Civil Society and Civil Religion as Mutually Dependent 357
in Turkey, or a national commitment to a welfare state in, say, Sweden all are basically
nonreligious but have many of the same hopes as religion for culturally binding a na-
tion and its citizens. In an imperfect world, it goes without saying that these hopes are
never perfectly realized over the long run. In some cases, these represent attempts to
substitute a new civil sacred for an old and enduring culture that has a way of seeping
back and snapping back over time.
In fact, the concept of civil religion raises the important issue of new forms ofna-
tionalism. It is becoming increasingly clear that the very notion of the nation-state is
more an ideal of Enlightenment elitism than a natural reality. From the late eighteenth
to the early twentieth century, many nations – including the United States itself – were
assembled according to political convenience rather than cultural coherence. As reli-
gious, ethnic, and regional communities were cobbled together in a series of strained
alliances under the mantle of statehood, politics and statecraft were supposed to pro-
vide the required solvent and glue. Using strategies ranging from totalitarianism to
civil religion itself, some nations were more effective than others. While the United
States offers one of the rare examples of overall success, even it is experiencing internal
fractiousness and centrifugality. Many other countries are finding that their centers are
not holding at all. For them, the ideal of nationhood has been rendered deeply suspect,
if not an outright farce.
CONCLUSION: CIVIL SOCIETY AND CIVIL RELIGION
AS MUTUALLY DEPENDENT
Clearly neither that layer of organizations termed “civil society” nor that umbrella of
cultural consensus termed a “civil religion” offers a sure path to social civility. Although
each works well in theory and even better in ideology, both have major problems in
practice. Civil society covers too vast an array of organizational saints and sinners; civil
religion is often both too abstract and too fragmented to be both coherent and cohesive.
For the most part, the two conceptual traditions have had very different proponents,
who have passed each other in the night. “Civil society” has been an enthusiasm of
secular liberals, many of whom are as eager to resist the clutches of an authoritarian
religion as a totalitarian state. By contrast, at least since the twentieth century, “civil
religion” has reflected the considerable influence of Christian theology.
But rather than regard the two as mutually exclusive, the two are really mutually
dependent. The various and sundry associations, movements, and institutions of a
civil society require some degree of shared cultural bearings if they are to coordinate
successfully on behalf of civility, as that is defined by the culture itself. And insofar as
they compete with each other for public priority, those that cleave closest to the civil
religion are best able to use it as a source of both legitimacy and cultural power (cf.
Demerath and Williams 1992). By contrast, even a widely shared civil religion or sense
of the sacred requires effective reinforcement, mobilization, and implementation at the
organizational level lest it become mere rhetoric and nostalgia. A civil religion without
a coordinated civil society as infrastructure, is likely to ring hollow when the bell to
action sounds.
In virtually every recent instance in which a country’s civil society has dealt a
major blow against perceived oppression and a delinquent state, the uniting factor has
been a call to the society’s cultural heritage and a civil religion that endures despite