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Abstract
Civil religious rhetoric has been utilized throughout American history to legitimize political interests by drawing upon broadly shared beliefs regarding the nation’s identity, meaning, and purpose in the world. Although scholars have traditionally assumed this rhetoric was employed to unify the nation, others emphasize its potential to exacerbate conflict as policy debates morph into battles over the national identity. This research project analyzes presidential speeches from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama (1939–2012) and finds that the type of speech delivered, public approval of the president, and the partisan composition of Congress influence the prevalence of civil religious rhetoric. It concludes that modern presidents have more often relied upon civil religion to rally the partisan base than build alliances with the opposition.
Notes
1 More recently, Transue (Citation2007) found that elevating the salience of a shared national identity reduces policy differences among members of different racial groups.
2 Although an explicit coupling of this sort does not always occur, the partisan orientation of the president is seldom forgotten (Edwards III 2003). It is therefore unlikely that an audience will fail to draw a connection between the president’s rhetoric and his partisan agenda even when the latter is not explicitly mentioned.
3 Gerring (Citation1997, 983) makes a strong argument against attempts to construct or employ “all-purpose definitions [of ideology] that can be utilized for all times, places, and purposes.” Rather, we must recognize that there are a variety of arguably valid attributes commonly associated with ideology and scholars should employ a definition that is “context-specific” to their particular research question. In sum, different definitions will be useful for different purposes and the responsible researcher will carefully consider why certain attributes are employed or discarded.
4 Gerring (Citation1997) reinforces this perspective by arguing that the primary distinction between ideologies and belief, philosophical, and cultural systems is that they specify a concrete political program and/or issue positions.
5 Her work does control for the presence of an electoral mandate as measured by a president’s margin.
6 Although all presidential communication is delivered with the understanding that it may attract the attention of the broader American public, some types of speeches are crafted to speak to the national audience less than others. Campaign “stump” speeches for example are intended to speak to the interests of partisan supporters and/or members of the particular community in which they are delivered. Similarly, an address delivered in another country or before an international organization is often written with a focus upon that particular audience. I do not discount the importance of such communication or the potential for civil religious rhetoric to be employed, but for the purposes of this study, I have chosen to analyze speeches that are primarily intended for a national audience.
7 Although nomination acceptance speeches are delivered at the national party convention to an audience of partisan supporters, they represent the official beginning of the general election campaign and garner widespread media attention. As such they are more likely than other campaign speeches to be written with a national audience in mind and are therefore appropriate for this analysis.
8 This term was coined by Aristotle and refers to a “form of rhetoric that praises or blames on ceremonial occasions, addresses an audience that evaluates the rhetor’s skill, recalls the past and speculates about the future while focusing on the present, employs a noble dignified, literary style, and amplifies or rehearses admitted facts” (Campbell and Jamieson 1985, 395).
9 Teten (Citation2003, 336) similarly argues that the Inaugural Address is a “ceremonial speech in which partisan positions and issue propositions are absent, with reverence and general reflection of the past and its unification with the present in their stead.” In contrast, State of the Union Speeches are “essentially the presidential platform from which policy is proposed and evaluated.”
10 Because Nomination Acceptance speeches are exclusively delivered in a campaign context, it could be argued that the prevalence of civil religious rhetoric may be influenced more by electoral considerations than public approval or the congressional environment. Without discounting these concerns, these speeches are included in this analysis because they remain a prominent example of how the president communicates to a national audience. Furthermore, an alternative model that excludes nomination acceptance speeches (available upon request) did not produce substantially different results for the hypothesized relationships than the model presented in this article.
11 Chapp (Citation2012) does not provide concrete percentages on these civil religious appeals as they relate to total campaign communications, but does report that religious rhetoric (in general) accounts for less than 1% of all words spoken in campaign speeches and that these civil religious appeals account for 55.8% of that subset.
12 The full text of these speeches was obtained from the Public Papers of the President and/or The American Presidency Project.
13 I have excluded speeches that were written but not delivered in person during this time to avoid any potential confounds associated with a difference between the two delivery formats (Tulis Citation1987).
14 Although the former are mandated by law or custom, the latter are delivered voluntarily in response to situations that arise.
15 Although presidents have increasingly relied on nontraditional media sources to communicate with the public in recent years, such communications were excluded from this analysis for two reasons: (1) Communications of this kind are simply not available for the majority of presidents examined in this study; (2) The message of such appeals is most often designed to primarily appeal to a narrow audience (“narrowcasting”) rather than the population as a whole (Scacco, Coe, and Hearit Citation2018). Although civil religious rhetoric could certainly be employed in that context, the focus of this study is to examine when such appeals are made toward a primarily national audience.
16 Lyn Ragsdale’s “Vital Statistics on the Presidency” (1998; 2014) provides a comprehensive listing of all major speeches. Her listing was itself originally obtained from successive volumes of the Public Papers of the President.
17 For example, I sampled three speeches from John F. Kennedy, four speeches from Ronald Reagan’s first term, and four more speeches from his second term.
18 Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address (1925) and Herbert Hoover’s State of the Union Address were the two training speeches (1932).
19 Given financial constraints, the coders were unfortunately unable to distinguish between civil religious rhetoric that was employed to legitimize ideological positions versus that which was used for other purposes. However, as noted in an earlier footnote, the fact that a speech is delivered by a known partisan (the president) renders a distinction between implicit vs. explicit connections to ideology/policy less important for these purposes.
20 This includes discussions of how God has guided the United States or has intervened on our behalf, along with the increasingly common use of “God Bless America” as an end of speech refrain. Although Schornhardt-Bailey et al. (2012) deem the latter to be a “vacuous” example of civil religious rhetoric and exclude it from their analysis, Domke and Coe (2010) provide a compelling argument for its inclusion. Their work documents its increasing prevalence beginning with President Reagan as a means of both appealing to religious Americans and making an explicit pairing between the American Experience and God’s Providence. As such, it is consistent with the conceptualization of civil religion provided in this article.
21 This list is consistent with Schonhardt-Bailey et al.’s (Citation2012) computer-assisted content analysis that sought terms that represent the “common denominator” and “fundamental basics for civil religious rhetoric”: “mission, sacrifice, destiny, chosen, freedom, divine/providence/spirit/God, America as an international example.”
22 To help illustrate the distinction between a historical figure/event that was coded as civil religious and one that was not, consider the following two examples. President Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union Address made the following reference to President Kennedy and it was not coded as civil religious: “Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right. In his memory today, I especially ask all members of my own political faith, in this election year, to put your country ahead of your party, and to always debate principles; never debate personalities.” However, in President Johnson’s 1967 State of the Union Address, the following reference to Abraham Lincoln was coded as civil religious: “At the heart of this attack on crime must be the conviction that a free America—as Abraham Lincoln once said—must ‘let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the Nation.’”
23 These speeches were originally selected to be a part of the study’s sample, but it was later decided to exclude them because of a lack of consistent public opinion data during that time: 1932 Nomination Acceptance; 1933 Inaugural Address; Major Speeches delivered on May 7, 1933, and July 24, 1933; 1934 and 1935 State of the Union Address; Major Speech delivered on April 28, 1935; 1936 Nomination Acceptance; 1936 State of the Union Address, and Major Speech delivered on September 6, 1936.
24 This statistic is sometimes referred to as Byrt, Bishop, and Carlin’s Prevalence Adjusted Kappa.
25 This approach (coding of sentences that contain civil religious references) is consistent with Shogan’s (Citation2007) coding methodology for the moral rhetoric of presidents.
26 More specifically, 20% of speeches contained fewer than 5% CRWP, an additional 26% contained between 5% and 10% CRWP, and an additional 24% contained between 10% and 15% CRWP.
27 An analysis that excluded these four outliers revealed no substantive differences in the results compared to those presented in this study.
28 A Shapiro-Wilk test of normality failed to reject the null hypothesis of non-normality with a test statistic of 0.802.
29 Skewness (1.839; Std. Error 0.181) and Kurtosis (3.423; Std. Error 0.360) test statistics fell outside of the normal range.
30 Alternative models (Poisson and Tobit) were considered, but ultimately rejected because they are not appropriate for the type of data analyzed here.
31 That is, 0 represents a condition where there is an equal number of members of both political parties; 0.05 would represent a condition where the president’s party controls 5% more seats than his opposition; –0.10 would represent a condition where the president’s party controls 10% fewer seats than his opposition.
32 Polls were selected as close to the speech date as possible but no more than six weeks prior. The majority of these statistics were gathered from the Gallup Poll archives at the Roper Center IPoll Database (http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/CFIDE/roper/presidential/webroot/presidential_rating.cfm).
33 Alternative variables such as a Presidential Job Approval to Disapproval Ratio and a Percentage Monthly Change in Job Approval Rating were evaluated but found to be less effective for the models presented in this study.
34 Unfortunately, the literature on civil religion is less clear on how these conditions may influence the use of this rhetoric. There are commendable studies on the content of civil religious rhetoric during military conflicts (Haberski Citation2012; Ungar Citation1991) and political campaigns (Chapp Citation2012); however, these studies do not evaluate whether these conditions systematically influence the use of civil religion.
35 This variable excluded conflicts in which a relatively small number of ground troops were involved (less than 1,500) and/or where the mission was primarily peace-keeping (i.e., Lebanon, 1982; Somalia, 1993; Bosnia, 1994; and Kosovo, 1999). The conflicts included were World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Invasion of Grenada, Invasion of Panama, Gulf War, Invasion of Haiti, and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Alternative variables such as Active Duty Military Personnel (excluding National Guard and Reserves) for each year and percentage change in Active Duty Military Personnel from the last year were found to be less effective in the models presented in this study.
36 Data obtained from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (U.S. Department of Commerce) (www.bea.gov/iTable/index nipa.cfm). These figures reflect the percentage change from the previous data point; seasonally adjusted annual rates from 1929–1946 and quarterly rates from 1947–2013. Alternative economic indicators such as the Unemployment Rate, Consumer Price Index, and Income Shares for the top 10% (proxy for inequality) were considered but found to be less effective in the models presented in this study.
37 Other scholars have also argued that in recent years political actors have strategically relied upon implicit rather than explicit religious rhetoric to appeal to religious voters without alienating those who are less comfortable with public expressions of faith (Albertson Citation2015; Calfano and Djupe Citation2009).
38 Whereas Chapp and Coe (2017) document the growing tendency for presidents to rely on non-traditional media sources to tailor their messages to particular subgroups of the population (“narrowcasting”), Scacco and Coe (2016, 2014) describe the development of the “Ubiquitous Presidency” in which “presidents cultivate a highly visible and nearly constant presence in political and nonpolitical arenas of American life.”
39 Cameron (2004, 647) defines this condition as a situation “when politics is polarized and control of government is divided by party.”
40 Alternative models (available upon request) that employ a binary variable representing changes in religious rhetoric (Reagan through Obama) or changes in the media environment (Clinton through Obama) did not produce substantively different results than those presented here.
41 Because civil religious rhetoric is more prevalent in an Inaugural Address compared to other speech types, and because these speeches often occur when the president enjoys a high level of public and congressional support, it is possible that the relationships identified in this analysis are merely coincidental. The result of an alternative model which excludes Inaugural Addresses was compared to the model presented in this article to explore this possibility. No substantive differences between the models were found and the results of this analysis are available upon request.
42 It should be noted that this particular relationship may warrant further analysis since it is measured rather crudely in this study. One could imagine more nuanced data of the varying levels of polarization within each particular Congress (i.e., Poole-Rosenthal Data Set) providing a more refined test on this potential relationship.