The stakes are high. “If we fail to rebuild the vital center, it will mean the end not only of American democracy—what is now left of it, anyway—but of the American creed itself: e pluribus unum,” Gorski writes. “The eyes of the world are still upon us. And if we should fail, the God of history will not deal kindly with us.”

I spoke with Gorksi about civil religion and the state of the culture wars. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Emma Green: What is civil religion?

Philip Gorski: Civil religion is the way a particular people thinks about the transcendent purposes of a life together. One might understand “transcendent” in a traditional religious sense, or one might just understand it as some kind of ultimate value or higher purpose that a nation or polity is built around.

American civil religion is a specific version of that.

Green: You contrast civil religion with two other narratives of American democracy: radical secularism and religious nationalism. Describe what those are.

Gorski: The radical-secular interpretation of American history is that American democracy is an Enlightenment project based solely on secular values. The religious-nationalist interpretation is that America was founded as a Christian nation, and our laws and Constitution are all grounded in Christian or Judeo-Christian scripture. One of the points of the book is to show that at the many junctures of our history, those two sources have been intertwined with each other.

One of my favorite examples of this is Benjamin Franklin’s draft seal for the United States. The image is of Moses parting the Red Sea and the Israelites crossing over behind him. Franklin can hardly be suspected of being a particularly orthodox Christian, yet he thought this narrative belied something fundamental about the American project.

Another example is Thomas Paine’s famous tract, Common Sense. Radical secularists often point to Paine when they’re arguing for the Enlightenment character of the American founding. Yet if you look at the first eight or 10 pages of Common Sense, Paine frames it entirely around an interpretation of 1 Samuel 8. The text was the basis of his argument about God preferring republican forms of government.

One can find this argument among arguably the least orthodox Christian figures in the founding generation. How much more influential must it have been among those for whom the Bible was a touchstone?

Green: You describe a tendency among some secular thinkers to cast America’s past leaders as non-religious. What’s up with that?

Gorski: People are trying to cook the books of moral accounting in American history. They want people whom they admire as important civic leaders to have the “right” motivations—which is to say, secular motivations. They want to wave away any inspiration those people might have received from Christianity.