This paper integrates the US civil sphere, European media as practice, and social psychological literatures to demonstrate how people construct their own civil purity and become pure. It uses in-depth interview data to uncover a language of civil purity that people draw on to construct their own belonging in civil society. It argues that some people create an imagined public-at-large that they infuse with polluting qualities associated with the binary cultural codes of civil society. This image functions as a mental heuristic, against which people compare themselves and see themselves as ‘better than’ on a number of moral values associated with civil society. This process of constructing civil purity is linked to one of the civil sphere’s two fundamental social institutions, namely communication. As a form of nonfiction media with record lows in trust and credibility, the mainstream news serves as a social topic through which we can witness the construction of civil purity.
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