Civil Society and Civil Religion as Mutually Dependent 355
On the one hand, our civil religion may not function quite the way it is depicted. On
the other hand, other societies have their own versions of a civil religion, though some
stretch the concept and its possibilities rather than merely illustrating it. Let’s consider
both complications in turn.
AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION IN DOUBT AND IN DECLINE?
At any given point, almost any society manifests enough cacaphony to give even the
most confirmed patriot second-thoughts about whether there is a salvageable cho-
rus sweeter than the sum of its individual voices. In the hurly-burly of the moment,
episodes of crime, corruption, and fever-pitched disagreement give ample fodder to the
pessimist. Even in the United States, we have had reason to wonder whether a society
that has grown so raucously complex could any longer sustain or be sustained by civil
religion, and whether its manifestations haven’t become vestigial facade rather than
a vital sustenance – more icing than cake. Bellah (1975) himself raised the issue of a
“broken covenant” in the bitter aftermath of the heightened expectations of the 1960s.
Certainly these symptoms of divisiveness are important. But insofar as any country
manages to hang together over the longer run despite its internal differences, it is also
worth asking why? In the U.S. case, an answer in terms of civil religion alone has grown
steadily more simplistic.
From the very beginning of our nationhood, there has been a paradoxical tension
between our heralded civil religion and our no less legendary “separation of church
and state.” While the former syndrome marks us as highly religious, the latter suggests
just the opposite. In fact, foreign observers sometimes see our church-state separation
as the basis of a very different version of American exceptionalism – one which singles
us out more for secularism than religiosity. Actually, these two seemingly inconsistent
syndromes are strangely symbiotic. Each is a guard against the other’s excesses, and each
provides a countervailing assurance as a boost to the other’s legitimacy. That is, we can
indulge a symbolic civil religion, precisely because there is a substantive separation of
church and state in important matters of government policy; at the same time, our
separation is never a total rupture precisely because of the presence of overarching civil
religious ceremonials (cf. Williams and Demerath 1991).
Meanwhile, America’s civil religion has been pressured by more than its church-
state separation. Our ever-expanding pluralism includes increasing groups beyond the
conventional religious pale, ranging from cults to the occult, and from new forms
of both spiritualism and survivalism to burgeoning numbers of Muslims, Hindus and
Buddhists outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even within that tradition, some point
to growing tensions. Richard Neuhaus (1984) has argued that religion has become
conspicuously absent from our “naked public square,” and Steven Carter (1993) has
termed ours a “culture of disbelief” – although both are really deploring the country’s
failure to readily accept conservative religion in the national political arena. In fact,
many see the rift between religious traditions growing steadily wider. As we have already
seen, not all share the diagnosis of a culture war. The problem may be less one of war
than of unraveling. Following Robert Wuthnow (1988), it is now common to note that
even America’s “civil religion” has been bifurcated into liberal and conservative camps.
As Wuthnow put it, the two have given priority to different clauses of one of America’s
great creedal shibboleths: conservatives stressing “one nation under God,” and liberals