Civil Religion Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Civil religion has been a political and theological problem of enduring concern across the centuries and has become a topic of renewed interest among social scientists in the last fifty years.

There is a rich heritage of philosophical, theological, and political reflection on the problem that extends at least as far back as Plato’s Laws. There are at least two prominent views of civil religion that characterize this heritage. According to one view, civil religion is a civic ethos that recognizes and cultivates beliefs supporting a society’s moral-political commitments. This version of civil religion employs the force of religious symbols, images, and language to garner political strength. This view of civil religion is manifested in some works of Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Another view of civil religion presents it as a civic ethos that is driven by more explicitly theological beliefs, though it gains power by political means and maintains itself through political forms. This version of civil religion arises from an overlapping theological consensus within a society and promotes a wider recognition of its bond with God and his providence, typically appealing to the language of national destiny and sacred purpose. Some features of this view occur in certain ancient Roman and medieval thinkers, while its other features manifest variously in later figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, and certain American Puritan writers.

The past fifty years have seen numerous scholarly studies on civil religion. Sociologists, historians, religious studies scholars, theologians, and political scientists have conducted most of this work. Scholars have sought to define and explain the phenomena of civil religion according to the contours of these respective disciplines. For example, Robert Bellah has been one of the most influential analysts and has invited a very welcome reconsideration of civil religion as a phenomenon, especially in its American historical and cultural context. One characteristic feature of his work as a sociologist has been his attention to the complexities and internal logic of religious and political associations across the political and religious spectrum. Bellah’s supporters and critics alike recognize how well he classifies and interprets the attitudes and behavior of such groups without reducing their motivations to merely economic or class considerations nor inflating their religious and political dimensions to the exclusion of other factors. He also recognizes the limitations of secularization theory, prominent among sociologists, that predict religion to become increasingly private and individualistic as society becomes more secular.

Among religious studies scholars, Martin Marty offers perceptive analyses of civil religion that capture some important religious and political features of the phenomena. For example, he distinguishes priestly and prophetic strains of civil religion. His prophetic variety of civil religion appropriates the religious language of prophecy to highlight the progress of social and political change toward a future of greater peace and justice. He associates a priestly version of civil religion with a religious language that promotes and preserves “American values.”

Political scientists have tended to focus on particular institutions of government, including the constitution and the presidency. Representative examples of this can be seen in Richard Pierard and Robert Linder’s book, Civil Religion and the Presidency, and in Sanford Levinson’s Constitutional Faith. These are detailed studies of particular institutions as they are altered by civil religious phenomena. There are a number of illuminating studies of civil religion through particular figures in the history of political philosophy. Some good examples of such work include Michael Zuckert’s essay on “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” Sanford Kessler’s book Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom, and Ronald Beiner’s essay “Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau on Civil Religion.”

While civil religion is often associated with premodern and presecular societies, it has been a recurring phenomenon in the modern period and occasioned considerable reflection in modern and contemporary thought.

Bibliography:

City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Bellah, Robert. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1997): 1–21.
Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
The Republic, translated by Neil Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Levinson, Sanford V. Constitutional Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Linder, Robert D., and Richard V. Pierard. Civil Religion and the Presidency. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1988.
McClay,Wilfred M. “Two Concepts of Secularism.” In Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, edited by Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
The Laws, translated, with notes and an interpretive essay by Thomas L. Pangle. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Rousseau, J. J. Social Contract, translated by Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994.
Spinoza, Benedict. A Theologico-Political Treatise, translated with an introduction by R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications, 1951.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthorp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.