352 N. J. Demerath III
At the same time, today’s religious right has departed considerably from the agenda of
mutual tolerance that has characterized the liberal values at the core of both mainline
religion and American democracy.
The term “fundamentalism” was coined in the United States, even though its orig-
inal biblical meaning has been eclipsed by a broader sense of ideological extremism
here and abroad (e.g., Riesebrodt 1993; Marty and Appleby 1995). In some ways, the
fundamentalist is now seen as a euphemism for any “fanatic” – or one “who won’t
change his mind and won’t change the subject,” according to the variously attributed
British witicism. But even in its less extreme form, conservatives have traded an empha-
sis on individualism for a stress on family values and an enforced traditional morality.
Although conservative, evangelical, even fundamentalist religious organizations are
undeniably a part of American “civil society,” many observers would see them as more
responsible for cultural friction than harmony. As some of religion’s most prominent
forms of civil society have become liabilities rather than assets in the pursuit of older
patterns of civility, it is important to remember that civility itself is a matter of cultural
taste and is a variable rather than an absolute.
Meanwhile, there is another aspect of America’s political tradition whose relation
to civil society and civility is more complex than is often supposed. One hears a good
deal about democracy as a central tenet of civility. And yet one must define such value-
laden terms very carefully. Insofar as democracy entails a spirit of equal rights and
responsibilities that goes beyond the voting booth, it involves a sense that what is
truly worthwhile in a society is truly accessible. Here conceptions of civil society are
sometimes sadly deficient.
Civility often puts a good face on social convention by dictating a hegemonic code
that is in the interests of society’s winners rather than its losers or indeed those who
simply cope. From this standpoint, civility becomes a conceit, and under some cir-
cumstances, it can engender sufficient resentment to undermine itself and become a
source of actual incivility in response. As civility becomes infected with power, what is
seen as appropriate within a dominant class, ethnic, gender, or generational group can
become – by virtue of that very perception – alienating to the subdominant.
In fact, both “civility” and “civil society” have different meanings in different coun-
tries. In an increasingly globalized (i.e., “Westernized”) world, American notions of ci-
vility and a civilized society are not without influence, but they are also not without
suspicion. If civility can be a high-status conceitwithinthe West, it can also be seen as
an exported conceitofthe West.
Meanwhile, the structured layer of “civil society” has also been a common export.
But in many countries it has taken on a different emphasis. From Latin America through
Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the reference is not so much to an Americanized
cultural outcome but to a structural segment of society that is a hopeful means to a
variety of ends. The important thing is that “civil society” is distinct from the state and
offers an independent voice influencing it.
But here, too, there is a need to make problematic what is often taken for granted.
The common assumption is that civil society is the best defense against state oppression
and corruption and the best pathway to democratization and all of its manifold bless-
ings. Certainly there are cases feeding such confidence, most notably the collapse of
Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including the inspirational saga
of Solidarity in Poland where the phrase “civil society” took on special significance.