Civil Religion unexclusive and exceptional

The Immanent Frame, purveyor of religious cogitation from the Social Science Research Council, has begun a new series of essays inspired by this passage from President Obama's inaugural address:

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old.  These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

Is there a problem with this rather banal reflection? Well, there's the perennial worry among some religion scholars that any appeal to shared values is by definition exclusionary. As Frame editor-at-large David Kyuman Kim frames it:

Nonetheless, by casting certain values as "old" and as "true," Obama has enjoined the American public in an affirmation of a tradition that may or may not be in fact be as "common" as he claims.  For while he invites the American citizenry to think of ourselves as part of a common conversation that makes for a tradition, he presumes a common inheritance.  And yet: there will no doubt be those who feel left out of this inheritance and from this invitation.  They will feel so for a host of reasons: differences over political positions or moral points of view, or disputes about the master narratives that have rendered the lives of various people invisible or "insignificant."  This is one of the perils of making an appeal and a claim to "the common good" and to shared values. When a tradition aspires to be encompassing, if not universal, in its moral claims, it will inevitably leave many feeling excluded.

This, it seems to me, is a fine expression of the characteristic American concern that the ingrained celebration (viz: valorization) of pluralism (viz: difference) as marker of America's collective identity not be threatened by the enunciation of common traditions (except, of course, pluralism itself). The great bogey for such religion scholars is the idea of an American civil religion. The hegemony, the hegemony!

But the species of civil religion experienced in America is a far cry from the kinds of political religion associated with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, , and Soviet Russia. Here's how Europe's great student of those political religions, Emilio Gentile, defines it (in his Politics as Religion,mens silk pajamas, p. xvi): 

the conceptual category that contains the forms of sacralization of a political system that guarantee a plurality of ideas, free competition in the exercise of power, and the ability of the governed to dismiss their governments through peaceful and constitutional methods. Cvil religion therefore respects individual freedom, coexists with other ideologies, and does not impose obligatory and unconditional support for its commandments.

Those scholars anxious about creeping Obamaite civil religion would do well to broaden their national and historical horizons, perhaps bearing in tmind he president's response when asked by a reporter if he subscribed to the "school of  'American exceptionalism.":

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.