Prophetic Politics

PROPHETIC POLITICS
not work. Prophetic politics cannot entirely rely on the Judeo-Christian tradition and
its beliefs. To gain a secular audience, the narrator must use civil religion as the sacred
story that his narrating relies upon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1997) or even
Robert Bellah’s (1967) ideas of the essence of civil religion make the mistake of portraying
it as a unified concept. A modern society has such a complex structure that
it is impossible to imagine that one single vision of the ‘American way of life’ could
serve as the one civil religion that goes along with the official religion itself.
The study of civil religion has, according to Ira Chernus, imprisoned itself. It is
unimportant to study whether a citizen believes or not but one should rather focus
on precisely how the citizen defines the object of his belief. Either there are multiple
civil religions or the concept itself should be seen as a wide and dynamic field
of beliefs in interaction with each other. (Chernus: a and b) One version of public
religion is not enough, and one sacred story is not sufficient to build an identity either.
The key lies in combining multiple sacred stories and interconnecting them.
The end result of this for the prophetic politician may yet still not be a unified version
of a civil religion, but if he can manipulate sacred stories, he might be able to
produce a dogma of public religion dynamic enough to fit into the world-view of the
majority of the citizens. Studying the construction of civil religion by narratives is
beneficial because the story logic and the creation of storyworlds about the essence
of the American Way of Life give the whole concept a more dynamic form. Since the
storyworld is to a large extent created by the reader/listener, narratives allow different
ideas about the American Way of Life to fit within the boundaries of a storyworld
than a more traditional concept of civil religion can accommodate. Thus I
suggest that the only way of creating a truly inclusive civil religion is to narratively
craft it so that its limits, contents and boundaries cannot be strictly defined even if
they can always be communicated by rich storytelling. Then each citizen could follow
the most pleasing storyline into the web of stories. This civil religion would not
be unifying in the strict sense of the word, but it would give an illusion of unification.
That is, each citizen could construct a civil religious storyworld to his or her own liking
and, due to the ambiguousness involved in the storytelling, imagine that others
actually think of the civil religion in the same terms as s/he does. The American Way
of Life should not be narrated in detail, but its characteristics should be vaguely described
in order to allow people to design it as they please.
Mircea Eliade notes that millenialistic movements ‘are always begun by strong religious
personalities of the prophetic type, and are organized or expanded by politicians
for political ends.’ (1963: 70–71) I argue, nevertheless, that in the case of the
creation of a civil religion, the order is reversed. A politician can incite a revolutionary
political movement and act as a prophetic leader if s/he tells stories that are effective
enough. There is no need for religious personality in the equation, but the
politician can use and exploit religion for his earthly purposes. De Tocqueville noted
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