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.
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References
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1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Of Civil Religion,” in Social Contract, ed. Ernest Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 305-306.
2.
2. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1912), p. 419.
3.
3. Ibid., p. 427.
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4. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
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5. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).
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and Gail Gehrig, American Civil Religion: An Assessment, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Monograph Series, no. 3 (Storrs, CT: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1979). Readers interested in subtler shades of meaning are encouraged to consult these sources; we wish to settle on a more or less majority definition and then deal with the substantive issues of civil religion in the current body politic.
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9. Gehrig, American Civil Religion: An Assessment, p. 18.
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and R. C. Wimberley, “Civil Religion and the Choice for President: Nixon in '72,”Social Forces, 59(1):44-61 (Sept. 1980).
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30. Phillip E. Hammond, “The Sociology of American Civil Religion: A Bibliographic Essay,”Sociological Analysis, 37(2):179 (Summer 1976).
