Perhaps this belongs under politics but statism is a religion.

That Old-Time Civil Religion

In The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, McDougall traces how changes in the American civil religion (or "ACR") have shaped the country's attitudes toward war and peace. From the founding until the Spanish-American War of 1898, what McDougall calls the "Classical ACR" (or "Neo-Classical ACR" after the Civil War) prevailed. It was a faith of national expansion on the North American continent, but it did not, in the words of John Quincy Adams, "go forth in search of monsters to destroy" overseas. A new faith took hold in the last decade of the 19th century: the "Progressive American Civil Religion," which became an even more firmly entrenched "Neo-Progressive ACR" during the Cold War. This was a militant faith that conceived of the nation's mission as being, in George W. Bush's words, to "end tyranny in our world." Today a third faith, the "Millennial ACR," aspires to unite the world through a global economy and regime of universal rights. It too has roots in the Cold War, though McDougall identifies it primarily with presidents Clinton and Obama.

You'll notice a pattern. Each civil religion has a "neo" phase that emerges when its original formulation runs into trouble. The basic impulse—toward staying at home, asserting American primacy in international affairs, or uniting the world—stays the same, but the rhetoric gets updated. And the progression from one civil religion to the next is not strictly linear: After World War I, for example, the Progressive ACR was partly discredited and the broadly non-interventionist Classical ACR enjoyed a slight return. Similarly, the globalist Millennial ACR was knocked back by the 9/11 attacks and the wars of the George W. Bush years, which brought the Cold War–style "Neo-Progressive ACR" back into fashion.

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It's too soon to say what Donald Trump might mean for America's civil religion. Does his America First rhetoric promise a return to the Classical ACR? Or, like the last Republican president, will he turn out to be Neo-Progressive after all? Whatever the case, if we follow the pattern McDougall sets out, the third civil religion will eventually be reborn as a "Neo-Millennial ACR."

That worries McDougall. "What American Civil Religion retained from Christianity," he writes, "is universality, which in secular form can only mean world government." That in turn "can only reinforce the Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Rousseauian manifestations of the will to power." McDougall recognizes the utility of having a civil religion, which "can provide the emotional glue binding diverse groups to each other and to shared institutions and national interests." But he's a political skeptic, not a true believer. "Civil religion turns toxic," he concludes, "when twisted into a Jacobin creed and peddled to people at home through mythical history and forced down foreign throats at gunpoint."