The Next Religious Establishment: National Identity and Political Theology in Post-Protestant America. By Eldon J. Eisenach. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 167 p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Extract

Animated by an “American identity crisis,” Eldon Eisenach seeks to comprehend a “deep disjunction in political culture and values between elite national institutions and the aggregate of local cultures and values.” National elites, in particular, many in the “American university,” offer America-in-crisis “a highly abstract democratic Universalism” which “denies American nationality.” At the same time national representatives of “local cultures and values” attempt to “ground national identity and national policy in a `conservative Restoration' by bringing back to prominence and honor the value-sustaining institutions of civil society” (p. 99). Both “Universalists” and “Restorationists” fail in their respective tasks, and American identity, Eisenach argues, is threatened in the process. While “Universalism,” often couched in the “neutral” language of “juridical democracy,” is in some ways built upon the New Deal “liberal establishment,” it has, he insists, not been able to articulate policies that speak to this “older, ruling coalition” and so poses “above the battle” (pp. 102–3). Restorationists suffer from another malady. Though winning elections, they have proved incapable of establishing “national authority” and so equally incapable of reestablishing an American national identity.