This Memorial Day led Mark Tooley to some reflections on the American civil religion, of which it is an important part:

America’s civil religion organically emerged from America’s founding as a pan-Protestant inclusive way to keep religion in public life without unnecessary division. George Washington was especially expert in citing the Deity while avoiding theological controversy. The tradition worked so well that as more Catholics and Jews came to America, the civil religion not only endured but thrived.

Abraham Lincoln became the high priest of American civil religion, expressed especially through his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address. In this tradition, God ordained America to be the “last best hope on earth” that also was under divine judgment for the sin of slavery.

Some Christians have criticized American civil religion as a diluted alternative to Gospel Christianity, with America replacing the church. But the advent of Christian nationalism, whose claims are far more aggressive, has persuaded some critics and skeptics that civil religion was far preferable. The latter fosters social harmony and national unity, while the former weaponizes religion into a permanent and unquenchable crusade.

As formal religious affiliation declines in America, there’s the question of civil religion’s durability. . . . For most of America’s history, the Mainline Protestants offered a providential hope that God was working through American democracy to better the world. But Mainline Protestantism has been declining for at least 60 years. Institutionally it may no longer exist in the near future. Can other religious traditions replace its role in American civil religion? Or can our civil religion coast forward indefinitely?

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.