CIVIL RELIGION

Civil religion in America today refers to a national faith that has a creed and moves the people of the nation on occasion to stand in judgment on its laws when they perceive that those laws violate what the creed affirms. It also moves people to rejoice in their nation-state when they experience it as realizing the values of the creed.

The term "civil religion" comes from rousseau's Social Contract (Book 4, ch. 8), where it was used to refer to a set of beliefs that support the political authority of the State. In Rousseau's analysis, these included belief in the existence of God, life to come, the reward of virtue, and the punishment of vice, with the added dictum of the "exclusion of religious intolerance." In his essay, Rousseau, as social philosopher, was recommending a way to civic harmony through supporting civic authority, a development of the ancient pietas (Marty, 1974).

Bellah's Theory. In 1967 the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah extracted the term from Rousseau's work and gave it a new meaning. In Bellah's use, it refers to something more specifically religious in the sense of transcending the law of the land yet capable of passing judgment on it. He introduced the term as a concept for sociological analysis of a phenomenon he thought could be distinguished from several others. At that time, he said: "While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith and others, that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of the 'American Way of Life,' few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America" (Bellah, 1967). The main tenets of this faith he extracts from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The central elements are the belief that God created all people as equal and endowed them with certain inalienable rights (Bellah, 1976, 168). The critical quality of this religion, he claims, is that people who believe in it can call upon it as a framework from which to judge the nation when it violates the rights of people or fails to protect them in time of unrest. Thus, the test of the depth of the institutionalization of America's civil religion in the mid-1960s was to be its response to the civil-rights movement and the antiwar movement (Bellah, 1967). Writing again about civil religion in 1974, Bellah entitled his book The Broken Covenant. Here he speaks as prophet to a nation failing to fulfill its promise. He expresses the hope, however, that scholars who find flaws in the American system will do what Max weber and Émile durkheim, who preceded them in the analysis of the relationship between religion and society, did, namely, use the lecture platform to clarify the present reality and to warn their colleagues about imminent dangers their analyses reveal. Their scientific observations thereby provide social service (Bellah, 1976). To make his point clear, he refers to the behaviors of Jefferson and Lincoln as foremost spokesmen of American civil religion, reiterating "the right of revolution should the state attempt to destroy the God-given rights of the individuals" (Bellah, 1976, 167–168).

For Bellah, "civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people." Political theorists and activists who have taken a position on separation of Church and State are disturbed by Bellah's passion and, for this reason, question his objectivity as a sociologist, claiming that the intent of his analysis is to bring about a condition of critical self-examination from the perspective of religious symbol and fervor, while they believe that the failures of State are better addressed from the perspective of cool reason and secular values (Smith; Wilson, 1971). This focus is but one dimension of the debate that currently surrounds civil religion.

The Sociological Debate. Writings of social scientists and ethicists preceded the debate by providing the books that incorporated the themes that later were analyzed as civil religion (de Tocqueville, Dewey, Tuveson, Smith). It is possible, as Prof. Mary L. Schneider of Michigan State Univ. suggests, to extract from the debate at least five definitions that provide different focuses on religion and the State or society. The first became popular in the mid-1950s, when America's common religion was described as emerging from actual life, ideals, values, ceremonies, and loyalties of the people. The suggestion was made that, out of its own ethos and history, a people can come to worship its own heritage (Warner, Williams). A second theme took the form of religious nationalism. In this perspective, the State becomes the object of religious adoration and glorification. This is a main aspect of classical pietas, wherein religion and patriotism are one (Dohen). Stress on the value of liberty as provided for in a democracy without dependence on a transcendent deity or even on a spiritualized nation is described as the focus found in Dewey's Common Faith ; here, democracy is religion (Williams). A fourth theme is Protestant nationalism, without there being any zealous or idolatrous element to it; it simply is the fusion of Protestantism and Americanism, its moralism, individualism, pragmatism, values, and the like. This perspective characterizes any number of works, but is particularly evident in Winthrop Hudson (Ahlstrom; Cuddihy).

All of these emphases, analyses, and commentaries are not the phenomenon that Bellah seeks to isolate for analysis. The fifth theme, then, is the one that characterizes his own work. Civil religion is a normative reality; it is essentially prophetic and stands over and against the folk ways of the people. It judges idolatrous tendencies of particular forms of Christianity and Judaism. In the words of Bellah, "it is of the essence of the American civil religion that it 'challenges institutional authority'" (Bellah, 1976). He locates in civil religion the prophetic function of calling the nation, including its civic leaders, to account whenever they fail to provide the members their rights as people "created equal." He includes, therefore, among the martyrs of the republic Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Bellah predicted a crisis of conscience for the nation at the time of the Vietnam War. When this did not occur, it did not disconfirm, for him, his analysis but indicated that the covenant was broken, although hope never fails. When his own writings carried the prophetic above the analytic function, his social-science colleagues chided him for his lack of objectivity (Fenn, Hammond). However, religionists espoused his cause and made him the central figure of major bicentennial celebrations (Boardman and Fuchs). The debate continued, then, with two new focuses: (1) is the covenant really broken? (Novak); (2) has the focus of civil religion moved from the nation to the world society? (Neal).

While essayists were debating the reality or emergent quality of civil religion (Bourg, Richey, and Jones), some survey analysts were attempting to measure the verbalized opinions and attitudes from samples of significant size and diversity to determine whether any variable could be found with consistency that might be claimed to carry this conception of civil religion through the social consciousness of acting communities of American people. To date that research is indecisive. In some cases, the sample is too narrowly encompassed to preclude the Protestant nationalism concept (Hoge). At other times, the items are too general to conclude that civic piety is not also being measured (Christenson and Wimberley). This lack of conclusiveness is agreed to by the researchers themselves. In the late 1970s, they invited more empirical studies with better measures and samples before anything decisive could be claimed as causally connected with civil religion, or before it could be stated that civil religion can be differentiated for analysis from any of the other concepts connected with national patriotism, with which it is so closely connected experientially (Wimberley, Cole and Hammond). To get evidence that would be convincing for the existence of the civil-religion hypothesis, one would have to find a substantial number of non-church-related believers as well as church-related ones. At the present time, the items used provide high association with church attendance but correspondingly low association with socially concerned non-church-attenders. There should be no significant difference if civil religion is an independent variable. Other research, assuming the civic-piety definitions of civil religion, examines its presence in new religious expression of the 1970s (Robbins).

Theological Interest. The intellectual and religious interest in the idea of civil religion is directly associated with a new political consciousness in modern theological speculation (see political theology). Theologians show the need of new reflection on religion and State now that their attention has been drawn to the growing problems of a world economy that outstrips the power of the State, and the corresponding need for associations of some type capable of seriously addressing the ethical and social problems generated by new centers of power (Baum, Neal, 1977). This political emphasis is dialectically related to the Churches' affirming the value of their plurality and social commentators' allocating religion to the private sphere with high public approval in established states only (Bell, Berger, Greeley). The emergence of more effective power centers in Third-World concentrations in the international struggle for survival brings the question of the object of civil religion into the fore-front of Catholic reflection and analysis. In this context, the traditional association of Catholicism with the affirmation of hierarchy and of Protestantism with congregationalism, shifts interest to the Judaic theme of exodus and covenant for a movement-perspective for historian, social scientist, and religionist simultaneously. From this fact derive the contemporary debates about civil religion.

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[m. a. neal]