Everyone agrees: President Obama had a tough 2013. With his approval ratings falling, many Americans think it unlikely that the president will do much of significance for the remainder of his term. Second terms can be disheartening, especially when partisan gridlock blocks meaningful change.<\/span><\/p>\n But despite his inability to implement important policies this past year, President Obama has already accomplished something that future historians may well consider one of his greatest achievements. In his second term, President Obama is helping to reinvent American civil religion, the way we think about God and national purpose. Call it the Obama doctrine of American civil spirituality.<\/p>\n There is nothing new in reinventing civil religion. America\u2019s public God has had many faces through history: the stern God of Puritan Calvinism; the revolutionary God of Deist Providence; the activist God of Protestant Benevolence; the sword-wielding God of the Civil War; the earnest God of Progress; the tolerant God of Judeo-Christian America. As a people, we have a great capacity to create God in our image, a deity that baptizes each new American generation with a sense of destiny, purpose, and meaning. Our presidents serve as high priests of America\u2019s many gods. And if the past tells us anything, we can be certain that a new American god is being born as we move toward being a different, more religiously diverse nation.<\/p>\n President Obama is not creating a new national self-understanding from whole cloth. His presidency has coincided with one of the most dynamic, transformative periods of religious life in United States history, and he is responding to this era of profound change.<\/p>\n