In a video taken inside the Capitol Rotunda during the siege on January 6, 2021, a man draped in a Trump flag breaks down weeping. RotundaRoundFace (RRF), as the internet later called him, falls to his knees, tears streaming while he smiles, joining his “Glory, glory, hallelujah” to the echoing chorus of other insurrectionists singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. A man asks RRF if he is okay and rallies a few others to pray together. RRF places his phone down, and above the men’s dark, huddled silhouettes, we see the fresco of the Apotheosis of Washington — George Washington raised into the heavens, becoming a god. The men join in a vague, banal prayer that ends with the request, “Guide us to do your will.”

Even today, that “will” remains ambiguous, perhaps even to its participants. On the morning of the joint Congressional session to certify the presidential vote, outgoing President Donald Trump spoke to hundreds of supporters in front of the White House, calling them to “show strength” and march to the Capitol. Over the next hours, rioters violently breached the building, hoping to stop the certification of what they alleged was a stolen election.

Though some rioters carried Confederate flags, the people singing Battle Hymn of the Republic likely didn’t know they were invoking a Union song set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” — the abolitionist John Brown, executed in 1859 for inciting a slave rebellion, of course being a very different kind of insurrectionist. The group was incongruous, but its members shared one characteristic: religious language and imagery.

As photos and videos streamed from this very digital siege, Peter Manseau noticed this pattern and created the hashtag #CapitolSiegeReligion. Manseau, the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the National Museum of American History, tweeted, “I’m convinced it is *the* story of what happened. Not everyone wore a Guns & God hoodie or carried a Jesus flag but they all shared the psychological safety net such symbols provided.” He connected with Michael Altman, an associate professor in the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies who works with their digital lab; the two were later joined by Jerome Copulsky, consulting scholar at the National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. Together, they built a database of the religious imagery, symbols, and language that permeated the riot and invited scholars of religion to analyze them.

Though symbols of Christian nationalism were dominant — “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump is My President” — the Capitol that day was a pluralist carnival. There was the Jewish shofar, the Catholic Infant of Prague, the Crusader’s Deus Vult cross, a man dressed as the Mormon Captain Moroni. There were QAnon symbols, memes native to 4Chan, and shamanism, combined with white supremacist slogans. There were prayers and hymns joining people of different religious traditions in quasi-religious epiphany. In an effort to “stop the steal” — a political project — why did rioters bring all this religion with them? Copulsky and Altman launched Uncivil Religion to begin to answer that question.

– April Zhu for Guernica

Guernica: How did Uncivil Religion come to be?

Jerome Copulsky: Both Mike and I know a lot of people who study the relationship between religion and politics in American history and saw, from as early as Trump’s 2016 campaign, something very interesting about the religious dimension of his support. Much of his support was attributed to a transactional relationship: Here’s a guy who’s going to give us the judges or policy we want, so we’ll support him. But it became clear that there was something deeper, something stranger going on.

Part of it was tonality, the desire for a strong man, a champion who would fight their battles and defeat (or at least vex) their enemies. This may explain why a group that had historically been looking for a level of (professed) piety from its leaders was able to support the boorishness of Trump — because he was “our fighter rather than our pastor.” As the Trump Administration went on, and particularly as Covid and the election increased pressure, the religious and spiritual warfare rhetoric also heightened. So I don’t think we were surprised, as we watched what was happening on January 6, to see so much “religion” being a part of it. That was, we might say, par for the course.

Michael Altman: On that day, I was sitting at my laptop working from home, trying to finish a syllabus for what was going to be a hybrid class on religion, politics, and law. I had one window open on the insurrection and one window open working on the syllabus, and I realized, this is what the syllabus needs to cover. That day I rewrote the whole syllabus, drawing on what came out. “Civil Religion in America” by Robert Bellah was one of the pieces that had always been in that class. And this gave us a new kind of discussion point on that day: Is what we saw on January 6 civil religion?

Guernica: What is civil religion? When we use it to frame what we saw on January 6, what exactly are we reaching for?

Copulsky: We have a funny situation in the United States. The Constitution set up a secular government in which Congress “can make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So on the one hand, ostensibly, we’re a secular government, but on the other hand, American politics has always been infused with religion — dominantly, but not exclusively, shaped by Protestant Christianities. And that infusion of religious rhetoric, symbols, and narratives into the American political imagination creates what scholars like Robert Bellah called “civil religion.”

Bellah, who was writing during the Vietnam War period, opened his famous article “Civil Religion in America” with an analysis of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Here you have the first Roman Catholic president, speaking in the midst of the Cold War, using vague, capacious God-language that really all monotheists could assent to, suggesting that American freedom and the nation’s activity in the world are set within a larger moral frame. This is not the same as the establishment of Christianity. For Bellah, religious and political rhetoric are combined to legitimize the state and condition its purposes. In the case of Kennedy’s inauguration, the ritual provided stability in the transition from a Republican to Democratic administration. As Bellah said, “it reaffirms … the religious legitimation of the highest political authority.”

Civil religion has this functional dimension: It binds citizens who may not have other things in common. But it also had, for Bellah, a normative dimension, which is that it held American aspirations and projects in the light of divine judgment. It’s important to note that Bellah was writing about American civil religion at a time he believed it was breaking down.

Now, we don’t have to accept Bellah’s interpretation, but he’s on to something that, even though we are constitutionally a secular state, politicians, both on the right and on the left, rely on religious rhetoric. Civil religion is supposed to undergird the American democratic political project.

So why did we use the phrase “Uncivil Religion” for this project?” On the one hand, what was going on was, on the face of it, uncivil. It was a riot, an attack on the Capitol. But, on the other hand, many of those religious tropes and symbols that had in the past been deployed for other political purposes were now being deployed in this attack, the purpose of which was to disrupt a particular political ritual, to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, to “stop the steal” under the banner of Heaven. Was it a political rally turned riot, a religious revival, or both?

Altman: I’ve always been really critical of the idea of civil religion because one person’s civil religion is another’s nationalism; we just don’t talk about it like that. I have also done some work on religion in India, and no one calls Hindutva an Indian civil religion. We call it Hindu nationalism. So it strikes me that a lot of civil religion is just American nationalism with God-talk. For me, Uncivil Religion is just the beginning of a poke at that — like, just as much as what we saw was white Christian nationalism, that is a kind of civil religion too.

There were a couple people on Twitter who got really mad because we called it pluralist. To me, that was a poke at the idea that not all pluralism is the liberal Episcopalian, the liberal Methodist, liberal Jew, and liberal Muslim having breakfast together. Sometimes you can have icky, hateful pluralism too. A big part of this project is to shock people out of the easy “good religion, bad religion” assessment. Religion doesn’t do stuff; people do stuff with religion. Christianity doesn’t do stuff; people who claim to be Christians do stuff and say it’s Christianity. Religion was the cultural tool that people had on hand. That’s why people were singing “Amazing Grace” outside the Capitol, because what do you do where they’re from, in their world, when you are overwhelmed with fervor and emotion? You sing a hymn. Prayer is not just talking to God; it’s a declaration of needs in the community.

Copulsky: If we listen to the statements of political leaders about the events — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dick Durbin, for example — we hear the language of desecration: These people who came in and attacked the Capitol desecrated the temple of our democracy. That leans on religious language. The Capitol building is a sacred space, and by entering it in this violent way — and also by breaking things and smearing feces on the walls — the rioters were infidels desecrating the temple. Yet many people who participated in the insurrection did not see themselves as desecrators; they saw themselves as attempting to liberate the temple of their democracy from the infidels.

So many people involved were deploying religious language. And what does the rhetoric of religion do but serve to legitimate one’s activity? It brings it to that heightened level. That’s what Bellah was talking about, that the religious language does something other forms of language, other symbols, aren’t necessarily capable of doing. It’s one thing to say you are involved in a political act. It’s another to give that political act a spiritual motivation and a divine sanction.

Guernica: The relationship between religion and national politics in the US has obviously changed over time. It obviously isn’t a binary, but how much of this is as old as the US and how much of this is new?

Copulsky: To say that this is an entirely new dispensation, that Trumpism is a radical break from the American way of politics, gets us off the hook way too easily. Certain people say there was civility to American politics before Trump came and blew it up, but I don’t think that’s the case. Moreover, a lot of the tensions, rhetoric, and resentments that found a voice in Trump are long-standing. The idea of a populist demagogue becoming president is nothing new; it goes back at least to the presidency of Andrew Jackson. There are certain new things, of course, particularly with regard to technology and social media – although we can probably make comparisons to other forms of media at other times in American history. Part of what we’re doing in this project is to suggest that January 6 is an event that can only be understood in terms of broader considerations of American history, politics, and religion. It did not just happen out of the blue.

Altman: I think what’s new is the event itself happening where it did. It happened on the Capitol, and that’s clearly new. I was joking with someone that part of this is what happens when you disestablish religion. I wonder, if we had an established church, like they do in other European countries, what would happen? Because in the US, we set religion aside as a category that is exempt from the law in some ways but then prohibited from certain public spaces in other ways. If it’s “religion,” you can’t teach it in public schools, but you don’t have to pay taxes. When you set religion aside, it becomes a resource that can be deployed — weaponized, if you want to get value-laden — in a variety of ways. It can then be used to raise political identities to a transcendent level. It can be used to bind groups. That’s not new. But the arrival of that in the Capitol in this particular way, that’s new.

Copulsky: As Mike just said, we don’t have established religion in the US, but one of the things that was interesting about Trump is that he literally positioned himself as a defender of the faith, even as it was obvious to his evangelical supporters that he was not of them. Over and again Trump said things like, They’re trying to destroy your Christianity, and I am going to protect your religious liberty. He was not a protector of religious freedom as such, but of a particular kind of Judeo-Christian conservatism. Trump defended their faith and they in turn came to Washington to defend him.

The great image for this, of course, is Trump standing in front of the parish house of St. John’s Episcopalian Church with a Bible, right after protestors had been violently cleared out of Lafayette Square. Why was he going for a photo-op there, in front of a church? Why was he holding a Bible? And not, say, the Constitution? It was a signal to his base. Interestingly, St. John’s is an Episcopalian Church, the daughter denomination of the Church of England, which is, of course, the established church of England — and was the established church of the southern colonies during the colonial period.

And another irony: Do you remember what was written on the sign behind Trump?

Guernica: No, I don’t.

Copulsky: “All are welcome.”

Guernica: I wonder if civil religion, when applied across an entire nation with whatever arbitrary borders that nation draws, is then always doomed to be exclusive? Is using religion for statecraft always kind of dangerous?

Altman: The underside of Bellah’s civil religion is the Lost Cause. I always think about Charles Reagan Wilson’s book Baptized in the Blood, which is all about the Lost Cause as a religion. Scholars of religion of the South have looked at lynching as a religious ritual — and while I don’t often see those two put in conversation, they exist literally side by side. That Martin Luther King Jr. is part of the pantheon of American civil religion, but here in Alabama, on the state calendar, Martin Luther King [Jr.] Day is also the celebration of Robert E. Lee’s birthday just shows that you’re right: It is an exclusive nationalist claim.

Copulsky: Should we consider MAGA as a new civil religion? We know what its symbols are, we know what its icons and its totems are. But what is the theology or the motivating spirit of MAGA? It is a kind of nostalgia for an America that never was, and a cultural dominance that has long been receding. To follow up on Mike, it’s interesting to think about how that MAGA civil religion, if we can call it that, has drawn very deeply from the wells of Lost Cause civil religion, which of course itself drew deeply from antebellum pro-slavery Southern theology — an anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-modern theological worldview.

Guernica: I keep going back to what Peter Manseau wrote in one of his tweets about the religious dimension of the insurrection, about the “safety net” of religious symbols. Could you speak about what the generally religious “vibes” of that day did to unify the group?

Copulsky: I go back to those videos in the Rotunda, because I think a lot of people got into the Capitol and then didn’t know what they were doing. You have Pastor Parler, who’s telling his viewers “Everyone here is peaceful. We’re not being violent with anyone!” and then turns around and yells to the crowd “Don’t break anything! Don’t vandalize!” It’s this great moment that captures the fact that many of these people don’t really know what’s going on. These guys seem surprised to find themselves where they are.

Altman: The dog caught the mail truck.

Copulsky: Right! That’s why I find the videos from the Rotunda so fascinating. They’re in the center of the Capitol, and they are trying to do something they regard as patriotic. But their actions illuminate the confusion. Even though some of them are carrying Confederate flags, they sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was composed during the Civil War as a Union song. One of the Rotunda videos centers on this one guy, RRF, who is clearly having a peak experience — he sings, lets out a sigh, begins weeping. And immediately he’s surrounded by other people he hasn’t met, and they’re like, dude, what should we do? Hey guys, let’s pray. And they form a huddle and they pray. Even though they’re coming from different places, this shared experience and this common language, for that moment, makes the mob into a team. So we want Uncivil Religion to show the religious dimension of January 6, which was not marginal to the event, but front and center. At the same time, we want to demonstrate the diversity of religious expressions on January 6. It was a religious — but not a religiously monolithic — event. And this confusion, of religion and politics, is something we ought to illuminate and think about.

Altman: I always come back to the image I put on the front page of the project: Jesus in the MAGA hat.

Copulsky: We couldn’t have created a better picture.

Altman: The thing about Jesus in American history and culture is that Jesus is a cipher. Jesus is an empty signifier that people constantly fill with everything from abolition to slavery to capitalism and socialism to essential oils. Trump and his message are similar. What holds it all together? I think it’s Jesus in a MAGA hat because both of those, in the meanings they carry, are empty.

Personally my favorite video — because I don’t know what the hell to do with it — is the guy walking around dressed as the NPC meme from alt-right 4chan culture. He’s walking around saying, “Hang all the traitors, hang all the traitors, bring them up, string them up.” That is so far afield of, say, the Trump voters who live in my town, but because MAGA can be filled with whatever, they can both be put in there. Or “Michael the Black Man” [the Black Hebrew Israelite who stood onstage and exhorted “good white people” to stand with Blacks for Trump against “demonic whites”]. Donald Trump’s ability to empty himself of meaning, and the way that in America, Jesus has been emptied of meaning, coincided perfectly to give everyone something to hang on to.

Copulsky: Let me say one more thing about MAGA Jesus in that photo. This is a strong Jesus; this is a chiseled, “manly” Jesus. This is a Jesus who means business. On the bottom is a sticker with the QAnon tag “WWG1WGA” [where we go one we go all]. The QAnon thing is also, we might say, a team-building exercise, as QAnon connects people from around the country and around the world on this quest for the esoteric “truth.”

You might say that the Trump movement has cultivated a form of political participation. There is certainly an entertainment dimension to it, and to the right wing media space generally: Trump himself grew to prominence with his reality TV show. But his supporters have deeply engaged with his “show,” by following his tweets, attending his rallies, and so forth. Trumpism involved a constant bond of engagement, which is why Trump’s social media presence and rallies were so important to him. The people Trump summoned and who came to Washington on January 6 to “stop the steal” were part of a team. They were super fans. Super fans who were now called onto the field to fight for their hero. After all, the term “fan” is derived from the word “fanatic,” itself a word with religious connotations.