As I sat on my couch scanning Twitter and listening to the President describe the killing of Osama bin Laden, I realized that this was a high moment in American civil religion. Thanks to a couple colleagues here at Emory and our writing group, I’ve had civil religion on the brain lately. As the president repeated “justice…justice…justice,” I began to wonder what Robert Bellah would say.
In 1967 Robert Bellah published his famous article “Civil Religion in America.” Bellah argued that there was an American civil religion that stretched from the founding of the nation up to his day and time. It was a religion born in the Revolution, matured through the Civl War, and at work in the midst of Vietnam. It was a transcendent understanding of the American experience that borrowed from biblical sources but existed alongside traditional religious commitments. It was enshrined in national rituals, inauguration speeches, and historic documents. It included the God in whom we trust, the God who blesses America, and the Creator who endowed us with inalienable rights. Its saints are Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy. It’s shrines are Gettysburg and Ground Zero.
Bellah identified three trials in American history that produced our civil religion. The Revolution brought us questions of independence and the rights granted by God. Then the Civil War challenged us to think about sacrifice–most notably the sacrificial death of President Lincoln–in the face of a moral evil like slavery. In 1967, Bellah saw the third crisis as the contemporary problem of “responsible action in a revolutionary war.”
We still live in the third crisis. The Revolution birthed a civil religion of rights and a God who grants them. The Civil War added a God who demands sacrifice for our national sins. Last night added a God of justice to our civil religion. George W. Bush said that America would bring those responsible for 9/11 to justice or bring justice to them. President Obama declared last night that “Justice had been done.” But what kind of justice?
The Creator in the Declaration of Independence is egalitarian and humanistic. The death of Lincoln is sacrificial. But the justice of American civil religion is retributional. Death requires death. Destruction requires destruction. We see it in our country’s domestic drug policy that locks away young minority offenders and sucks them into a prison industrial complex. We see it in a litigious society that demands all harm be ameliorated with a check. We see it on the streets outside the White House where people celebrate the death of a mass murderer like it was a Super Bowl win. An eye for an eye until we’re all blind.
Osama bin Laden committed immeasurable evil. In the face of such evil, justice becomes confusing. Justice is easy if someone steals your bike or smashes your car. Justice is harder when someone is killed. Justice seems almost impossible when someone’s evil destroys thousands of people and their families. On a day like today, it feels like justice and evil are incommensurable.
But perhaps the civil religion of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy, can produce a justice that isn’t based in retribution.
Bellah concludes:
“[American civil religion] does not make any decision for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being in Lincoln’s fine phrase, an ‘almost chosen people.’ But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.”
Retributive justice. What an ugly term. I think justice ought to be divorced permanently from that conjunction and any synonymous constructions. Thank you, Michael, for highlighting the ambiguity of the term justice. We need a national education about justice that is not in the form of a Law and Order television franchise or political chest-thumping rhetoric. But, what is the forum where this education can take place if we continue to insist on values-free education in our schools?
Paul, I think one place it starts is with the ways we frame conflicts. In this case, I don’t know that Obama’s use of justice was the best frame for understanding the killing of bin Laden. The one thing I’ve been thinking about since I wrote this is that justice and war don’t work well together. There is no enemy in justice, just a wronged and a wrongdoer. But in war it is us and them–me versus an enemy.
It seems to me that the killing of bin Laden was an act of war, not one of justice. He was an enemy. As soon as the reaction to 9/11 was cast in terms of war it became about victory and retribution, not justice. I don’t know that there was any other way to go about things, though. Justice is always within a society, whereas war is between a nation or society and its outside. Bin Laden was not American, he was not a part of our society, and therefore, he could only be understood as an enemy that had to be combated through warfare.
Perhaps Obama would have been better off casting bin Laden’s death as a victory over evil instead of as bringing justice to victims. I’m not sure though.
I think that to cast the roles of good and evil so starkly is also trouble. There is more ambiguity there than we often care to admit. I have been thinking too. It seems to me that we already have a word for retributive justice: Revenge.
Nice article, Mike. Your style and journalistic eye for detail are enviable.
But I must say I’m not sold on the repudiation of retributive justice. Nor do I think, as Paul does, that it must be coterminous with revenge. (A side point here might note that retribution has suffered from invidious distinctions to restoration, reconciliation, and rehabilitation, but that is another matter.) In its best sense, retribution responds to the gravity of the crime by demanding some requital. Detestable actions require proportionate consequences; if transgressors operate with impunity, it trivializes the severity of their offense. This is one of the problems Wole Soyinka and other critics of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee have exposed: true reconciliation cries out for crimes to be paid for in some sense, not just confessed. The problem is not so much retribution per se as it is the exclusive focus on retribution, without complementary forms of justice. So, we might leaven the discussion of justice being served (retributively) in the case of OBL by discussing the ways that this retribution–while richly deserved–remains imperfect. We might discuss how systemic violence incubates and legitimates further violence (Slavoj Žižek develops an illuminating perspective on this at the beginning of his short book on violence). We might commit ourselves to greater dialogue on Islam in America, etc.
If the fist-pumping patriots congregated outside the White House had truly understood the gravity of 9-11 and the character of retribution, they would have curtailed their jubilation.
Another way to think of this: would it have been a more or less just world to inhabit if OBL had escaped his compound unscathed, and suffered no consequences for his terrorist activities other than the modest inconveniences of trying to avoid surveillance? Most would concede that it would be a palpably less just world. It might even embolden those contemplating involvement in terrorist activities to pursue them. Not to continue to pursue OBL would seem (on some level perhaps) to accept his offense, just as to cease searching for a murderer is implicitly to minimize or even acquiesce to his homicide.
On the other hand, though justice may have been achieved in its retributive dimension, to conclude the matter at that would clearly be a travesty. The death of one hardly expiates for the deaths of thousands. No amount of jubilation will (in the President’s words) “fill the empty seat at the dinner table.” The palpable sense of incompletion, and the revulsion we experience at the celebrations this news touched off reminds us of that. Mike’s example of our penal system illustrates this. We focus almost exclusively on retribution, to the point that any deviation from this exclusive focus constitutes being “weak on crime”–one of the most potent forms of criticism in the lexicon of political invective. But by ignoring the systemic violence that produces these crimes (is it really coincidental that we imprison minorities and those that occupy the lower economic strata of our society?), and by precluding the possibility of rehabilitation by failing to reform the harsh conditions within our penitentiaries, we become complicit in the perpetuation of these crimes, and a more robust experience of justice is deferred.
I suggest that the historical resources and social capital may already be present for a more integrated approach to justice. The dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, MLK’s march on Washington, Clinton’s apology to those Japanese Americans who were interned during WW2–even Obama’s inauguration provide examples of civic rituals that restore and reconcile our nation.
Your points are well taken, Ryan. I’m not an ethicist or a theologian and I think it shows at a couple points in the post. I think you are right about the imperfect nature of the retribution and I think that was what bothered me but I wasn’t sure how to think through it.
I like how you put the OBL killing in the frame of a “more just world.” I think that points out the problem. In the case of OBL a very national and judicial understanding of justice (as you point out, based on retribution) is expanded around a case of international impact. Our domestic failure to imagine a ‘robust justice’ (a phrase I really appreciate) has revealed itself through an international incident. I agree with you that the resources are there in our history for a more robust justice. I would even argue that they are part of our civil religion, as your examples of MLK, Gettysburgh, and Clinton point out. But we, and I include the President in his address on Sunday night, have failed to draw on these civil religious resources thus far.