Page 257 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

246 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

thought of as stable, firm, and consistent. Newer ways of thinking about
culture have begun to question such assumptions. We now think of funda-
mental cultural ideas as evolving and as significantly rooted in
contemporary experience. Reflecting on the way commemoration invokes
significant memories of the nation and its values, historian John Gillis
observes,

we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities.
Memories help us make sense of the world we live in; and “memory
work” is, like any other kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in
complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is
remembered (or forgotten), by whom and for what end. 36

It is interesting to note that it has only been relatively recently in American
culture, at least, that ideas about the kinds of meanings, rooted in consen-
sual understandings of where we’ve come from, have concerned the broad
swath of public discourse. Traditionally, only the cultural elites cared.
Gillis notes that, in addition to this sort of democratic uninterest in the
past, the American project was originally conceived of as very much about
the future, with figures such as Jefferson specifically eschewing the idea of
narrativizing a national “past.” 37
Yet there are some received notions available to us from the earliest
days of the republic, ideas that can be seen to still be in play (though not
necessarily determinitive) in the way that tragic events such as 9/11 are
remembered, interpreted, and understood. In his comprehensive study of
the physical sites of American violence and tragedy, cultural geographer
Kenneth Foote cites an early expression of American ideas of civil religion
in a quotation from Joseph Galloway published in 1780.

The fundamental and general laws of every society are the lessons of
instruction by which the subject is daily taught his duty and obedience
to the State. It is the uniformity of these lessons, flowing from the
same system of consistent polity, which forms the same habits,
manners, and political opinions throughout the society, fixes the
national attachment, and leads the people to look up to one system of
government for their safety and happiness, and to act in concert on all
occasions to maintain and defend it. 38

The fundamental idea that collective interest underlies a sense of duty and
obligation to public order is nearly generic in American civic education.
One way of thinking about civil religion, then, is through ideas like these,
where the religion is not sectarian, but underlies a sense of duty to a state
whose legitimacy is both underscored and justified by its relationship to
public sentiments, duties, and obligations. The system is in a way self-justi-