President or pontiff?

"When President Bush went to Atlanta to lay a wreath on the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 75th anniversary of his birth, he was greeted by protesters shouting, 'Bush go home' and 'Peace, not war,'" complained National Review in a February 9 editorial.

The journal demurred on the question of whether King a serial adulterer, shameless plagiarist, and fellow traveler with Communist subversives--was a fit subject of a national holiday. But it chose an interesting way to express its outrage over the supposed affront to President Bush. "If King is an example and an inspiration to all, then the President of the United States, in his role as pontifex maximus of the American civil religion, will, and should, honor him."

"Pontifex Maximus" was a title bestowed on Roman officials whose authority extended over both the political state and the official state religion. The term "civil religion" was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual architect of the totalitarian French Revolution. Rousseau defined his creed as "a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject." Digested to its essence, Rousseau's civil religion was the mandatory worship of the state.

In a review of the 2003 State of the Union address, this magazine warned that President Bush's public conduct "reflects a belief in what has been called the 'Civil Religion'--that is, the public worship of the state as God." (See "President or Ruler?" in our March 24, 2003 issue.) What THE NEW AMERICAN warned about last year--the deification of the state, and the near-deification of the president--National Review, the supposed flagship of the conservative movement, now prescribes as conservative orthodoxy.