Lessons for a future atheist president from Jimmy Carter’s funeral

The funeral and related rituals surrounding the death of former President Jimmy Carter made for an impressive spectacle. As befits the great man almost everyone agrees Carter was, the services were an inspiring reminder of a life well-lived and a time more hopeful than today. Apparently, many Americans found the events to be memorable and meaningful.

Secularists like me—meaning not just personal non-belief, but a commitment to government neutrality with regard to religion—sometimes forget just how religious America has been and continues to be.

Carter’s funeral was a real mix of church and state. The early service at the Capitol had a religious format. The later state funeral service at the National Cathedral was both a public and official event and a fully religious service. America’s armed forces robustly participated.

Carter’s funeral raises several issues for secularists. First, what does it reveal about the whole idea of church/state separation in America? Second, what does it tell us about the future of that separation? Finally, what does the Carter experience teach us about building a secular civilization?

Regarding the separation of church and state, Carter’s funeral reminds us that America has always been a very religious country and that the Constitution was never understood to require the kind of purely private religious observance that secularists sometimes champion.

I wrote a book in 2007 entitled American Religious Democracy: Coming To Terms with the End of Secular Politics. It was a rebuttal to the notion of public reason argued by John Rawls, which tried to restrict religious expression in the public square. The book pointed out that many Americans were religious and they had every right to speak for, and vote for, their religious values expressed in public policy. Any effort to limit that was simply anti-democratic.

Today we live in an obvious religious democracy in which religiously oriented voters installed President Donald Trump.

No one knows exactly what the Establishment Clause in the Constitution was meant to prevent, beyond the literal establishment of an official federal church. George Washington obviously thought that it permitted public acknowledgment of God and public thanksgiving and prayer, since he engaged in both. 

The Pledge of Allegiance says we are a nation “under God.” In God We Trust is imprinted on our money. And the beautiful official Navy Hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save," sung for Annapolis graduate Carter, is a direct plea for God’s help.

Secularists are free, of course, to argue that these and like practices are unconstitutional. But there is no reason to believe that they would have affronted the framers of the Constitution. (Cases requiring taxpayers to pay for religious schools are another matter.)

The second issue raised by Carter’s funeral is the future of the separation of church and state. The funeral was a grand expression of America’s Protestant origin and culture. When people claim that America is a Christian nation, they are both wrong and right. That was never officially the case. But the Protestant tradition created the public culture of civil religion that we continue to a certain extent to practice today. President Dwight Eisenhower once remarked, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. ” It once really mattered what Protestant voices like Reinhold Niebuhr preached about public policy. That is America’s civil religion.

Carter was a fervent Christian who taught Sunday School while president. He believed in a kind, gentle, inclusive savior in Jesus Christ. That is why the words spoken at the funeral on behalf of Carter’s vice-president, Walter Mondale, were so beautiful and direct: “We spoke the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace.”

But that Protestant tradition is fading. Of the living Presidents, George Bush and Bill Clinton are faint and maybe false representatives. Barack Obama was practically the first post-Christian President, at least in terms of doctrinal faith. Joe Biden is something of a throwback because of his age, but in any event is a sincere Catholic, not a Protestant. Trump is closer to a pagan barbarian. There is nothing remotely Christian about him.

More generally, many, perhaps most Americans today are either not believers or are spiritually oriented but unmoored. Fewer and fewer Americans are really shaped by the Protestant tradition.

There may never again be a public expression of American Protestant culture as fitting as that of Carter’s funeral.

This raises the third, and crucial, issue for secularists concerning Carter’s funeral: How do we build a secular civilization? Let us now imagine the funeral of the first self-proclaimed atheist American president. A secular civilization will have the same need for national ritual that any civilization has. It will have the same need for story. That story had better be about a beneficent universe, a hopeful future and a welcome place for human beings. We don’t have that story now.

To create such a story, we secularists have to put reductionist materialism behind us. To build a civilization, we need an understanding of reality that can raise up a man like Jimmy Carter and then bury him with an inspiring funeral like his. If we could not do that today, we have to work to be able to do that tomorrow.