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Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes between two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction between the means and ends of civility. We examine the complex connections between the different dimensions of (in)civility and show that the disaggregation of civility and incivility tells us what kind of (in)civility matters, as well as when and why.

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Symbolic religious establishment (SRE), that is, the noncoercive recognition of religion by the state, has become the object of a growing debate in political philosophy. Although SRE is purely symbolic, some have argued that it can be wrong because of the message of political inequality that it sends. The indeterminacy of this expressive argument makes its application problematic, however. The objective of this article is to improve the applicability of the expressivist argument by providing clear guidelines of evaluation of SRE. I develop a three‐step test that helps distinguish permissible from impermissible cases of SRE: religious symbols that are divisive, political, and not appropriately justified are impermissible because of their exclusionary message. One important upshot of the argument is that the appeal to the value of heritage does not provide a plausible justification for the introduction of new religious symbols, and therefore that such neo‐establishment is always impermissible.