditional piety. Read my impressions of this life in posts like Chicken Catching Night.

Traditional piety declined in importance as people got jobs. Instead of relying on their neighbors, folks began to rely more on their job and employer. This, and other societal changes brought on the form of piety that Sedgwick calls “modern.” For me, this was the piety of the Vietnam War protests in which an equitable future became the dominant concern of folks who were morally concerned about their world.

I mark the beginning of “post-modern” piety to nine-eleven when America discovered vulnerability. I happened to be at the east coast Consumer Electronics Show in Atlanta when the Trade Towers went down. I entered the show hall early, preparing for a panel discussion on a new release of our team’s product that I thought was exciting and would make the company a mint.

By the one o’clock, my bosses and colleagues were huddled together in a hotel dining room worrying over what to do next. My boss, who lived in Brooklyn, was frantic because his eighty-year-old mother had been in Manhattan for the day and was returning home on foot, walking over the Brooklyn bridge. We were all figuring out how to get home as safely and quickly as possible. Since planes were grounded in Atlanta, a group from Seattle formed a caravan of three rental cars for forty-three hours of driving straight through back to the northwest. Our piety had shifted focus from the future to vulnerability and safety in less than a day.

In 2025, we’ve practiced post-modern piety for almost twenty-four years, but I wonder: have we moved on to a new stage? America changed decisively in November 2024. Have we passed on from community, future equity, and vulnerability to something new? And more terrifying?

This week, our EfM group discussed our changing feelings about Tesla vehicles. A year ago, a Tesla Y was a desirable vehicle. Its minimal carbon footprint, sleek design, and low operating costs were all attractive. But today? For some folks, a Tesla has become an advertisement for a nihilistic creator intent on rapid and radical change, reshaping government programs indiscriminately, and pursuing threat diplomacy.

It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.

But caution has never stopped me from making wild guesses. I predict a decline in reliance on government and return to something like traditional piety in which personal cooperation shines more than it has for decades.

Today, government services and society in general appear disrupted and not as trustworthy as they once were. Consequently, we may have to turn more often to our families and friends for support. Personal communities will become more important, revitalizing bowling leagues, lodges, and churches. Neighborly visits and community potlucks will comfort us in a turbulent world. Computer networks will foster interdependent support groups and shift away from spotlighting blazing individualism. Helpers will become more prominent than influencers.

Sound utopian? Well, why not?

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The Federalist on Factions

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 10.

Over two centuries ago, the authors of the United States constitution were remarkably prescient in their anticipation of the turmoil that blankets the United States today.

The United States in 2025 is in the clutches of a faction that wants to remake the country into something it imagined existed in a mythical near past. Mounting a diatribe against the faction is tempting, but here I will only discuss why factions are undesirable and how they rise rather than fume over the details current factional fever.

The problem with factions is, as James Madison pointed out in his definition above, is that a faction places the impulses of one group over the rights of other groups and the interests of the wider community. In the eighteenth century, propensity toward factionalism was noted as a flaw in democratic governments and a reason for forming the United States as a republic rather than a democracy.

Here, republic and democracy are used precisely. A town hall that is open to all and gives an equal vote to each attendee is a pure democracy. A city council meeting in which only the elected council members have a vote is a republic. In both cases, the ultimate authority stems from the citizens, but control is less direct in a republic. In historical republics, such as the classic Roman republic, membership in the governing council might be be freely elected but was often limited to people of wealth, land ownership, special families, etc.

Madison’s argument was that factions form with more difficulty in a republic and dissipate more quickly in a large republic. This argument may not have greatly swayed decisions on the U.S. constitution, but we now have what Madison wished for: a large republic of federated states.

I’m not sure that today’s prevailing faction is a majority. In my estimate, although Donald Trump officially won both the popular and the electoral vote, the November 2024 election was too close to confirm his supporters as a majority. Nevertheless, the election has given a faction a tight grasp on the reigns of power in America and the winners intend to do as much as they can to reshape the country to their tastes.

I ask what caused the current faction to prevail, contrary to Madison’s expectation. Before I sail off into speculation, I quote Madison again, simply because he wrote so well:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

Since the turn of the twenty-first century liberty has reached new levels; we have computer networks that offer almost everyone the liberty of their own platform for broadcasting to the world. In the last decade or so, social media have added the equivalent of anabolic steroids to the computer network: likes and shares on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Those pernicious buttons have enabled virality; today, within a few clicks, a catchy post spreads like the measles at an anti-vax birthday party.

Ubiquitous platforms and virality have transformed our American republic to a brood stall for factions. Virality is all about “fast thinking,” the shoot-from-the-hip thoughts that are fight or flight reflexes rather than considered, judged, and reasoned responses; in other words, an aliment which is gasoline to the fires of faction.

Madison expected that a large republic would quickly engulf factions with reason.

Instead, technology has added an accelerant.

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American Civil Religion And Christian Nationalism

“Today, the U.S. faces both a rise in Christian nationalism and a crisis in civil religion. The two phenomena are related.”

In the 1960s a sociologist, Robert Bellah, coined the term “American civil religion” for a set of beliefs that could be ascribed to almost all Americans and is not limited to the United States. This national religion has no defined legal status, but these beliefs are consistently affirmed and followed in public discourse.

The American civil religion was, and still is, invoked when witnesses take the stand in court and officials are conferred their office. It is not specifically Judeo-Christian but it is consistent with Judeo-Christian beliefs. The core Christian precepts of loving ones neighbor, salvation, and resurrection are not directly present.

In an article published in 1967, Bellah said

 “The whole address [the Kennedy inauguration] can be understood as only the most recent statement of a theme that lies very deep in the American tradition, namely the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”

Don’t confuse civil religion with Christian nationalism. Civil religion, as observed by Bellah, maintains strict separation of church and state. In America individuals and their churches are obliged to accept the civil religion, but civil religion does not endorse the idiosyncrasies of individuals or the denominational churches they have formed. Christian nationalists want to go beyond civil religion and oblige the state to publicly sanction specific religious symbols and practices. Nationalists are less concerned with common faith than the civil religion.

Pew Research Center studies have revealed that Americans who identify as Christian and attend religious ceremonies has declined from about 90% when Bellah first wrote about civil religion to less than 70% in 2020.

How has the decline in Christian affiliation affected civil religion?

In 2011, reviewing a book by religious and political philosopher Charles Taylor, Bellah wrote

“The deeper question that I, a Durkheimian[1] sociologist, would ask Taylor is whether a post-Durkheimian society is ultimately viable. Without some degree of consensus, without something like a ‘common faith’ … is a coherent society possible? … We have become … a nation whose citizens feel no lasting solidarity beyond themselves and their families. Is that a situation too incoherent to last?”

Bellah raised a serious question.  In the intervening decade, divisions have gotten wider and more intense. Today, even families are often harshly divided over politics.

The U.S. faces both a rise in Christian nationalism and a crisis in civil religion. The two phenomena are related. The current president appears to have jettisoned the sanctity of his oath of office in a profound rejection of the civil religion, a set of beliefs that have prevailed from the origins of the country in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The current president’s election was endorsed by the proponents of Christian nationalism and their attitudes have buoyed up the rejection of our civil religion. The Christian nationalists, many of whom seldom attend church services and frequently are not church members, think that public government endorsement of Christianity will restore greatness to America, but don’t mind a president who publicly despises the American civil religion, which many thinkers and historians assert is the motivation behind the two century success story of the United States.

It is easy to confuse causation and correlation, especially when the ground is shifting under our feet. Has decreased participation in church services caused a decline in civil religion? Or the other way around? Or does declining civil religion cause empty pews?

Or is an enormous paradigm shift changing us it ways we don’t understand?

[1] Emile Durkheim was a founder of modern sociology in the early 20th century who argued that governments were essentially religious in origin and justification.