American Civil Religion in the Era of Trump

Abstract

Robert Bellah once argued that America’s “founding myth,” what he called American civil religion, binds American society together by providing its citizens with “a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that connect them to the divine order and gives them a sense of origin, direction, and meaning. For evidence, Bellah primarily turned to the inaugural speeches of American Presidents. This paper draws on semantic network analysis to assess the prominence of terms associated with American civil religion in the inaugural addresses of Presidents Trump and Biden. Because some believe American civil religion is no more than a thinly-veiled form of nationalism, it also considers the centrality of nationalist discourse. It finds that both Trump and Biden employed the language of nationalism and American civil religion, and while no differences were found in their use of nationalist terms, American civil religion figures more prominently in Biden's address than in Trump's.