Abstract
This chapter looks at some shrines connected with the deaths of Americans, both civilian and military. The deaths all involve themes — the winning of the West, minority rights, and in particular America as the defender of freedom and democracy — that contribute to what Bellah (1970) terms America’s ‘civil religion’, and therefore the deaths contained the potential to generate popular shrines. To these places, pilgrims come to look, pay homage, remember, and pray. Though American civil religion finds formal expression in presidential speeches and saluting of the Hag, it has no formal equivalent of church attendance, so it is largely in informal and popular ways that identification with civil religion is manifested. Pilgrimage to a shrine associated with one of the civil religion’s saints is one such manifestation.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Sellars, R., Walter, T. (1993). From Custer to Kent State. In: Reader, I., Walter, T. (eds) Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12637-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12637-8_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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