Civil Society and Civil Religion as Mutually Dependent 353
And yet there are two major difficulties with the scenario.First, civil society itself
is not always what many might hope. Its myriad associations and organizations often
reflect the interests and control of high status elites; alternatively, they may take on
the properties of extremist movements with demagogic appeals to short-run emotions
at the expense of long-range advantagement – pro-life as well as pro-choice, pro-labor
as well as pro-NAFTA.Second, the state itself can be a far more positive source of civil
outcomes than sometimes modish state-bashing would allow (Gupta 2000). Especially
from the standpoint of nonelites and the disadvantaged, government can sometimes be
the only realistic source of positive change; it can also serve as a crucial arbiter among
conflicting organizations within a civil society that can be far more turbulent than its
image would suggest.
So much then for a brief critique of two different versions of “civil society,” and
the liberal thesis of a causal relationship between civil society in the organizational
sense and a civil-ized society overall. Somehow something seems to be missing as an
intervening factor. Let us turn to that now in the concept of a “civil religion.”
ASSESSING “CIVIL RELIGION”
To those in search of a stable and peaceful social order, “civil society” offers structural
hope at the institutional level. However, another source of encouragement is more
cultural and more society-wide. It is “civil religion,” or any society’s most common
religious denominator which consecrates its sense of nationhood and pivots around a
set of tenets and rituals forged in the fires of a shared history. In the United States, it is
a Judeo-Christian heritage invoked by nondenominational public prayers on July 4th,
Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, and presidential inaugurations.
Civil religion is another concept with origins in the eighteenth-century European
Enlightenment, especially within France, and particularly in the person of Jean Jacques
Rousseau (1762). In fact, the very phrase “civil religion” had an ironic ring in such
circles. After all, Rousseau and his peers were basically nondeists who looked forward
to an age without the religion identified with Christianity and its higher churchly
variants. And yet many of these people saw the need for a different sort of “religion”
that would compel allegiance to the state through a different sort of faith. In Rousseau’s
(1762/1960: 305–6) terms:
But there is a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it behooves the
Sovereign to fix, not with the precision of religious dogmas, but treating them as a
body of socialsentimentswithout which no man can be either a good citizen or a
faithful subject.Almost exactly 150 years later, another Frenchman developed the idea further.
Toward the end of his great work,The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life(1912/1976),
that seminal sociologist, Emile Durkheim, took readers by the hand and guided them
back to turn-of-century “modern France” following the book’s extended excursion
among the tribal Arunta in Australia. As part of the concluding chapter – one of the
great thirty pages in Western social thought – Durkheim (1912/1976: 427) writes:
Thus there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession
of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself. There can be