Super Bowl Ads and American Civil Religion

The two most controversial, apparently contradictory Super Bowl ads—Bob Dylan’s protectionist, “American Import” Chrysler ad and Coca-Cola’s multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful”—show the breadth of American civil religion. As religion scholars have long observed, it belongs to the nature of religious language to self-destruct. An infinite God who chooses one people or takes flesh in one man; an eternal moment that includes all time; a Way that is the source of all action but does nothing itself: all these paradoxes and more exemplify how religious language evokes a reality that cannot be named, beyond all language. 

Around major sporting events, which stand apart from government and so are not directly tied to civil religion, the language and rituals of American civil religion appear with more and more fervency. Religion, as the derivation of the word from the Latin ligare (to bind) implies, attempts to strengthen the bonds that hold things together, and events like the Super Bowl, the World Series, and any Nascar race seem to call for rituals that affirm that we Americans are in fact one country. More than most nations, we are many. We have no clergy of any traditional religions whose blessing would be acceptable to most of us, no food or language or ethnic heritage that is native to all of us. So, more than most nations, we need the huge flags, the singing of the national anthem. In the United States, churches and synagogues commonly have a national flag in the sanctuary, next to the altar or the pulpit. All nations have a civil religion, but the United States needs the most elaborate and powerful civil religion in the world. 

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