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Examines the recent attempt by contemporary conservatives to arrest the decline in the moral character of American political society and thereby to maintain American standing in world affairs strategically, economically, and culturally by way of a contrived civil theology for American political society. In light of this attempt, it is possible to distinguish and classify civil theology in terms of the organic and contrived variety.The United States offers a convenient instance in which these two types of civil theology can be discerned and analyzed. The traditional American civil theology, which provided the myth structure for American society up until the 1960s, can be understood as essentially organic in structure. With the atrophy of this "traditional" civil theology have come efforts to ameliorate moral decline in the United States. Recent attempts to revive the traditional civil theology by American conservatives have, however, resulted in a contrivance that only appears to be a restoration of the traditional civil theology but, in reality, amounts to the establishment of an orthodoxy of a sectarian Protestant community drifting toward radical elements of Christian eschatology. In this way, the contrived civil theology risks the establishment of an American ideology, or "Americanism," in the words of Russell Kirk. This newly-institutionalized Protestant sectarianism, in turn, has been further radicalized around the notion of American exceptionalism and that the United States embodies a certain divinely-ordained "destiny." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the recent attempt by contemporary conservatives to arrest the decline in the moral character of American political society and thereby to maintain American standing in world affairs strategically, economically, and culturally by way of a contrived civil theology for American political society. In this way, it is possible to distinguish and classify civil theology in terms of the organic and contrived variety.The United States offers a convenient instance in which these two types of civil theology can be discerned and analyzed. The traditional American civil theology, which provided the myth structure for American society up until the 1960s, can be understood as essentially organic in structure. With the atrophy of this "traditional" civil theology have come efforts to ameliorate moral decline in the United States. Recent attempts to revive the traditional civil theology by certain American conservatives have, however, resulted in a contrivance that only appears to be a restoration of the traditional civil theology but, in realty borders on an ideological construction of the type typically anathema to American political thought and practice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the recent attempt by contemporary conservatives to arrest the decline in the moral character of American political society. The effort has resulted in a contrivance that only appears to be a restoration of the traditional civil theology but, in realty borders on an ideological construction of the type typically anathema to American political thought and practice.