Civil Religion Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Civil religion in the United States is a concept most closely associated with Robert N. Bellah, whose 1967 seminal work argued that a “religion”—separate and distinct from church or synagogue—provides the unifying civil underpinning that bonds and guides U.S. society. According to this argument, a “biblical republicanism” was expressed from the outset in the conviction that the Creator gave inalienable rights to be realized and protected by these United States and a higher, sacred force continues to permeate, evoked by the words and rituals that celebrate and reaffirm the nation. The founders, the protectors, the martyrs— Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.— inhabit the pantheon, with the defining events memorialized and re-created in communities throughout the country, thereby institutionalizing the history and values that serve to form the cultural union.

As with so many foundational concepts in the United States, civil religion has its philosophical and political roots in Enlightenment thought. The “civil religion” of Rousseau’s Social Contract included belief in God—and rewards and punishment as sanctions to safeguard desired norms. Montesquieu argued that virtue was essential to a republic—both flowing from and creating love of country. The “Creator,” “Nature,” “God” of social contracts, however, was deistic and not explicitly a Christian god. While Christianity—indeed Protestantism—was indisputably the dominant and dominating religion of the minority who were “churched” in early America, civil religion turns to a god of morals and oaths and battles, leaving the particulars of Christ to private worship. The exceptional secularism of the United States—its dual clause of freedom from religious dominance and freedom to exercise religious beliefs—uniquely enabled the a-specific nature of this moral force while nurturing its strength.

The sociological roots for civil religion rest firmly with Emile Durkheim, who posited that religion was both the product and the producer of social cohesion. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim argued that the sacred is something “added to and above” the real—an ideal above the profane world in which humans function, but of their own thought and making. According to Bellah, U.S. civil religion provides the ideal, the sacred authority and imperatives that function above the mere “will of the people.” America is for truth, justice, freedom, equality… ideals above the politically profane.

The shape and content of U.S. civil religion inevitably changed and re-formed itself over time. Its religiously nonparticular nature enabled this accommodation. U.S. civil religion is, on the other hand, not aggressively secular. It is not a “cult of state” that eschews allegiance to all but itself rather than protecting against the pull of religion (as with French laicite); it in fact assumes religion. The question of the day, however, is, does it assume—or can it accommodate—the episodic surges in diversity and intensity of the cultural and religious allegiances existing outside of but pressing upon the public realm?

Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy” suggests that, as competing ideas are taken up, the enveloping tent of unified values and beliefs weakens and tears. Over time, waves of immigration and shifts in the geographic and cultural origins of that immigration have challenged the fabric of civil religion as well. A nation of Protestants has become a nation of Protestants (and Evangelical Protestants) and Catholics and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Wiccans and so on—with atheists and agnostics in good measure as well. And a “melting pot” nation defined by Northern European culture is redefining itself in a veritable eddy of races, ethnicities, and religious traditions. The traditions Durkheim looked to as transmissions of culture from one generation to the next are now as competitive as they are unifying. The “they” out there—shared enemies of World Wars I and II and the cold war, which fanned the unifying forces of conflict—are less clear. The unifying ceremonies and mourning triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001, remain in flag displays and car decals, but they too are losing their grip as some of “us” are so easily mistaken for “them.” Recent research on today’s “second generation” notes that the children of immigrants are not quick to identify themselves as Americans—a label they identify with a white bread existence they do not share.

How, in the face of these changes, these tugs on the canopy, does civil religion continue to be the glue of social cohesion? The specifics of the “higher power” must become vaguer and vaguer as competing religions vie for space in the public realm—the specifics of the culture and values likewise being heatedly debated. Social dynamics as problematic as these compel a rephrasing of Durkheim from declaration to question: If the old gods of civil religion are “dead or dying,” are there “new ones yet to be born”?

Bibliography:

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96:1-21.
Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday.
Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press.
Herberg, Will. 1983. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters. 2004. Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage.
Machacek, David W. 2003. “The Problem of Pluralism.” Sociology of Religion 64:145-61.

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