Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society

Abstract

Civil religion denotes a religion of the nation, a nonsectarian faith that has as its sacred symbols those of the polity and national history. Recent scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common canopy of values that helps foster social and cultural integration, but this perspective may now be at odds with a complex reality. Ours is an increasingly differentiated society with the rise of group politics and subcultures. The forms of civil religion remain, but the cultural cohesion it purportedly reflects is dissolving. Civil-religious discourse has become a tool for legitimating social movements and interest-group politics. A critical examination of the current uses of civil religion must lead to a critical reanalysis of the society at large as well as the concept itself.

Civil Religion

“…Merely saying a prayer in public without any sense of connecting the nation to the divine in some way does not qualify as what the current literature understands as civil religion. Additionally, purely sectarian religion doesn't qualify as civil religion (Cristi and Dawson, 2007;Demerath and Williams, 1985). Civil religion is more abstractly defined than most denominations, faiths, or creeds.…”

“…For example, rather than focus on the 'content' of civil religion, Luchau (2009) focuses on the ontological aspects of civil religion. He draws on Göran Gustafsson (1984) and Demerath and Williams (1985) to suggest that there are two main poles of civil religion: civil religion as phenomenon and civil religion as rhetoric. Civil religion as a phenomenon assumes a values consensus in society and suggests that these values are integrated into the morality of individuals, while civil religion as rhetoric suggests the contested use of symbol systems for public consumption and political debates.…”

“…Williams (1996) suggests that religion in political mobilization can be viewed as 'ideology' (top-down) or 'culture' (bottom-up), and understanding civil religion as one or the other posits a specific understanding of the relationship of citizens to each other and to the state (see also Demerath, 2001;Cristi and Dawson, 2007). Demerath and Williams (1985) additionally point out that the original Rousseauian concept of civil religion was essentially tied to state power, suggesting that the Durkheimian notion of civil religion as an integrative aspect of a unified culture should not be taken as a given. While this understanding is not at the heart of Bellah's (1967) original conception of civil religion, it is not wholly absent.…”

“…institutionalized in a collectivity," which he termed 'American civil religion.' The phrase 'civil religion' was borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential eighteenth-century political philosopher, who suggested a topdown, sacred morality imposed by the state on its citizens (Demerath and Williams, 1985;Luchau, 2009). Rousseau was less convinced than either English 'social contract' theorists or his French Enlightenment colleagues that reason and selfinterest would be adequate to hold together a society -particularly to bind the masses to the state.…”

“…Bellah, however, developed his concept owing more to Durkheimian notions about religion as integrative and unifying (Demerath and Williams, 1985;Fenn, 2001;Santiago, 2009). He envisioned American civil religion as something emerging in civil society from the national experience itself, rooted in the nation's religious inheritance but developing separately from it.…”