(RNS) — I’ll rise this Memorial Day to remember W. Lloyd Warner, the distinguished anthropologist who gave us the single best account of how civil religion in America works — or rather, how it worked once upon a time.
“An American Sacred Ceremony,” a chapter in Warner’s 1953 book, “American Life: Dream and Reality,” focuses on the celebration of Memorial Day in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the wake of World War II.
Memorial Day originated in the North after the Civil War to show respect for the fallen Union soldiers, but by the middle of the 20th century it had become a commemoration of all who had died for the country. Warner, without using the term “civil religion,” calls it a “cult of the dead which organizes and integrates the various faiths and national and class groups into a sacred unity.”
In “Yankee City” (as he identified Newburyport), preparations would begin several weeks before Memorial Day itself with various participating civic and religious organizations holding meetings and sending messages to the local newspaper announcing their activities for the day. These would include processions, memorial services, patriotic programs and the cleaning of cemeteries, along with the decoration of old gravestones and the erection of new ones.
Throughout, the emphasis was on self-sacrifice — the voluntary willingness of soldiers to give their lives for democracy and for their country. Sermons given the Sunday before Memorial Day often mentioned Jesus’ self-sacrifice for all and stressed the day’s meaning for the nation as a whole.
As one clergyman put it: “Memorial Day is a religious day. It is a day when we get a vision of the unbreakable brotherhood and unity of spirit which exists and still exists, no matter what race or creed or color, in the country where all men have equal rights.”
On Sunday afternoon, rituals in cemeteries, memorial squares, lodge halls and churches often included vacant chairs decorated with flags and wreaths, each with the name of a veteran who had died. Speeches commonly referred to George Washington, who had devoted himself to the country, and Abraham Lincoln, who had sacrificed his life for it.
The rituals continued on Memorial Day morning. Early in the afternoon, uniformed groups gathered in the business district to march in a parade to the cemeteries as crowds gathered along the entire route. The different religious bodies — Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish — conducted separate rituals in their cemeteries, then re-formed for the march back to town as an American Legion firing squad fired three times as a “general salute for all the dead in the cemetery.”
The different religious communities’ “sense of separateness was present and expressed in the different ceremonies, but the parade and the unity gained by doing everything at one time emphasized the oneness of the total group,” Warner wrote. “Each ritual also stressed the fact that the war was an experience where everyone sacrificed and some died, not as members of a separate group, but as citizens of a whole community.”
There are those who disdain this kind of sacralized patriotism as pseudo-religion or religious nationalism. I tend to disagree. How real it is these days is another question.
When Warner was studying Yankee City, there were still a handful of veterans around from the Civil War, plus many who had fought in the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. And, the Korean War was grinding along. Few Americans didn’t know someone whose life had been claimed by one or another of these conflicts.
Since then, the wars we’ve fought, including the present one, have involved nothing like the mass mobilizations of the past, and unlike them, they exist in our collective memory as shadowed affairs at best, and moral disasters at worst.
As I write this, I can hear the band from the middle school down the block practicing “The Caisson Song” in preparation for Monday’s parade through West Hartford Center. Other than that, the preparations have been scanty. By the look of it, the parade will have less to do with the townsfolk who gave their lives for their country than with the kids playing soccer, lacrosse and little league baseball.