Two sanguine interpretations of American civil religion

Bellah maintains that American civil religion can be a benevolent sort of national religious consensus, provided it attends to the cautionary words of its prophets. (Bellah, 17) Stout agrees that there is a consensus view in American civil religion, and that it is "faith in the institution of war as a divine instrument and sacred mandate to be exercised around the world." (Stout, 284) Bellah finds grounds for national optimism in the same place that Stout finds little but blood-stained ground (and much of that foreign). Which scholar makes his case more convincingly? Does Bellah demonstrate to your satisfaction that the prophets of civil religion and belief in transcendent judgment serve to keep its jingoistic tendencies in some sort of check? Does Stout prove that Americans are inspired to violence specifically by America's civil religion, rather than by violence inherent in human nature or (to offer a less nebulous option) by a broadly western European imperialist impulse?

It seems to me that Bellah and Stout shade very close to the same interpretive error that has bedeviled other authors in previous weeks: in endeavoring to explain American behavior on the basis of American civil religion, both authors treat both phenomena as peculiarly American. Perversely, this replicates one of American civil religion's conceits, American exceptionalism... which national conceitedness, I hasten to add, is hardly peculiar to Americans. Have Americans been particular people in particular times? Of course: we could hardly be otherwise. Have we been, collectively, peculiar? Not nearly so much as we have (collectively) told ourselves at times, either in flattery or in reproach.