Civil religion

Civil religion is the set of beliefs, symbols, rituals and narratives by which a political community sacralises itself, supplying a sense of transcendent purpose, origin and destiny that functions religiously without constituting a church.

The term is Rousseau's, from The Social Contract (1762), where he proposed a minimal state-sponsored civil profession of faith to hold society together while leaving private belief alone. Its modern currency comes from Robert Bellah's 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America", which argued that alongside its churches the United States possesses a distinct religious dimension: a nonsectarian God invoked in presidential inaugurals, a founding narrative with the Revolution as exodus and the Constitution as covenant, martyrs in Lincoln and the war dead, sacred texts, shrines at Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial, and a calendar of Memorial Day, Independence Day and Thanksgiving.

Bellah's analysis was carefully two-sided, and this is regularly lost when he is cited. He held that civil religion can function prophetically, supplying a standard above the nation by which the nation may be judged, Lincoln's second inaugural and Martin Luther King Jr.'s use of the founding documents are his examples, and that it can equally degenerate into idolatry of the nation itself, with the Vietnam War as the case he was writing against.

Comparable phenomena are widespread. State Shinto in Japan from the Meiji period to 1945 is the most thoroughly institutionalised example, and the Shinto Directive issued by the occupation authorities in December 1945 was an explicit attempt to dismantle it by severing state sponsorship from shrine practice. French laicite functions in some analyses as a civil religion with its own values, symbols and commemorations. Soviet and other communist states developed elaborate secular liturgies, mausolea, processions and calendars that scholars have analysed in exactly these terms. The British coronation rite and national war commemoration in many countries are further instances.

The category is contested. Critics argue that it stretches "religion" past usefulness, that it defines religion by function alone and so makes almost any strong collective commitment religious, and that the content of most civil religions is too thin to do the work claimed. Defenders answer that whatever one calls it, the phenomenon is real: societies do sacralise themselves, do treat certain symbols as inviolable, and do respond to their desecration with an intensity that has no proportion to any material loss, the ferocity of disputes over flags, anthems and monuments being the standing evidence.

American civil religion's most visible symbols, "In God We Trust" on currency and "under God" in the Pledge, have generated a recurring line of constitutional litigation that shows courts grappling directly with the definitional problem the main entry raises: whether civil religion is genuinely religious or merely a secular formality invoking religious language without content.

"Under God" was added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954, during the Cold War, explicitly to distinguish the United States from atheistic communism, an origin critics argue undercuts any claim that the phrase is a neutral, non-religious formality. Legal challenges culminated in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004), where the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits by finding the plaintiff lacked standing to sue on his daughter's behalf, leaving the Establishment Clause question unresolved, though lower courts have generally upheld the phrase by invoking ceremonial deism, the idea that certain religious references have, through long repetition, lost their religious significance and become secular ritual formulas, a doctrine some justices, including Sandra Day O'Connor, endorsed while others expressed considerable skepticism.

The ceremonial deism doctrine is, in effect, a judicial attempt to resolve the ambiguity the main entry describes as central to civil religion generally. Critics on both sides have pointed out the same awkwardness: if the phrase has really become religiously meaningless through repetition, it is unclear why removing it should offend anyone, and if removing it would offend people, that is itself evidence it has not become meaningless, an argument the courts have never fully resolved and have mostly avoided rather than answered.