Civil Religion Research Paper

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In a seminal thesis published in the Winter, 1967, issue of Daedalus, and in later revisions of his argument, Bellah 1967 claimed to have discerned two kinds of civil religion in the USA. One was fairly traditional: a composite of biblical themes that were compatible with the natural law tradition mediated by the church. This legacy saw in the history of the US a version of God’s election of ancient Israel. That is why Bellah referred to it as a ‘special civil religion’ that was compounded of prophetic warnings and commands to a chosen nation burdened with particular rights and responsibilities. The other civil religion was utilitarian rather than traditional, and it was based primarily on the thought, interests, and experiences of the American people themselves. Describing it as ‘the lowest common denominator of church religions,’ Bellah argued that it paid more attention to the interests than to the responsibilities of the people. Interpreted in terms of the social contract rather than of the covenant, it owed far more to John Locke than to the Bible (Bellah 1976a, p. 57).

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Bellah alternated between arguing that the civil religion was vital and enduring and issuing warnings that the civil religion was in a precarious state. Bellah at first seemed to be sure that the civil religion was alive and well: far from dead, it would show its vitality during the American Bicentennial of 1976 (Bellah 1973). However, in reflecting on that celebration and also on the latest Presidential campaign addresses, Bellah was quite clear that Americans had largely forgotten about a past that they had never clearly understood.

Bellah himself alternated between thinking that his article coincided with the debut of the civil religion on the American scene and with its decline. On the one hand, he suggested that the civil religion had only come into being through his publication of the 1967 article and appeared confident in its continued existence (Bellah 1973). On the other hand, disappointed in the results of the Bicentennial, he regretted that it was only an ‘empty and broken shell’ (Bellah 1975).




Some religious leaders have condemned American civil religion as authoritarian, dangerous, and idolatrous. They are joined in this criticism by some leading politicians who see a civil religion as idolatrous. Some critics, therefore, argued that Bellah was engaged in an attempt to revitalize the nation itself by infusing its political institutions with religious meaning. Bellah merely wished, through exhortation, and admonition to recall the nation to its higher purpose (Crouter 1990). To others it was quite clear that Bellah was trying to resuscitate Protestant beliefs and public influence at a time when both seemed to be losing credibility and support. At the very least he was trying to invoke the legacy of the Protestant establishment of the late nineteenth century. ‘Bellah introduced theological principles that he presumed overarched the state and the religions it protected’ (Hammond et al. 1994 pp. 8–9). These criticisms persisted, despite Bellah’s disclaimer that the civil religion was merely another way of talking about a world view (Hammond et al. 1994, p. 2).

Bellah’s claim to have identified a civil religion that endures regardless of those who believe in it or who can verify its existence has elicited criticism or comments from those who see his work not as sociology but as political theology or ideology. Indeed, some noted that his interpretation of American religious and political ideals found its justification in theological propositions (Hammond et al. 1994, pp. 8–9). Perhaps in response to these critics, Bellah has argued that the civil religion needed no help from himself or from anyone else; it could endure on its own terms. On one occasion Bellah insisted that the civil religion had never been a majority viewpoint but continued to exist enshrined in certain texts, particularly Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. It, therefore, did not matter how many people believed in the civil religion or whether evidence could be found for it through the use of questionnaires. The civil religion was there, Bellah (1976b, pp. 153–4) argued: a matter of ‘faith in certain abstract propositions which derive ultimately from God. If the ‘‘larger society’’ does not conform to them, so much the worse for it’ (Bellah 1976b, pp. 153–4).

Bellah himself has pointed out that his case for the American civil religion is quite in keeping with a Durkheimian approach to social life. Societies do express their identity and define themselves in religious terms; indeed any enduring form of social life may well become serious about its foundations, standards, boundaries, and destiny. The sacred is a pervasive aspect of social order. No wonder, then, that for Bellah (1989), while the concept of the civil religion may be dispensable, it nonetheless points to an enduring problem concerning the relation of the political to the religious aspects of any society. (Marty 1974).

To sum up Bellah’s many and quite variant readings of the civil religion and of his own arguments, it is helpful to distinguish two sets of axioms. These are shared among sociologists who study religion and are not idiosyncratic to Bellah alone, but Bellah does provide an example of how they may operate in the thought of a single sociologist. On the one hand, Bellah identified himself as working within a set of assumptions that he would attribute to Durkheim. On the other hand, Bellah would also acknowledge the validity of a Weberian viewpoint, that thinks of charisma as being somewhat ephemeral or evanescent and always distorted by any attempt to make it part of a routine or rational social order. Religion, on this view, is disruptive to institutions and is, therefore, most evident during times of crisis or chaos. Bellah would therefore not be surprised that that some sociologists, therefore, have found in the civil religion an episodic phenomenon that is most visible in times of crisis and is only gradually rooted in enduring institutions or ways of life (Marty 1974).

The debate on civil religion thus reflected a wide range of assumptions about the relation of religion to complex societies. Bellah, in keeping with his Durkheimian assumptions, saw the US as largely individualistic and utilitarian as a result of a break with the Biblical tradition. In his view the Constitution owed more to Locke and to notions of interest than to covenantal theology; for Bellah, that break represented a considerable decline in the moral vision of the nation.

On the other hand, also in keeping with a Durkheimian interest in a religion of humanity, Bellah and his associate, Philip Hammond, saw more universal possibilities for the civil religion. All societies express their political unity in civil religious terms. Their critics, however, accused them of expressing an American notion of manifest destiny under the guise of the civil religion (Weddle 1983).

Despite the protest by Hammond et al. (1994, p. 2) that Bellah did not have in mind an ‘idolatrous worship’ of the American nation–state, Bellah argued that American culture has within it the potential of becoming the basis for a global civil religion. It was a point in keeping with his Durkheimian interest in a religion of humanity, and others have found some support for his thesis. There is some evidence, for instance, that the US space program transformed astronauts from American celebrities into representatives of a global civil religion (Wilson 1984). Furthermore, the US is apparently not peculiar in its use of national heroes as exponents of a civil religion; similar processes appear to be at work in Yugoslavia (Flere 1994).

Subsequent studies have suggested that religion may still be engaged with the political system, but far less at the national than at the local level. Rather than influencing a broad range of social values, religion is now more likely to be engaged in interest-group and single-issue politics. Instead of a steady pull on the direction of social change, religion therefore increasingly exerts a temporary, however intense, influence during spurts of social mobilization on the part of particular communities and constituencies (Demerath and Williams 1992).

Some have argued that the civil religion is no longer a national conscience but a set of partial ideologies. It is, therefore, merely ‘a confusion of tongues speaking from different traditions and offering different visions of what America can and should be’ (Wuthnow 1998). That is perhaps why Bellah’s more universal claim for the civil religion has aroused another set of criticisms to the effect that the civil religion, at least as Bellah conceived it, ignored the presence and claims of minorities and smacked of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Moseley 1994, p. 18).

Beyond the context of the US, however, scholars have found the notion of a civil religion to be a particularly suggestive concept. Despite—or because of—Bellah’s ‘broad and diffuse use of the term,’ civil religion, and the ‘theoretical instability’ of Bellah’s model, there has been a proliferation of studies of civil religion in a wide range of national contexts (Crouter 1990, p. 161).

Drawing on Dobbelaere’s (1986) discussion of the civil religion, it would be possible to distinguish four conditions under which religion would have different relationships to a national political system. Where religion is still an enduring and vital institution, and where it is still central to the nation–state, one would expect to find such traditional forms of civil religion as Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. However, where traditional religion has been eroded or transformed, one might expect to find more secularized cultural systems like Soviet Marxism or Nazism. More ephemeral or episodic forms of religion might persist and remain central to a nation–state; consider the notion of a civil religion that is episodic and not widely known but still central to the history, traditions, and identity of the US.

Dynamic relationships between the center and the periphery, however, will change the meaning and location of civil religious beliefs and symbols. In Japan, since the nineteenth century, Shinto has moved from the center, where it was the civil religion of an aristocratic and military elite, to the villages and clans, where it has strengthened national resistance to Western influence. Whereas under the Meiji, Shinto had been central and enduring as a national civil religion, under occupation by the US Shinto was no less enduring, however marginal it had become to the public ideology of the nation (Takayama 1988, p. 328).

Although Japan’s national culture was transformed into one that was largely secular and democratic, Shinto remained vital to the ability of Japan to recover from the war and to rebuild its economy while preserving a sense of continuity with the past. However, as Shinto has been adopted by the corporations and the nation–state as a means of mobilizing the loyalty of workers and citizens, it has become more secular and arguably less significant to the mobilization and motivation of Japanese citizens and workers (Dobbelaere 1986).

The beliefs and symbols of the civil religion may therefore become the source of legitimacy for the nation–state or the target of cultural opposition. On the one hand, an ideal of an ethnically pure nation– state may legitimate the most brutal forms of ethnic cleansing. As in the case of Yugoslavia, it would be a mistake to underestimate ‘the power of a system of reified, prescriptive culture to disrupt the (contradictory) patterns of social life’ (Hayden 1996, p.784). Similarly, in Chile a form of the civil religion reinforced by the church and articulated by the Pinochet regime sought to give religious legitimacy to a repressive military elite and regime (Christi and Dawson 1996). Such attempts, however, associate civil religion with a regime rather than with a nation–state as a whole and, therefore, place it in a more marginal location. The same observation applies to attempts by the dominant regime in Malaysia to use Islamic beliefs and practices to reinforce social discipline and to legitimate the political and economic goals of the state (Regan 1976, p. 103).

As nations become increasingly secularized, the civil religion, to the extent that it survives, will become marginal to the culture and politics of the nation–state and put in only episodic appearances during periods of social mobilization around specific issues. For instance, in Celtic heroes and symbols were central to the resistance of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands against Germany in the nineteenth century. Recently, however, France and Spain have met with resistance from Celtic communal groups on their own peripheries. The symbols and identity of the Celtic periphery are thus being co-opted by the European Union in an attempt to assert a Pan-European communal culture (Dietler 1994).

As the cases of Northern Ireland and Wales demonstrate, there is no necessary connection between strong ‘nationalist doctrines’ on the periphery and an equally strong ‘nationalist politics’ (Beuilly 1985, p. 74). In the US, marginal groups that wished to define themselves in opposition to the national center that seemed to them to be insufficiently legitimate have established their own alternative versions of the civil religion: the Seventh Day Adventists being one example (Bull 1989, p. 181).

Some have, therefore, argued that the civil religion is an essential arena for the contest among opposing communal and interest groups and between the center and the periphery, (Willaime 1993, p. 573). There is an intimate connection between civil religious protest on the periphery and oppositional politics toward the center. Indeed, it would appear that civil religion comes into being as a way of arbitrating the protest of local or communal groups against the state. Mexican– Americans, for instance, have joined elements of Catholic liturgy with traditional folk celebrations to mobilize and discipline farm-workers for an agricultural union movement in the United States. The movement used traditional religious symbols that had been central to Mexican culture for the purpose of opposing a dominant class and its institutions in the US (Bennett 1988). Indeed, highly sectarian forms of the civil religion have been developed in order to protest the secularization of the civil religion at the political center; the Unification Church would be a prime example of this authoritarian tendency (Robbins et al. 1976). Similarly, representatives of Native American communities have attacked a politicized civil religion at the center as being inimical to the Indian traditions (Deloria 1992).

As Bryan Wilson and others have argued, there are strong secularizing tendencies in the Christian faith, and these have been deployed on various occasions against civil religion. In Sri Lanka the role of the King has been crucial in maintaining social and cosmic harmony; even the British took the role of the King in the most important ritual of Sri Lankan civil religion, until protest from missionaries forced them to cease their involvement. As a result, the ceremony has been degraded into a festival of Sri Lankan cultural arts, and the society as a whole has lacked the means of legitimating the center to the periphery, (Seneviratne 1984).

There is some evidence that the decay or removal of the civil religion from public discourse in some countries has created space for a secular civil society to emerge. In Norway, civil religious symbols have been used by conservative and Christian elites to legitimate the monarchy, but there is a general tendency to keep religion on the margins of public life; even during times of crisis civil religious symbols may be notable by their absence from public discourse. As they remain on the periphery, however, the symbols of civil religion may be deeply, if not widely held. In Norway, although public discourse is secular and political legitimacy is derived from the legal system, the Christian com- munities of the south-west still maintain a hope that Norway may become a Christian nation (Furseth 1994 pp. 46, 50–1). Although Canada lacks a civil religion, religious symbols and beliefs remain vital to regional and local communities (Reimer 1995).

On the other hand, some have argued that it is the very secularization of the center that raises fears that the society as a whole may disintegrate; these fears are the source of demands for a revitalized civil religion (Willaime 1993, p. 571). As Martin (1997, pp. 28–35) has pointed out, for a society to survive it must have continuity, to achieve which it must maintain a certain identity. That identity, furthermore, always implies a difference between the society in question and all others. By having a cultural as well as political center, a society forecloses other possible bases for integration. The full range of possibilities, and the un- certainty of making choices among alternative identities, is not open to any society that wishes to maintain its identity, and therefore also its difference from other societies, over time.

Once this is understood, Martin (1997, pp. 29–35) argues, it is no longer problematical that religion may become one of the markers of identity or difference. Whether religion becomes an exclusive marker or becomes associated with other forms of the sacred in a particular society depends on a wide range of circumstances that are both historical and geopolitical. Thus, it is not unusual that traditional forms should be co-opted by chauvinism or become a source of peripheral resistance to the center.

In the course of trying to clarify the civil religion thesis, various proponents have argued that there are a wide range of types based either on the content of the ideology or its social constituency. Martin, however, has pointed out the free-floating nature of the sacred and its contingent relation to religion and politics. Rather than developing complex typologies to encompass these relations, what is needed, therefore, is a series of statements of the ‘If … then …’ variety that stipulate the conditions under which civil religion may be more or less central, marginal, traditional, secularized, popularized, or politicized. It is appropriate to ask to what extent religion is ‘locked into the core processes of cohesion, power, and control’ and to investigate the extent to which religion and its dominant institutions maintain their traditional ‘relation to territory and history, to national belonging and death’ (Martin 1997, p. 104). One must also ask whether the religious community in question has a voluntaristic or ethnoreligious base and whether its symbolic options are more generic or particular. The answers to these questions will then help one interpret each community’s or nation’s construction of ‘the world’ as relatively open or closed, hostile or indifferent (Martin 1997 p. 56).

Further work, therefore, remains to be done on civil religion as an expression or outgrowth of conflict within and between civilizations. On this level, it remains to interpret civil religions as cultural developments of civilizations translated from their centers to new peripheries. Following Martin, it would be possible to view the American civil religion as a continuation and residue of the English civil war over a century earlier, just as conflicts between the North American center and its Central or Latin American periphery are continuations of the struggle between Northern and Southern Europe. On the basis of Martin’s argument one could interpret the American civil religion as the response of one periphery to the English center: a response composed partly of a tradition of establishment and partly of voluntaristic and ethnoreligious dissent (Martin 1997, p. 57). Similarly, one could investigate Japanese Shinto and Sri Lankan civil religion as the development of Buddhism on Asian peripheries.

If arguments concerning the civil religion are to contribute to mainstream social scientific discussions of nationalism however, further work remains to be done on civil religions as the result of the ‘civilizing process’ as religion is transplanted from the center to periphery. Relatively few scholars interested in civil religion have focussed on the work of Anderson (1983), who has traced the interaction of Western Christianity with a wide range of societies in both hemispheres. In Anderson’s view, Roman Christianity, carried by the Church throughout Europe, had integrated a wide range of local cultures and religions within a common civilization and by means of a lingua franca (Latin). In developing local vernaculars into which the Bible and liturgy were then translated, however, the Church succeeded in encouraging indigenous elites to develop a national culture resistant to the imperial center. These smaller and more cohesive entities thus represented a limited and secular reduction of the religious civilization that created them. Thus civil religions, by this argument, are secularized remnants of a trans-national religious civilization.

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