Philip Gorski, the Yale sociologist of religion, reflects on it in the age of Obama. In a wonky but illuminating interview, he urges Americans to forsake idolatry:
The United States, because it’s a nation of immigrants and because it’s so deeply pluralistic, can’t be defined in terms of some shared background culture or in terms of some kind of ethno-national descent. It’s not Sweden, where they can disagree, but at the end of the day, they’re still Swedes. The only way in which you can really have any kind of coherence to an American project is to have it based around some set of ideals. But one has to always be somewhat critical. I think the real danger sign that you’re slipping toward some form of potentially dangerous state idolatry is when you start to hear too much about blood and blood sacrifice. This is a very dangerous kind of rhetoric, which one hears inevitably in times of war and conflict. It tends to redefine national belonging in the United States around race, around lineage, clearly to exclude more recent immigrant groups. That, I think, is the danger, where an attempt at a civil theology can degenerate into some kind of state idolatry.
This resonates with a previous Dish discussion of Stanley Hauerwas' work .
The Dish 