On October 15, 2026 I was invited to give a public talk at the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. Below are my remarks as written – you can watch a recording of the talk and the Q&A here (starts at about the 13th minute). In the talk I made the case for a recommitment to a shared faith in a prophetic or humble civil religion. A premise of the talk is that nations, like people, are the stories they tell about themselves. Those stories can only ever be partially true, but they matter. The story we should tell is one of working together toward “a more perfect union” rather than one of asserting we have already achieved perfection.
Thank you for your overly generous introduction. Whenever I hear someone read my bio I spend half the time thinking, “please stop talking” and the other half thinking “but where’s page two?”
Before I start, I want to tell a brief story about a long walk to go a very short distance. As you heard, this isn’t my first time on campus. I dropped out of a PhD program here in 1994 to go into politics fulltime. I grew up volunteering on campaigns, going to marches, and telling anyone who would listen why I was right about all that was wrong. I was 11 in 1976 when a former peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was running for president. That year for Halloween I dressed up as a peanut and handed out Carter literature while I trick-or-treated. To answer your next two questions, no there are no pictures and no I didn’t have a lot of friends.
In college I studied political communication and kept working on campaigns. Then I went to graduate school and taught at a university for a couple years. I decided I was done with politics and was going to be an academic. So I came here to ASU to study under the late professor Richard Ashley. Rick was one of the world’s leading scholars in an obscure area of international relations theory whose brief moment in the spotlight was rapidly dimming by the time I got here. To pay the bills when I was in grad school I taught public speaking here at ASU. Then, as now, I started class with the news of the day. In the fall of 1991 a guy named Jerry Brown was one of many Democrats running for president. My students had never heard of Jerry Brown so I told a lot of Jerry Brown stories, and there were a lot of them. I felt a bit guilty, so I called the Brown headquarters and asked for Brown literature. This was pre-internet, the big technological innovation of the Brown campaign was an 800 number. No one got back to me, which led to more Brown stories. Then over winter break I got a letter from the campaign asking if I wanted to run as a Brown delegate at the Democratic National Convention. I thought that sounded fun, why not, so I agreed. That led to more guilt since mostly I’d been making fun of him, so I called the Arizona Democratic headquarters and asked who was in charge of his campaign here. That person and I got lunch, and she asked if I wanted to be a state director for Brown. That sounded fun, had never done that before, why not? How hard could it be? Yowza. My academics suffered, but I quickly built a political network. There just weren’t that many Democrats in Phoenix in 1992. I was asked to run for vice chair of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, which I did and was elected. I managed a losing state legislative race, and was asked to work in the district office of the newly elected US Representative for Tempe and parts of Phoenix, Sam Coppersmith. Sam was, and is, smart and interesting, he believes in public service and working for the public good. He remains a friend and mentor. I worked with and learned from a lot of good people in Arizona politics, people like Andy Gordon, Congressman Coppersmith’s chief of staff who has had a distinguished career in public service and politics and who hired me in spite of my family name, Chuck Blanchard who went on to serve in senior positions in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and the late Bob Grossfeld from whom I learned how to be a political consultant.
In 1994 Sam ran for US Senate. If you know your American political history you know that was not a good year to be a Democrat. After a very brief stint as a very bad reporter at the Business Journal, I was offered a job working for US Senator Ted Kennedy. Off I went. Now, a lot of years, jobs, even career changes later, I’m back.
I tell you that story for a few reasons. One is that standing here is weird and I can’t not talk about it. The other is to explain how and why all this matters to me. The thing about my story is that while it is true, or at least true to me, it isn’t entirely factual. My first chief of staff, Andy Gordon, is here this evening, I’m going to pre-emptively assert he’s too polite to fact check me in public. I left out where I lived and the dumb things I did. I name checked a few people and a few conversations, leaving out a lot that didn’t fit, was boring, or beside the point. I tell you my story because my story matters to me. It informs not just why it feels a bit odd to be here, but because my story tells me why I’m anywhere.
We are our stories. We are the stories we tell about ourselves to others, and to ourselves.
In the words of Colonel John Stapp, an early tester of G forces on a rocket sled, people are “a thin, flexible leather sack filled with thirteen gallons of fibrous and gelatinous material, inadequately supported by an articulated bony framework.” We are masses of electrons, bacteria delivery devices, data about our online shopping habits and browsing histories, and part of a global food chain. None of which helps us make sense of the world or is much of a reason to get out of bed in the morning. They certainly aren’t reasons to fly across the country to talk about the idea of having faith in an American story, let alone reasons to show up and listen to that talk, no matter how much extra credit is involved. No one says, “time to rise and shine, another great day for my 13 gallons of fibrous and gelatinous material to feed the algorithm.”
We are made of chemistry, biology, physics, economics, and ecosystems. But that’s not who we are. We are our stories ourselves. Our stories tell us where we came from, why we do what we do, and what to do next.
Part of our story about who we are, our meaning, our origin, what we do next, is our community, tribe, or nation. We tell a story about who we are together to help tell the story of who we are as individuals.
In a 2022 essay in The Atlantic called This is No Time for Passive Patriotism former Obama speechwriter and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes wrote that, “Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.”
That story usually involves a fixed, physical place. It also typically includes values and national characteristics, a shared history, and a hoped-for future. The stories nations tell about themselves help their citizens express their individual identities, form a coherent shared present, and shape national policy.
In his 1975 article, In Search of the People: A rhetorical alternative, rhetorical scholar Michael McGee argued, “One begins with the understanding that political myths are purely rhetorical phenomena, ontological appeals constructed from artistic proofs and intended to redefine an uncomfortable and oppressive reality. Such myths are endemic in the human condition. Though technically they represent nothing but a “false consciousness,” they nonetheless function as a means of providing social unity and collective identity. Indeed, “the people” are the social and political myths they accept.”
The point of the story is not to accurately and completely capture everything at once; the point is to make sense of the present based on an explanation of the past that offers a direction for the future. In the words of American philosopher Richard Rorty, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” As the mid-20th century conservative rhetorical scholar Richard Weaver wrote, “It is a limitation to suppose that the truth of the story lies in its historicity.”
That rhetorical construction, that story, has to sound or feel true but cannot ever be entirely accurate. It has to be useful. National narratives are not fully true, but to work they must be true to life.
Ultimately, the success or failure of the story of a nation can similarly determine the success or failure of a nation itself.
No national narrative is fixed. As University of Nevada Las Vegas professor M. Lane Bruner wrote in 2005, national identity is “incessantly negotiated through discourse” in “an ongoing rhetorical process.” A nation is the story it tells about itself. And as people and as “a people” we are our own stories about ourselves. As rhetorical scholars Jodi Wallwork and John Dixon wrote, nations are “imagined as entities possessing a geographic and historical ‘reality’ that somehow exceed their human membership.”
We are always creating and re-creating meaning, locating ourselves in the context of a complex world around us. To the extent that we can all share an evolving narrative and therefore an image of who we are and who we continue to become, we can call ourselves a nation.
All descriptions of ideas or events are necessarily only partially true because they only include parts of what is being described. In deciding what to call something, we are simultaneously deciding what not to call it. All leaving in requires some leaving out. As mid-20th Century rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke wrote, “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality.” This leaving in and out matters because it shapes how we see and respond to our world.
The identity of a nation, like our own personal identity, is a matter of assembling parts that seem to make sense, fit, and provide an understanding of history to explain the present and predict the future. That assembling, the narrative, the story, is never entirely factual but what we do with it ends up making it true.
We all participate in our national political conversation in one way or another. We shape and are shaped by that narrative. We tell our national story, and are characters in it. For most of us that usually means posting what we hope are clever comments on social media and arguing with family at the holidays. It’s a sticker on a laptop, a vote, an argument, a protest.
All of us participating in political conversations are storytellers and sense-makers. Our world is big, complicated, and confusing. We cannot possibly understand all of it, all of the time, from every possible angle. We make sense of this complexity by telling ourselves and each other stories about what is happening and why, and what will therefore likely happen next. Narratives, and stories, are an important way of giving meaning to what matters.
250 years into our American experiment, it’s worth pausing to ask what our national story is and whether or not we still have faith in it.
50 years ago, during our nation’s bicentennial, many people asked the same question. In 1976, Barbara Jordan told delegates to the Democratic National Convention that Americans are “a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.” Jordan, then a member of the US House of Representatives from Houston and the first African American as well as the first woman to give the convention keynote address, went on to say that “We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present … but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America.”
Which is to say, we were and remain a people in search of our story.
One reason answering this question matters is that our story is a reflection of a national faith. Our story is outside of us even as it includes us. Our story has meaning beyond us and gives us meaning. We have faith in our story, and our story is a reflection of our faith.
One of the tricky bits about the American story is that it’s relatively new.
England was more than 1500 years old when America’s upstart colonists took it on. The Basques have occupied the same land in northern Spain for something like 5000 years. Arizona became a US state in 1912. That’s a decade younger than my favorite bar. There’s a bar in Annapolis, Maryland that’s more than 150 years older than Arizona. That pales in comparison to a bar in Ireland that’s been in operation since about 900. We think we’re cool because we hit 250, and for a democracy that’s a very big deal. But let’s not mistake the US feeling old and cranky for actually being old and obsolete, or worse aged, wise, and fully complete.
Another challenge of the US story is that we all come with different stories. We have different faiths, most of which are even older than a bar in Ireland, that run deeper and speak to more than our American story. Our stories collide. Some of your families can trace their ancestry to the Hohokam, Yavapai and other first people who called what is now Arizona home. Others of you are here because your families were forced here when the US government drove them from their native lands elsewhere in what is now the United States. Some of you may be descended from slaves, people who were stolen from their homes in Africa. Some families came for great jobs, some because they needed any job they could find, some for health, some as settlers, some as entrepreneurs, some on the lam, some to study at ASU. Your family roots are here, Mexico, West Africa, India, Germany, Spain, Russia, China, and Canada. Your faiths are Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, monotheistic, pantheistic, and atheistic. That’s a lot of stories.
One more example to put this in perspective: The Aztecs settled what is now the capital of Mexico around 1300 because of a prophecy that said to center their empire in the place where they saw an eagle holding a snake and perched on a cactus. Washington, DC is the US capital as a compromise to get the south to help pay the newly independent colonies’ war debts. A very different vibe.
What story, what national narrative, could possibly tie all of these threads together? What narrative net could we possibly weave that honors these individual strands while also providing collective meaning? Enter civil religion.
Popularized by a sociologist named Robert Bellah in 1967, civil religion is a way of conceiving who we are, where we came from and how we should behave next. Our civil religion is a way for a relatively young, very large country with more than 340 million people from every corner of the world, people who came here for a range of reasons or who were brought here against their will, to find common purpose. Civil religion puts our challenges in a context bigger than any one person or event. American civil religion is, as the conservative University of Florida political philosopher Samuel Goldman explained in an op-ed in the Washington Post last summer, “a system of belief distinct from Christian orthodoxy and secular neutrality.” As Bellah notes, this faith exists alongside our other faiths. As Goldman put it, in Bellah’s view our civil religion is “neither secular nor strictly Christian.” I have met Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists who believe in our civic faith. In 2004, then US Senate candidate Barack Obama told an interviewer, “Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower as well of our civic religion.”
ASU’s professor John Carlson explained that civil religion “is the moral backbone of our body politic. It is the collective effort to understand the American experience of self-government in light of higher truths and through reference to a shared heritage of beliefs, stories, ideas, symbols, and events. For a country of immigrants and diverse peoples-where national identity is based not upon ethnic or tribal belonging or cultural homogeneity-civil religion provides a shared basis for citizenship.” Carlson explained that our civil religion “affords a model for forging consensus based upon founding principles that transcend differences in ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and political party. The promise of unity this vision holds out-based on convictions that we are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and share common dreams and pursuits—is greater than any individual.”
We have been telling a version of this story since before the founding of what is now the United States. The phrase “a shining city upon a hill” to describe the US was first used by Reverend John Winthrop in 1630. It was part of a sermon called A Model of Christian Charity that he wrote on the sailing ship Arabella on the voyage to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He borrowed it from the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew.
Declaring a place he’d never been a shining city upon a hill is a bold statement. But if you’re going to convince a bunch of religious believers, in this case Puritans, that fleeing persecution on an uncertain voyage to a new continent to face an uncertain future that almost certainly involved severe hardship and death, it doesn’t pay to be timid. “C’mon, give it a shot, sure there’s scurvy but also lice and rats, if we survive the trip we’ll probably freeze or starve, who’s with me?” won’t cut it. The promised land, a new Jerusalem, is a much better pitch.
This message of faith in and of America as a special place defines us. We see evidence of our nation as a fath all around us. We have our saints martyrs in Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy, and King. We have sacred texts like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation. We have sacred dates like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. And we have our sacred spaces, like the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court, and the US Capital. Those of you who have toured the US Capital building know that there is a painting on the underside of the Capital dome called the “Apotheosis of Washington.” It depicts George Washington, our first president, ascending to the heavens. It is stunning, inspiring, and not subtle. That’s one reason so many people saw the attacks of January sixth as being so terrible. A group of Americans, our fellow citizens, stormed a sacred democratic space. It wasn’t an office building or shopping mall, it was the spiritual home of the longest continuous democracy the world has ever known.
Our civil religion is, of course, a myth. It is a story, not a box of facts. Like all stories, it leaves in and leaves out. The story expresses a point of view. The “New World” was only new to the Europeans – to those living here it was already home. Religious freedom meant freedom for everyone who was more or less Protestant – Catholics were very much unwelcome in most early colonies. The faith of the Iroquois, Navajo, and others whose land the Europeans stole were not even worth considering by the early settlers. We then chased Native Americans off their lands or we killed them. Women had no formal or institutional power. The man who wrote the phrase “all men are created equal” owned slaves and slavery remains our nation’s original sin. The list goes on. Those facts matter. People were treated cruelly and murdered. Much of the awful origins of America continue to echo today. But we live the story, not the facts.
Scholars often point to two strains of civil religion, a prophetic vision and religious nationalism. The former asks of us, the latter declares for us. One way to distinguish between the two is in President Lincoln’s reported reply when asked if God was on our side during the Civil War. Lincoln said that he prayed not that God was on our side, but that we were on His.
For Yale sociologist Philip Gorski, civil religion “is fed by biblical as well as philosophical sources, specifically prophetic religion and civic republicanism.” The prophetic piece of the faith draws on God’s demand for “individual righteousness and social justice.” Civic republicanism generally holds that “free institutions are inherently fragile and cannot survive very long without a virtuous citizenry to support them.” This stands in contrast to what he calls religious nationalism, which is rooted in blood sacrifice and is ultimately apocalyptic.
This prophetic vision is humble and always working to improve. It says we are working toward “a more perfect union.” It says we must till the civic soil together to reap the harvest of our democracy. Our task is our gift. In our prophetic faith, we work toward union which is the point. The point is the work, the work of civic republicanism, of democracy, is its reward. Religious nationalism assumes greatness has already been bestowed on us and therefore anything the country does is great – the only evil is questioning, because questioning assumes that we may not be perfect, and since perfection is our nature, humility (which assumes one might be wrong) is a sin. Religious nationalism says we are perfect, and those who question that imperfection are themselves imperfect and must be brought into line. It says that the gift of our nation is bestowed by accidents of geography, not earned through the work with which were tasked by our founders.
My faith is in the former.
Like all faiths, our civil religion has faced times of trial. We had the American Revolution and the Civil War in the 1860s, the civil rights movement and social upheaval in the 1960s. Now, in the first third of the twenty-first century, we are facing another test of our national faith.
After President Trump’s second inaugural address, Professor Carlson wrote, “Civil religion forms the basis of civic unity — the unum that our pluribus forms. Presidential inaugurations exhibit three facets of our civil religion — the priestly, the prophetic and the political — all of which Trump’s inaugural address ignored or transgressed.” Professor Carlson is not alone in expressing concern that a narrow Christian Nationalism is elbowing our shared civil religion aside. For too many, political opponents have become political enemies. We put our team ahead of our ideals. Voters have gone from reluctantly voting for the lesser of two evils to cynically voting against what they see as the evil of two lessers.
Too many in politics, in the press, and of course online, tell us to hate anyone who doesn’t look, sound, pray, or love like our team does. Our humble effort to create a shared conversation about a common purpose is being replaced by shouting, denouncing, and demanding.
Coming through a time of trial isn’t guaranteed. If the outcome were certain it wouldn’t be a trial. Some faiths don’t survive. Nations fail. What comes of our national faith is up to us.
The American story I believe in is one of hope, humility, and hard work. It is a faith that tomorrow will be better if we work together for our shared good. It is a belief that no matter our differences, we can come together in this remarkable democratic experiment. Here I lean heavily on the writing of American political philosopher Danielle Allen. In an essay in The Atlantic she asked how the decedent of someone who was enslaved can have such a strong belief in the promise of our nation. She wrote, “The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of where I found it. Instead, I own it.”
This story is my civic faith and I have faith in that story. My faith is informed by a lot of years at St. Thomas’s Day School in New Haven, Connecticut. It is also informed by being the son of an immigrant from England who moved to the US after high school because her parents were looking for work, and the great grandson of a Basque immigrant who wound up in Redlands, California for the same reason.
Our task is to tell our American story in ways that bring us back to our humble roots so that we can achieve a vision of a “more perfect union.” As Professor Carlson wrote, “And so it falls now to those who cherish that old-time civil religion — and to new faces of our democratic faith (consider inaugural poet Amanda Gorman) — to preserve the “higher truths” that guide us and to invigorate the moral aspirations of our body politic.”
Our story is yet unfinished. Sexism remains real and a real problem. Racism is baked into every corner of our society. Stonewall was not that long ago, and members of the LGBTQ community still face legal discrimination. The list of things at which we need to do better goes on from there. But things are better and will continue to get better if we continue to work on it.
As Richard Rorty wrote, “you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.” As Rorty put it, “We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take those truths to be the last word about chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.” To borrow an example from Nikole Hannah-Jones’ from the 1619 Project, we need to fly the flag for the country we can become, if not for the country we are.
At the conclusion of his 2017 book. “American Covenant: A history of civil religion from the puritans to the present,” Philip Gorski praises a civil religion that doesn’t “confuse democracy with empire.” In drawing on Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem,”Let America Be America Again,” Gorski argues a positive civil religion strives for a “free people governing themselves for the common good.” Such a “righteous republic,” he says, “demands that the political community protect the weak and downtrodden from the high and mighty” and also has an “egalitarian ethic.”
My faith in a prophetic civil religion is strong, but I’m not sure that’s the case for many of my fellow citizens. Christian nationalism is on the rise. Intolerance and its cousins arrogance and bombast are all around us. But, in the words of Sam Goldman, “a revival of American civil religion seems more promising than any alternative. America’s Christian majority is not going to disappear. But neither are its significant minority of non-Christians and substantial cohort of Christians uncomfortable with Christian nationalism. To borrow Lincoln’s words, civil religion might be “the last best hope” for a divided people. It always has been.”
Faith must be lived to be true. So how do we live this faith? How do we practice prophetic civil religion?
There isn’t a magic spell or trick. If there were I would hand out cards with the incantation and be on my way. This is hard. But there are things we can do. This is a short and incomplete list of some ideas, all of which come down to living your faith in our shared story.
- Show up. Don’t just shout from behind a keyboard or complain to people who agree with you. Participate in a community.
- Behave online the way you would like others to behave. Debate, discuss, disagree. But do it in ways that advance the conversation not in ways that shut it down or let you briefly feel good about how clever you are.
- Vote for people who treat our politics in ways you think it ought to be treated – even if that means voting for people with whom you might disagree. Our politics will get better, our civil religion will get stronger, if people in politics see they will get punished for behaving badly and rewarded for behaving well.
- Volunteer for candidates you believe in. Not just who you think will win, or who has a strategic edge in some imagined future contest, but people you think reflect the best of what our nation can be.
- Donate. If you can, write checks to candidates you think are behaving in ways that strengthen civil religion, regardless of whether or not you think they can win. I am lucky enough to be able to donate to campaigns, and I’ve written some big checks to people who had no shot of winning, but who talked about politics in ways I think people should talk about politics. I wanted to say “you’re doing this right, please keep doing it.”
- Engage locally. National politics can be tribal, local politics is about helping each other solve shared problems. Do the work where the work is.
None of these will solve everything. But that’s OK. I live in downtown Washington, DC. Sometimes there’s litter in front of my house. When I see it, I pick it up and put it in the trashcan at the end of the block on my walk to my office. My picking up a candy wrapper won’t solve litter. I don’t own a garbage truck. But if there’s litter in front of my house, I pick it up and throw it away. If I finish a candybar or or snack when I’m walking I don’t drop the wrapper on the sidewalk, I wait to find a trashcan to throw it away. Do that.
The chapel at St. Thomas’s Day School was relatively austere. The benches were wooden and hard. The altar was simple. Faith was expressed in work and commitment to others. Faith was never shouted, even if it was sometimes sung mostly out of key but with a lot of enthusiasm. That faith is the same faith I have in a humble civil religion that shows its virtue in its work. It is a faith in a more perfect union that we can never achieve but that is always worth striving for. My faith is in who we are together tomorrow, not what we were alone yesterday.
My loyalty is to my dream country, not to the one to which I wake up every morning. The United States, our remarkable democratic experiment, allows me to have and maybe realize that dream. That is my faith, my civil religion.That, as they say, is my story and I’m sticking to it.
