Are Dogs Part of America’s Civil Religion?
by Katharine Mershon
“The Peace Hat, FDR (WWll) and Fala, Too!” by Tony Fischer Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
During the Trump presidency, much was made of the fact that the White House was without a dog for the first time in one hundred years. Not only were the halls of the symbolic home of American democracy markedly dogless, the White House’s former resident was notorious for his intense dislike of dogs. What does this dog hatred say about his character? countless journalists inquired in a flurry of think pieces. Is this contempt for canines un-American? others questioned, noting a breach of American presidential tradition. Others observed Trump’s predilection to wield dog-related insults at his perceived enemies, especially when they were people of color and women. In these cases, the racist and sexist implications of his dehumanizing invectives were clear. In other instances, however, his dog insults were rather nonsensical. What does it even mean to say someone was fired like a dog? many mused, humorously pointing out that dogs don’t typically have jobs from which they can be fired. But I’d add that there’s an additional incoherence to the former president’s canine hatred: the insult doesn’t land if you like dogs. And given that between 40–50 percent of households in the United States include canine companions, totaling over 75 million pet dogs nationwide, it’s fair to say that lots of Americans do.
Trump is far from the only American politician whose moral fitness has been measured by his attitude toward dogs. Remember the vitriol directed at then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney when a journalist unearthed a two-decades’ old story about Romney stowing Seamus the Irish Setter in a kennel on the roof of his station wagon for an entire day, stopping only to gas up and hose off the terrified dog. In a less extreme but symbolically rich occasion, Ted Cruz came under fire just a few months ago. Not only did Cruz abandon the human residents of Texas to jet off to Cancún, but he had the audacity to leave his dog behind as well. When a journalist posted an image of Snowflake the dog’s forlorn face peering out the front door of his empty home, it immediately went viral. It also produced tons of memes; Snowflake, they suggested, represented all Texans. (And yes, Ted Cruz’s dog is really named Snowflake).
So why do any of these canine political controversies matter and what do they have to do with American civil religion?
Robert Bellah’s famous 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America,” is useful for helping to explain how dogs fit into the picture. For Bellah, what is crucial to notice is that religious practices—including both rituals and symbols—can be located outside of overtly religious spaces. Indeed, as citizens of the nation, Americans participate in forms of political belonging and meaning-making that are also essentially religious in character. Think of the 4th of July, Veterans Day, or Inauguration Day—federal holidays that serve to integrate the local community into the national one. The rituals and symbols associated with these occasions provide opportunities for Americans to reaffirm, modify, and contest core national values and beliefs. Although a central tenet of American life is (ostensibly) the separation of church and state, Bellah’s essay allows us to see the persistence of religion within the political realm.
One of the questions that Bellah’s essay raises, however, is the extent to which diverse Americans actually identify with common rituals and symbols of belonging. Bellah attempts to respond to this challenge by acknowledging that the notion of an American civil religion does not preclude private forms of religious beliefs and practices. In his account, Americans share an orientation to religion that is particularly powerful in “times of trial,” such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the crisis of the War in Vietnam. Bellah’s essay has produced ongoing debates about the possibilities and limits of civil religion as an operative concept for understanding American political life. (For an insightful reading of the multiple strands within American civil religion, see Nichole R. Phillips’s 2018 book Patriotism Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism.)
For my purposes here, I want to emphasize that civil religion provides a useful way of naming the beliefs, symbols, and rituals that Americans identify with transcendent value. Civil religion might describe something more like an aspirational way of understanding political unity—even when the symbols and rituals fail to work for everyone in the same way, they are powerful because they suggest the possibility of a transcendent national identity. Civil religion’s aspirational character means that it is marked as much by its failures as its successes. Fragmentation and disunity are felt particularly in times of crisis, when American identity is being contested and reimagined. In what follows, I propose that we are living in such a time now and that dogs represent a contested site in American civil religion. It is because dogs can be used to represent so many things—from how we feel to who we are—they lend themselves well to affirming or contesting core American values, symbols, and rituals.
My aim is to show that by paying attention to how dogs are symbolically deployed in the public sphere, we can better understand the complex processes by which American values are debated and reworked. From shoring up white anxieties about Black masculinity to representing the return to “normalcy” in US politics, representations of dogs are used by different actors to make implicit claims about what it means to be an American. As my opening examples suggest, dogs are particularly powerful figures during election cycles. Because dogs are such a rich site of human projection, they can be used to address and deescalate political debates without the politician actually having to name the conflict. The dog’s mere presence is enough.
The recent Georgia Senate runoff between Kelly Loeffler and Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock provides a particularly good example of canine civil religion at work. In a series of attack ads that pull decontextualized quotes from Warnock’s sermons, Loeffler paints Warnock as a dangerous Black radical who is out of touch with the white conservative values of Georgia’s electorate. Warnock was the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, former home to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., making him among the most prominent Black religious leaders in the country. This position was bound to be used against him during the election. As political scientist Dr. Andra Gillespie notes, the central question for Warnock’s campaign was always going to be: “Can you be racially transcendent and the pastor of arguably the most prominent Black church in America?” Signaling racial transcendence thus became a key objective of the Warnock campaign.
Enter Alvin the beagle. In a 30-second campaign ad viewed over 6 million times, we see Warnock, dressed in a button down shirt and puffy vest, walking Alvin down the sidewalk of a tree-lined suburban street. With Alvin trotting in front of him, Warnock quips that they knew the “smear ads” from Loeffler were coming. “But I think Georgians will see them for what they are,” Warnock says, tossing a bag of dog poop into the garbage. He then turns to Alvin and asks, “Don’t you?” Alvin lets out an enthusiastic bark in what looks like vigorous affirmation. “I’m Raphael Warnock, and we approve this message,” he says, holding Alvin, who is vigorously licking Warnock’s face.
Not once does Warnock say anything about race. He doesn’t have to; Alvin does the symbolic heavy lifting for him. As political scientist Dr. Hakeem Jefferson notes, “the entire ad screams that I am a Black candidate whom white people ought not to be afraid of.” Through the beagle, the ad counteracts racist stereotypes about Black masculinity. To love dogs is to be American—and in doing so, implicitly appeal to white middle class norms. It’s important to point out how much the dog’s breed matters here. Alvin recalls America’s most famous beagle: Snoopy, a wholesome American cartoon icon known for his intelligence and wry sense of humor. Beagles are also known to be “loving and lovable, happy, and companionable—all qualities which make them excellent family dogs.” If Warnock loves beagles, the logic goes, then he must also embody these qualities. Again, we see how the breed works to associate Warnock with core American values. The beagle’s size is also important here: Alvin is small enough to be held. The image of Alvin in Warnock’s arms is essential to reinforcing his nonthreatening character. The ad would read very differently if Warnock were paired with, say, a pit bull, which scholars, including Dr. Colin Dayan, Dr. Harlan Weaver, and myself have shown are negatively associated with people of color.
“Doggie Patriot, Phoenix National Cemetery” by inkknife_2000 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Alvin exemplifies the way in which dogs are used as symbols to navigate cultural conflicts during what Bellah calls “times of trial.” Alvin allows Warnock to talk about race without talking about race by counterbalancing stereotypes about Black masculinity and violence, while also reinforcing white middle class values. As a Black pastor running to become the first Black senator in the history of Georgia, this campaign was a referendum on who Americans wanted to be. Did they want to maintain the status quo by electing a white woman endorsed by Trump or to make history by electing Georgia’s first Black senator? But instead of producing an ad that asks that very question, Warnock walks down a tree-lined suburban street with a beagle. Why? Because the image of the peaceful suburbs and the American dog appeals to the fantasy of a shared American identity that isn’t torn asunder by partisan politics or discussions of race. In other words, the ad speaks to a shared sense of American civil religion that transcends these issues—and dogs were central to this conversation.
In the Warnock case, Alvin the beagle appears as symbol of a unified America. But the beagle’s particular association with whiteness shows how intersections of race and breed complicate the notion of civil religion as a shared set of symbols and rituals. The symbolic complexities of Warnock’s use of canine imagery becomes particularly evident when contrasted with another example from the 2020 election: the case of Joe Biden and his German Shepherds, Champ and Major. (Sadly, Champ passed away on June 19th. This article will consider how he was represented during the 2020 presidential election and up to the time of his death). From the beginning, Biden represented himself as someone who would return order to the White House—and his dogs became a central symbol of this return to normalcy—in other words, to a world in which common truths are shared. As NPR reported a few days before the inauguration, President-elect Biden was going to “restore a bipartisan norm upon moving into the White House: presidential dogs.”
Biden directly spoke to dog lovers throughout his campaign, from an ad featuring dogs wearing Biden/Harris gear to official tweets exclaiming, “Let’s put dogs back in the White House!” During the campaign, a group called Dog Lovers for Joe created a 30-second ad that places black-and-white images of Republican and Democratic presidents cuddling their dogs alongside a clip of Trump asking “How would I look with a dog walking across the White House lawn?” shaking his head in disgust. The ad concludes with the statement, “choose your humans wisely,” suggesting that to love a dog is to be a good person. By juxtaposing Trump’s dismissal of presidential dogs with bipartisan images of former presidents smiling with their dogs, the ad suggests that at the very least, Trump has poor judgment, and at the most, his dog hatred is un-American.
In contrast, Biden not only had two dogs, but also one of them was a shelter dog. Much was made of the fact that Major would be the first rescue dog to occupy the White House. (This isn’t technically true; Lyndon B. Johnson’s dog Yuki was a rescue, though not a shelter dog). For many, the Biden family’s decision to adopt a shelter dog instead of purchasing one from a breeder further reinforced his good character and down-to-earth nature. After Biden was elected, the Delaware Humane Society (from which Major was adopted), held an “indoguration” for Major—demonstrating how dogs are also integrated into the central scripts of American rituals.
However, while dogs can reinforce a politician’s good character, the reverse is also possible. When Major bit not one, but two White House employees, there was a flurry of bad press incorrectly reporting that Biden banished the dog from the White House. As of the writing of this essay, Major has just been brought back to the White House after some intensive training. The response to Major’s return has been mixed, with some even suggesting that it’s “best for our country” that Major remain at the Biden home in Delaware.
As with Warnock’s beagle, breed matters here. The image of German Shepherds in the White House is not a cause for celebration for everyone—and for good reason. Rather than seeing Major and Champ as emblematic of the implicitly white family or the return to normalcy, the dogs are also symbols of anti-Black state violence. As German Shepherds, they recall America’s long legacy of weaponizing dogs against Black people—from the enslaved to Civil Rights protesters and Black Lives Matter activists. When we pay attention to the symbolic dimension of the breed, we can see that the dogs reveal important, competing images of America’s history. Depending on one’s racial location, the dogs’ symbolic purchase is very different.
What does it mean that dogs can symbolize American unity and violence at one and the same time? How might we understand American civil religion differently if we incorporate into it the categories of race, gender, sexuality, and the nonhuman? For one, we can see that civil religion isn’t just about unity, but also about national fragmentation. The very symbols, rituals, and beliefs that civil religion depends on are always already bound up in histories of violence. Dogs serve as a powerful example of civil religion precisely because they are thought to be symbols with universal referents: the American family, loyalty, and unconditional love. But as the examples of Alvin, Major, and Champ show, this fantasy is tacitly white, middle class, and heterosexual—and this leaves out a lot of people. We’re living in a time of changing demographics. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of non-Hispanic White eligible voters has declined in all fifty states, and the population of Hispanic voters has risen across the country. At the same time, Black and brown people are disproportionately dying of COVID-19, there’s still a crisis at the border, people of color are experiencing state-sanctioned violence, and legislation is being introduced across the country to curtail the rights of trans people. It’s hard to align these realities with the notion of America as a country where the voice of every citizen matters, regardless of race, class, gender, and sex. These competing ideas about citizenship and belonging play out in the bodies of the dogs themselves.
Dr. Katharine Mershon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research and teaching range across the archival and philosophical spaces of the modern Americas, with a particular focus on religion in non-traditional spaces and materials. She is currently working on a book entitled Dogs Save: Canine Redemption Narratives in the American Imaginary, which introduces the genre of the “canine redemption narrative” to argue that stories about dogs and humans use the structure of Christian conversion narratives to create the fantasy of a unified American nation. You can follow her on Twitter here.