ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some rudimentary propositions about the connections of politics and religion in occidental and Christian civilization, enclosed in a heuristic philosophy of history. Politics and religion have had both competing and collaborative functions in the control of society and in the stimulation of certain durable qualities of human conviction. In the United States the pathological features of politics and religion—their decline of power and virtue—seem more closely linked in time and substance than elsewhere. American culture has experienced a dialectic of sects and solitude, the rigor of the community and the estrangement of the individual. American manifest destiny is a major theme, but it is not the exclusive theme of the crossing patterns of religion and politics. Religion and politics have two dimensions: the interior and the exterior—the believer and the church, the citizen and the state.
