356 N. J. Demerath III
emphasizing “with liberty and justice for all.” Of course, this is a major change from
Bellah’s overarching formulation. Indeed, from this earlier perspective, the detection
of two civil religions may signal the absence of any civil religion, insofar as there is no
longer a single “sacred canopy” (Berger 1967) for the society as a whole.
However, another reading of present-day America actually cleaves closer to
Durkheim and Rousseau, as well as to more recent accounts of civility. As noted earlier,
both had a much broader and less theological conception of the sacred. Durkheim’s
formulation for the France of 1911 and complex societies generally resembled a “reli-
gion of the civil” rather than “civil religion” in its sectarian sense. Given the habit of
civil society theorists to sharply juxtapose the civil versus the state, and given America’s
long-standing status as a paragon of the civil society, it is joltingly ironic that one of
America’s most distinctive characteristics is the extent to which its culture-at-large flows
from, instead of competing with, its political norms and institutions.
For a nation that was diverse from the outset and lacked other bases of cultural
solidarity and commonality, the Constitution itself has often served as America’s civil
religious scripture – a statement of political means that soon became elevated to cultural
ends. Of course, it is hardly politically correct to talk of consensual norms and values in
a society as large and complex as the United States. Still, compared to the other societies
before us, it is striking just how rooted our common culture is in our political structures
and their enabling documents, laws, and conflict-reducing procedures. In fact, if civility
can be operationalized as the extent to which any collectivity conforms to rather than
departs from its own values, one reason why the United States might rank high is that
its values derive from the implementation procedures themselves. This may be at least
as responsible for America’s status as a civil exemplar as any of the factors mentioned
previously. It is also an interpretation that gains credibility in comparison with other,
more conflicted societies elsewhere.
While American civil religion remains alive, if not always well, other countries
around the world illustrate different forms of civil religion with sometimes far greater
problems. This is not the place for an extensive global survey (cf. Bellah and Hammond
1980; Demerath 2001). But it is worth noting a few important variations on the theme.
Northern Ireland offers an especially violent case of a country with two civil religions –
one Protestant, one Catholic, both Christian. Many Latin American countries may be
moving in the direction of a Catholic-Protestant split, but with a third strand emerging
among more indigenous peoples and their traditions. Israel is an especially fractured
situation as a nation without a formal constitution or official religious standing, but
where civil religious competitors range from orthodox and ultra-orthodox Judaism to
secular Zionism, and Islam itself.
In further contrast to the American case, many countries resemble Rousseau’s orig-
inal model in two senses. First, there are some in which civil religion is more of a
top-down imposition by a political elite than a bottom-up emergence from the cul-
tural well-springs. This was true of Japan’s State Shinto from the 1860s to the 1940s,
Turkey’s changes under Kemal Attaturk in the 1920s, Indonesia’s pan-religious “pan-
casila” crafted under Sukarno in the 1940s, and the radical shift inflicted on China by
Mao Zedong and the Communists after 1949 with its “cultural revolution.” Second,
the Turkish and Chinese cases alert us to the possibility of a civil religion that is not
“religious” at all in the conventional sense. Instead they illustrate what I earlier termed
a “religion of the civil” or a broader “civil sacred.” Communism in China, Westernism