Civil Religion in Political Thought
Its Perennial Questions and Enduring Relevance in North America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5707300 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ron Beiner (University of Toronto, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 472-474 |
| Publication date | 2011-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Church and State (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-969X • E-ISSN: 2040-4867 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jcs/csr066 |
| OpenAlex | W2082747648 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Let's start by noting a substantial ambiguity in the meaning of the term civil religion. In his “Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion,” Montesquieu celebrated the Romans for their exemplary capacity to “put the gods in submission to politics,” and to “fashion religion for the sake of the state” as opposed to a disposition of “the state for the sake of religion.” This captures very directly the sense of civil religion as the political appropriation or political instrumentalization of actual world religions. This is the dominant signification of the term when one refers, for instance, to the civil religion of Machiavelli or Hobbes or Rousseau. Civil religion means something quite different in the influential work of sociologist Robert Bellah; he defines it as a kind of religion substitute supplied by the polity's own rites, rituals, and rhetoric. This second meaning is conveyed quite well by Wilfred M. McClay in his foreword to Civil Religion in Political Thought, when he associates civil religion with “the glue that binds together a society through well-established symbols, rituals, celebrations” (such as the ecumenical services that typically figure in Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in Canada) and deems it “a highest common denominator” appealing to citizens of diverse faiths (pp. vii–viii). In its ambitious scope, the Weed and von Heyking volume tends to span these two meanings.
Appropriation · Civil Religion · Civil society · Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Polity · Secular state · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies
| Citations per year | 0.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2023 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |