A Sacralizing Impulse

A few days ago, President Trump made waves when he gave what appeared to be an overtly partisan speech to a group of Navy sailors, at a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy.

Notable was the speech itself: Trump veered into criticizing the news media and his Democratic predecessors, which wasn’t totally surprising, even if it was surprising in context. But also notable was some of the journalism following up the event: while expectedly impatient with Trump’s usual tone, the New York Times was especially offended by Trump’s disregard for maintaining a nonpartisan military, which, the article notes, “is one of America’s oldest and most sacred democratic traditions.”

This is fairly common parlance – invoking the sacred when speaking of American government and civic life. We’re used to referring to “our sacred democracy,” for example, or America’s “hallowed” duty to “make the world safe for democracy,” that sort of thing. But upon reflection, this is also a bit strange. The military is a secular institution, and politics, generally, pertain to the secular order. Few people would say otherwise, even if they would persist in using this kind of language.

The sentiment probably comes from a few different sources. As religious institutions’ influence wanes, and loses cultural authority to receive and direct our impulse to name and venerate the sacred, it makes sense that this need to sacralize something would get redirected. And, something as noble and prominent as the military, or democracy on the whole, would be natural objects for that sacralizing impulse.

But there are also roots to this tendency that go deeper, historically. There’s been a long tradition in American life that that sees American democracy and the Kingdom of God as running perilously close to each other. We’ve been haunted by this odd complex of God, country, and democracy from the time of our founding, when the American “mythic vision” took root. Then was the idea born that we would serve as a sort of lodestar for the world, a beacon of freedom and political, moral, and social progress.

All of it makes for a bit of a tangle: the American democratic tradition is neither God’s Kingdom nor the devil’s, wholesale. And the American military is neither “sacred,” in the way we usually use that term, nor an institution deserving disrespect, either. But these fine lines, and the cue we might flag when we are inclined to speak of our institutions in these sanctifying ways, are all good cause for self-reflection: what is worthy of this sacralizing impulse? Where exactly do our allegiances to political or military institutions lie? And how perilously close to our ultimate allegiances do they – and should they – run?