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While Rousseau is generally credited with coining the term "civil religion," analysis of civil religion in sociology has been influenced more by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim was, of course, an intellectual heir to Rousseau, but nevertheless a gap of great proportions separates them: For Rousseau civil religion is a sensible thing for leaders to Create and encourage; for Durkheim it is an emergent property of social life itself.

On this rather simple difference hangs a conceptual issue obscuring almost all contemporary analyses of modern-day civil religion. Those influenced by Rousseau often begin with a bias against civil religion on the grounds that it is or easily can be an idolatrous fraud perpetrated on naive believers. Those influenced by Durkheim, by contrast, often begin with a bias in favor of civil religion on the grounds it is inevitable in any case and may -- in its finest forms at least -- be the transcendental expression of the profoundest values of a people.

Each of these points of view is therefore likely to have a blind spot, an aspect of civil religion left unquestioned and thus never made problematic in theory. For those largely in the Rousseau camp this blind spot is their difficulty in taking seriously the claims of a civil religion. Durkheim’s followers, on the other hand, give little thought to the question of how a civil religion comes to be. This chapter addresses the latter question by looking at the role played by religious pluralism and law in the formation of America’s civil religion.

Durkheim’s Conception of Religion

Generally speaking, Durkheim’s civil religion theory has been understood o mean that, to the degree a collection of people is a society, it will exhibit a common ("civil") religion. A corrupt, though understandable, interpretation of this theory holds that religion therefore unites a people or integrates the society. Such an interpretation is plausible, of course, if one reads literally Durkheim’s definition of religion (what "unites into one single moral community"). Other statements in The Elementary Forms are just as conducive to that interpretation (for example, "Rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically").¹

But it is the fact of unity more than the fact of religion with which Durkheim begins. Religion is more the expression of an integrated society than it is the source of a society’s integration. "Men who feel themselves united, partially by bonds of blood, but still more by a community of interest and tradition, assemble and become conscious of their moral unity." Durkheim goes on. "They are led to represent this unity."² Here is the key passage. It is in this kind of reasoning that Durkheim connects religion and integration – not that religion produces the cohesive society but rather that the phenomenon of cohesion has a religious quality.

This argument is not at all unknown. In 1937 Talcott Parsons observed that the real significance of Durkheim’s work on primitive religion lay in his recognition not that "religion is a social phenomenon" but that "society is a religious phenomenon."³ In other words, the very existence of society – the fact of stable social interaction itself -- implies religion. The question is whether and how it is expressed.

Durkheim, of course, found religion expressed in the totemistic practices of the Arunta. The persuasiveness of his argument lies in the rather direct link between the experiences of unity allegedly felt by the Arunta and their ritualistic expressions of that unity. But Durkheim did not mean his theory to rest on the directness of this link. ("We cannot repeat too frequently that the importance which we attach to totemism is absolutely independent of whether it was universal or not."⁴) Had Durkheim lived longer, he very likely would have pursued the religious significance of societal integration in a modern context. When he asked rhetorically, "What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ . . . and a reunion of citizens commemorating . . . some event in the national life?" he was certainly hinting at this issue.⁵ But it was only a hint. Was he noting that Christianity is no longer the language by which unity is expressed? Did he believe he could identify the "religions" that do express for modern societies what totemism expressed for the Arunta? Would he agree that these are "civil" religions?

Answers to these questions are not easy to come by. The analysis of modern civil religion gives evidence of one rather direct application of Durkheim’s thesis -- expecting in any society a reasonably close analogue to totemism. This work in civil religion, however, fails to deal with the "linkage" that totemism so conveniently provided. Why should a people, disunited by denominationalism, multiple ethnic traditions, class differences, and such be led to represent their unity anyway? Around what are they unified? Arguing they are unified by a civil religion may be a difficult task, but it is made easier if a plausible case can be made for why a civil religion might develop in the first place.

This chapter therefore attempts to outline two related issues: (1) How has a single, uniting religion emerged out of the variety of Christian (and non-Christian) groups in American society? (2) Is this religion simply "there," to be expressed by those Americans who choose to do so, or are there structural settings (analogous to the "effervescent" phases in Durkheim’s Arunta) where its enunciation is, so to speak, fostered, even compelled?

The common interpretation of Durkheim’s thesis -- that a society is integrated to the degree it possesses a common religion -- is therefore given two twists in what follows: First, the major terms in the thesis are reversed and taken to mean that to the degree a society is integrated the expression of its integration will occur in ways that can be called religious. And second, because conflict obviously endangers societal integration, wherever resolution of conflict occurs is a likely scene for the expression of this religion. In the religiously plural society, churches cannot resolve conflicts, at least between parties from different churches. Buy legal institutions are called upon to do so. Without claiming that legal institutions – and they alone -- are responsible for American civil religion, I argue only that law has played a critical role in that civil religion’s development.

In developing this argument I shall (1) take a close look at the notion of religious pluralism, finding it to mean much more than mere multiplicity of groups defined by ecclesiastical characteristics; (2) look at the historical form taken by pluralism in American society as a set of pressures to which responses were required; and (3) identify the "religiousness" of the response made by legal institutions. In so doing I am attempting to apply Durkheim’s thesis to religiously plural societies and thereby show how a civil religion can develop.

Religious Pluralism

The term "pluralism" is widely used today by social scientists. At a minimal level it refers simply to heterogeneity. In the hands of political scientists, anthropologists, and political sociologists, for example, arguments occur over whether pluralism impedes or secures democratic government. Theorists also differ in their understanding of how pluralism works -- whether it provides multiple channels to power holders or supplies group anchorage for would-be alienated individuals. And there is the intricate argument that pluralism permits multiple but contradictory group memberships, thus making political conflict erupt more often within an individual or a group than between contending political factions.

For all the specifications of "pluralism," however, the concept as used in political analysis almost always refers to heterogeneity of groups. And since modern societies commonly contain several religious groups, the notion of religious pluralism has been seen as analogous to or even synonymous with racial or ethnic pluralism.

There is, of course, nothing incorrect in this usage. Methodists are a different group from Presbyterians, just as Catholics are different from Protestants or Christians from Jews. Still, the incompleteness of this notion of religious pluralism is apparent if instead of denominational differences one looks at historicocultural differences: the Judeo-Christian tradition versus the Islamic tradition, a Western versus an Oriental religious outlook, a mystical versus an ascetic perspective. What can religious pluralism mean if reference is not to denominational or group heterogeneity but to a multiplicity of nonempirical belief systems? Understood this second way religious pluralism builds on the classical understanding of religion in sociology and therefore requires fuller discussion.

Whether formulated by Durkheim (a system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things), by Weber (that which finally makes events meaningful), or by Tillich (whatever is of ultimate concern) religion in its "classical" sense refers not so much to labels on a church building as to the imagery (myth, theology, and so forth) by which people make sense of their lives -- their "moral architecture," if you will.⁶ That human beings differ in their sensitivity to and success in this matter of "establishing meaning" there can be no doubt. Moreover, people certainly differ in the degree to which they regard historic, institutionalized formulations as personally satisfactory. Thus some are churchgoers and some are not; some would change the prevailing theology or ritual and others would not. Societies might be said to differ in whether they offer only one or more than one system for bestowing ultimate meaning.

Teggart asserted social change results from "the collision of groups from widely different habitats and hence of different idea-systems."⁷ And if Teggart assumed human history records few stable "pluralistic" situations (that is, single habitats with multiple idea systems), he was very likely correct. The word "religion" in its plural form does not even enter the language the West until the mid seventh century and does not become common until the eighteenth. Closely related words – piety, obedience, reverence, and worship – never do develop plural forms.⁸

Religious pluralism (in the sense "religion" is used here) is not equivalent, then, to a choice between Rotary and Kiwanis, the Cubs or the White Sox, the Methodists or the Presbyterians. Rather, as Teggart notes, the consequence for the individual of confronting competing idea systems is liberation from "traditional group constraints" and "enhanced autonomy."⁹ Correlatively, Smith observes the word "religions" (plural form) comes into use only as one "contemplates from the outside, and abstracts, depersonalizes, and reifies the various systems of other people of which one does not oneself see the meaning or appreciate the point, let alone accept the validity."¹⁰ In other words, though religious pluralism can mean the existence simply of religious differences, it can also refer to a situation qualitatively different from other pluralisms: When one meaning system confronts another meaning system, the very meaning of "meaning system" changes.

In the Western world this change is most readily seen in the separation of church from state -- the explicit differentiation at the structural level of religion and polity. But as Maclntyre, referring to British society, contends, "It is not the case that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any over-all social agreement as to the right ways to live together."¹¹ The accuracy of this time sequence determines the viability of the notion of religious pluralism being presented here: If the separation of church and state is regarded as only a political event, then churches are seen as voluntary associations, and pluralism indicates merely the presence of multiple religious groupings. Alternatively, if the separation of church and state arises from a situation of competing meaning systems (that is, is essentially a political response to a religious state of affairs), then the existence of multiple churches indicates something far more profound than simply a choice of religious groups. Needless to say, this latter interpretation of religious pluralism is the one used here.

My previous comments are no mere attempt to legislate the use of terms in sociological discourse. They mean to suggest that viewed in a certain way the concept of religious pluralism can have new theoretical importance.

John Courtney Murray, in discussing the "civilization of pluralist society," uses the notion of religious pluralism in both senses outlined.¹² First, religious pluralism implies different people’s different histories -- here Murray essentially is merely relabeling those differences. Second, because discussion of concrete affairs goes on in abstract terms -- in "realms of some theoretical generality"-- pluralism implies the existence of different sets of terms, different realms. Discourse, Murray says, thus becomes "incommensurable" and confused. Compare MacIntyre’s analysis: "If I tell you that ‘You ought to do this,’... I present you with a claim which by the very use of these words implies a greater authority behind it than the expression of my feelings.... I claim, that is, I that I could point to a criterion . . . you too ought to recognize. . . . It is obvious that this activity of appealing to impersonal and independent criteria only makes sense within a community of discourse in which such criteria are established, are shared." ¹³ Kingsley Davis says it more succinctly yet: "As between two different groups holding an entirely different set of common-ultimate ends, there is no recourse."¹⁴

Religious pluralism need not imply entirely different sets of "common-ultimate ends," of "impersonal and independent criteria," or of "moral architectures." But it may be argued that some level of sharedness must exist for institutions to exist, and religious pluralism would appear to reduce that sharedness.

But does it? Once a society permits multiple meaning systems to exist side by side, does it cease to be a society? Doubtless that can happen, but it is more normal for a society to work toward a new, more generalized, common meaning system. It is easier to form a social contract than for all to go to war against all. Still, as is now recognized, "mere" social agreement, a rationally derived document, is insufficient. Commitment to its rightness is also required. Every contract has its noncontractual element, Durkheim said; every legal order possesses its charismatic quality, Weber noted. And that noncontractual element, that charismatic quality, that commitment is articulated finally in terms that are (by definition) "religious." In a single society, then, can more than one set of religious terms exist? And if they coexist, can they continue to function as they are thought to function in a society with a religious monopoly?

Obviously, individuals do not generally confront each other’s "moral architectures" in any direct fashion. Such situations do arise, of course, but manifestations of moral commitment more often occur as institutional conflicts and conflict resolution. The city government decides between road improvement and welfare payments. The corporation chooses to reward longevity or quality of service. The church elects to immerse or sprinkle. The citizenry is ordered to stop plowing and go to war. In all such instances (assuming the absence of sheer coercion) persons feel -- or can come to feel -- an obligation to justify their behavior. But this is not because of any prerecognized specific norm; there is no detailed prescription for every conceivable act. Rather, the obligation is in "realms of some theoretical generality," to use Murray’s phrase. It is, as Talcott Parsons notes, a "generalized obligation" that is morally binding. A person or an institution demonstrates integrity not only by choosing right from wrong in a concrete situation but by maintaining a "commitment to the pattern over a wide range of different actual and potential decisions, in differing situations, with differing consequences and levels of predictability of such consequences."¹⁵

Such commitment in any but the simplest, thoroughly ascribed society must be to a "generalized symbolic medium," not to specific norms.¹⁶ Given the integrative potential of such a generalized symbolic medium -- of action to action, policy to policy, person to person -- the question can be raised whether in a single society more than one such medium can exist. Or if "pluralism" exists, can any one medium command the same commitment it might in a monopolistic situation?

The relation between a "generalized symbolic medium of values ‘and what I earlier referred to as "moral architecture" or "set of religious terms" is quite clear and has long been recognized. The "primary moral leadership in many societies," Parsons writes, "has been grounded in religious bodies, especially their professional elements such as priesthoods." ¹⁷

Religious pluralism, as just interpreted, clearly has had enormous impact on those institutions regarded as religious before pluralization: churches, clergy, theology, and so forth. In some sense they become "less" religious if they no longer enjoy a monopoly in articulating the ideology by which ultimate meaning is bestowed. Reduction in ecclesiastical power, the transformation of ritual into a "leisure" time activity, and the "privatizing in general of theology into pastoral counseling or religious "preference" all reflect this altered status.

If churches become less religious in some ways, some other places in the social structure may become more religious. If pressures are great in a society for a single generalized symbolic medium, a single reality-defining agency, and churches no longer are the targets of those pressures, the pressures will be exerted elsewhere. It is my contention that in America legal institutions feel those pressures greatly, that portrayal of the sacred or articulation of the charismatic tends to be expected of them. In this special sense the law has become more "religious." The pages that follow show how a "common American religion" emerged from religious pluralism and illustrate how current legal institutions express that common religion. In these efforts the Durkheimian blind spot is overcome; I will be investigating just how a civil religion -- in this case America’s -- came to be.

Religion and Law

The impact of Puritanism on the common law is now widely acknowledged.¹⁸ David Little has traced the close connections between Puritan theology and early seventeenth-century common law.¹⁹ Considering the volatility of the seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that religious and legal reformation possessed common elements. But tracing out those elements in detail is, as Little shows, an exceedingly difficult task. For example, the codifying common lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, remained a loyal Anglican all his life, paying no special attention to Puritan theological debates going on at the time. And yet in the jurisdictional struggle between church courts and common law courts Coke not only claimed the latter’s superiority but justified the claim by reference to common law tradition.²⁰ In so doing he effectively sided with Puritanism in its struggle against Anglican traditionalism.

Pound’s assertion of Puritanism’s "impact" is not well documented. It does little more than show how "individualism" in the common law had analogues in Puritanism, but as Pound himself makes clear, this individualism in the common law has many other roots. Moreover, Puritanism may have contributed (or did contribute) as much to a renewed interest in "collectivism" in the law, considering the stress it placed on the covenant, on the "contractualism" it posited between man and God or man and man. David Little claims "explicit Puritan influence on the particulars of common law was nil." Nevertheless, he continues, "It is my contention that the concurrence of important tensions and changes in legal and religious outlook toward the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth centuries is more than coincidence. In this I believe I am not far from Pound’s interest . . . [in his effort] to understand how a system of law comes to embody and perpetuate a general way of looking at social life-a special system of values."²¹

The argument by which Little so carefully weaves together these two entities -- Puritanism and common law -- does not follow Pound, then, in method. He does not see a direct impact of one on the other. Instead Little argues the common law was in a fluid state at the time, seeking principles of legal interpretation for frequent new activities and conflicts. Where might such principles be found? More accurately, perhaps, how might they be articulated? Little’s answer is twofold: First, the religious revolution of the seventeenth century -- a revolution that defined new "order" in the church, in the parish, in the "priesthood of all believers," and in social life generally -- provided an ideologically parallel case. Second, Puritan theological conceptions found outlet in the common law’s articulation of its principles. "Obviously, the crown and the courts could not work together indefinitely so long as each was making the kind of claims to authority it was. A solution had to be found, but it would have to come from sources other than the old English order [that is, the "ancient realm or the Anglican tradition"] The deep-seated tensions of early seventeenth-century English society had to be solved by some rather novel rearrangements of political and legal institutions."²² In other words, Puritanism was an ordering" ideology available to a common law seeking theoretical foundation.

What is underplayed in this approach, however, is the additional role Puritan theology played in legitimizing religious pluralism. Calvinism, Anabaptism, and subsequent "Protestantisms" contributed a new interpretation of order; but they also provided a theological rationale for ending church monopolies on articulating that order, thus pressuring legal institutions into the attempt themselves. As one historian of nationalism puts it: "The Protestant Revolution, by disrupting the Catholic Church and subjecting the Christian community to national variations of form and substance, dissolved much of the intellectual and moral cement which had long held European peoples together. At the same time it gave religious sanction to the notion, already latent, that each people, and each alone, possessed a pure faith and a divine mission."²³

Puritanism, then, did more than offer an alternative articulation of social values for seventeenth-century England even as it did more than provide parallel support to common lawyers in their fight against traditionalism. In addition, though not all at once, of course, Puritanism forced onto society’s agenda the item of pluralism, the question of "religious liberty," the separation of church and state the matter of "intellectual and moral cement." In so doing it left legal systems, especially the common law tradition, the task of formulating a new religion, so to speak. This process is most clearly evidenced in the activity surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court, to which I turn presently. First, however, I must take two intermediate steps.

The first concerns the doctrine of religious liberty. I have just argued that Protestantism provided a theological rationale for ending church monopoly. Any doctrine of religious liberty will lead to the separation of civil authority from matters of faith, hence possibly to pluralism. But inasmuch as Zwingli’s Zurich, Calvin’s Geneva, or Puritan New England are ordinarily seen as having been religiously intolerant, the task of tracing the establishment of religious liberty is a critical one.

The first idea of religious freedom is, of course, lost to history, but it may be accurate to suggest 1523 as a significant date in the social structuring of the idea in the West. In October of that year Conrad Grebel and others (who "became" the Anabaptist movement) challenged Zwingli’s use of civil power to enforce religious conformity. Bender highlights it thus: "Here is where the first break in the Reformation occurred that led inevitably to the founding of Anabaptism. In 1523-25, at Zurich, are the crossroads from which two roads lead down through history: the road of the free church of committed Christians separated from the state with full religious liberty, and the road of the state church, territorially fixed, depending on state support, and forcibly suppressing all divergence, the road of intolerance and persecution."²⁴

The "logic" of religious toleration was established, then, even though occasions of reneging were obviously frequent. Thus Geneva must be considered a theocracy by all accounts, but Calvinism’s English counterparts, the Presbyterians, really had no rebuttal for their "leftist Puritan" challenger, Henry Robinson. A real commitment to the doctrine of predestination, he said, precluded religious persecution. Those not elected by God could not possibly be saved; "uniformity of profession" cannot be confused with "certainty of grace."²⁵ A doctrine of religious liberty and therefore of pluralism was clearly implied here, even if its widespread institutionalization was a long time in coming.

Soon after Henry Robinson came another Robinson -- this one the Reverend John -- who also symbolizes the Protestant theology of pluralism. As spiritual leader of what became the Mayflower Pilgrims (though he remained in Leyden, never coming to Massachusetts), John Robinson is remembered today as the author of the phrase, "The Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth." One does not have to believe the Massachusetts colonists wanted to be religiously tolerant; it is enough merely to acknowledge that a theology allowing religious liberty (or legitimating pluralism) was being clearly enunciated, however long before it became practical reality.

The second step concerns law and authority in colonial America. Not surprisingly, without many of the traditional encumbrances the emerging American society was freer than old societies to manifest religious pluralism and its consequences. This is especially apparent in the Supreme Court’s articulation of the newly emerging "common" religion. As will presently be shown, the history of the Court can be interpreted as a halting, hesitant, but "inevitable" effort to perform for American society the religious task of providing a common moral understanding. Before I deal with that dependent variable, however, I must take a second intermediate step, this time into colonial history.

American colonial life has been highly romanticized. With respect to the subject at hand, should one remember witch hunts or Roger Williams? Was Massachusetts Bay a theocracy or the fount of town meeting democracy? Historians’ judgments on these questions vary, but it seems important to my thesis to maintain that the pressures of pluralism and their impact on legal institutions did not wait for the revolution and constitution making. Is there evidence in colonial America, then, that these pressures were felt from the beginning?

C. K. Shipton points out "there never was an established church in Massachusetts, there was no agreed-upon body of dogma, and serious moral deviation was punished by the state, not the church… Many of the normal functions of the established churches in Europe were here transferred to the state." Towns maintained a minister at public expense, it is true, but all inhabitants, including vocal Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians, participated in his selection, "with the result that the minister’s theological difficulties were usually with the civil body rather than with the church."²⁶ Meanwhile the civil body -- township or colony -- was able to escape the "chaotic confusion of laws" in England by administering them "in one tribunal," according to Howe. Ecclesiastical, maritime, statutory, and equitable" laws were subsumed under the common law, which Bay colonists recognized as a set of unchanging principles of public law, principles which our usage would describe as ‘constitutional.’" ²⁷ G. L. Haskins goes further; the common law was the "cornerstone," the Bible merely the "touchstone," of early Massachusetts.²⁸

It may have been an intensely moralistic atmosphere, therefore, but churches had no monopoly in defining what was moral. Anticipating the distinction between "professed doctrines of religious belief" and "actions" as it arose in Reynolds v. United States (98 US 145 [1879]) -- a case resulting in the prohibition of plural marriage -- came to see that religious "liberty" could become behavioral license unless the obligations between people were subject to the jurisdiction of a secular tribunal. By mid eighteenth century in New Haven, William Livingston rephrased a "Puritan principle" to read "The civil Power hath no jurisdiction over the Sentiments or Opinions of the subject, till such Opinions break out into Actions prejudicial to the Community, and then it is not the Opinion but the Action that is the Object of our Punishment."²⁹

Shipton suggests this principle of freedom of thought, often believed to be state policy first in Virginia, whence it entered the U.S. Constitution as a "natural right," may have been borrowed from Puritan New England. If the revivalistic Great Awakening (1730-1745) was a last ditch effort to reinstate the ‘old order" against the onslaught of the coming denominational pluralism, it would be accurate to say the cause was hopeless. The Puritan "old order" itself quite clearly contained the ideas that had already destroyed its ordering capability.

But "ordering" could not be avoided. "Natural rights mean simply interests which we think ought to be secured," but it is clear that legal institutions increasingly had the task not only of securing those rights but of defining them as well.³⁰ Laws, that is to say, not only would inform citizens what to do and what not to do but would have to serve as well to assess the morality of what they did. The common law as influenced by Puritanism in England, then, was transferred to America, but in the transfer its moral-architectural ("religious") features stand out because the pressures of pluralism also stand out. To a degree hitherto unknown in the West, people were free to adopt any religion. The consequence, however, was that the simultaneously emerging common law was forced to take up the slack, giving it, as Pekelis insists, a "religious and moralistic character."³¹ That is to say, the pressures for a single moral architecture (single "reality-defining" agency, single "generalized symbolic medium") were felt in common law institutions. American society well illustrates the effect of those pressures.

The Religious Character of Legal Institutions

The institutions of the common law seem to have had their "religious" flavor for a long time. The law for Edward Coke, writes David Little, "is more than the measure of reason. It is . . . the measure and source of virtue as well."³² Just as Puritanism had the effect of making every issue a moral question, so also, as Pound noted, did every moral question become a legal question.³³ The notion of "contempt of court," as found in English and American law, illustrates the point well:

Where the law is highly codified, where, so to speak, the law is asked to specify duties -- the situation more nearly found in "civil law" or Latin cultures -- the courts can act more administratively, less "judgmentally." But where the task of justifying, articulating, or "interpreting" the law is asked of the courts -- where "aspirations" as well as "duties" are at issue -- courts must take on a "religious" character.³⁵ Only in a sense, Pekelis reminds us, does the United States have a written constitution. "The great clauses of the Constitution, just as the more important provisions of our fundamental statutes, contain no more than an appeal to the decency and wisdom of those with whom the responsibility for their enforcement rests."³⁶ Whether courts are thought to interpret" or to make the law, the fact remains that common law courts find and give reasons for their decisions. And in the act of reasoning they do more than cite statutes; they also develop the single symbolic moral universe -- the moral architecture. The common law, then, has a "collective" character as pronounced as the individualism more often viewed as its distinctive feature. Any concerted effort, even to promote individual interests, will yield a collective enterprise. But if religious liberty is among the promoted interests, the concerted effort takes on an interpretative task on behalf of the collective.

Though this chapter’s central notion, religious pluralism, is rendered by Pekelis simply as "communities of various types," the elements of the argument are all there by implication: (1) Plurality of the religious systems requires redefinition of order but does not escape the need for order. (2) Legal institutions therefore are called upon not only to secure order but to give it a uniformly acceptable meaning as well. (3) The result is a set of legal institutions with a decided religiomoral character. The historical context of these forces in the West has led the common law to become their medium, the legal philosophy of the Enlightenment their symbols, and the U.S. judicial system most concretely their vehicle of expression.

No clearer illustration can be found than Nelson’s analysis of the legal situation in Massachusetts during the years just before and after the revolution. In prerevolutionary times, he notes, juries reached verdicts and applied the law consistently "largely because men selected to juries shared a . . . set of ethical values and assumptions."³⁸ By the 1760s, however, this ethical unity no longer obtained because Puritan theology itself contained the seeds of pluralism; the Great Awakening was but the early eighteenth-century flowering of those seeds, leading to religious diversity in New England. The result was that as soon as "jurors could no longer agree whether a community gained or lost when, for instance, a millpond flooded a meadow, jury verdicts indeed became ‘fluctuating estimates’ that were ‘utterly indefinite and uncertain,’ and it became essential to transfer to the judiciary the power of finding law" (italics added). Moreover:

One can inquire whether other institutions also served to express those moral standards. Thus, "Congress quickly assumed a theological function and began interpreting events in religious terms and exhorting other patriots on doctrine and morality. . . . But as the early years faded and the years of war began to pass, Congress made progressively fewer pronouncements which required any reference to the foundation of things in God and busied itself more and more with mundane affairs such as the disposition and pay of the Continental Army."⁴¹

More importantly, however -- and more in keeping with the Durkheimian spirit of this chapter -- one can ask if any agency in American society has been required to express those moral standards. I assert here that such a "theological function" was unavoidably thrust upon the judicial system. Ethical diversity then, or what I have called religious pluralism, had the effect of putting onto the judicial agenda the task of declaring, indeed promulgating, the moral standards for the community at large. The culture may yet have been Puritan at its roots, but the courts replaced the churches as the vehicle for expressing the moral standards of that culture.

Religion in the Legal System: A Disappearing Rhetoric

Little documentation is needed for the claim of an expanding judiciary in American history. "Actually, between 1820 and 1890 the judges were already taking the initiative in lawmaking. Far anticipating the leadership of the executive or administrative arms, the courts built up the common law in the United States -- a body of judge-made doctrine to govern people’s public and private affairs."⁴²

The present thesis, however, contains a critical corollary less widely acknowledged: With this expansion the judiciary adopted the task of articulating the collective’s moral architecture. Federal judges, as Albanese puts it, "rode circuit with the gospel of the civil religion and preached sermons in which the Constitution, its virtue and its promise, figured prominently."⁴³ Of course, many have spoken of "the nine high priests in their black robes" and of the sacredness imputed to the Constitution and other artifacts of the legal order. But in keeping with Eugene V. Rostow’s characterization of the contemporary Supreme Court as a "vital national seminar," it is worth noting that the original charge to the Court was only that it render an aye or a nay.⁴⁴ It quickly began handing down written opinions also, however, and under Marshall began the practice of trying for a single majority opinion, which gave ‘judicial pronouncements a forceful unity they had formerly lacked."⁴⁵

With the expansion of judicial explanation came the difficult problem of knowing what religious rhetoric, if any, was allowed in the explanation. I have already referred to the Reynolds v. United States case (1879) wherein Mormon polygamy was outlawed. "Can a man excuse his practices . . . because of his religious belief?" asked Mr. Chief Justice Waite. "To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land. . . ." Were "religious" exceptions to be made, the opinion held, "then those who do not make polygamy a part of their religious belief may be found guilty and punished" (98 US 145 [1879], italics added).

Here in a single decision is exemplified the paradox confronting American courts because they are in a religiously plural society -- a paradox that hands to them the erstwhile religious task of articulating a moral architecture. On the one hand citizens cannot use religious beliefs to justify any and all actions. On the other hand truly religious belief, it is thought, ought to be manifest in action; else why assume in finding Reynolds innocent society might find nonpolygamists guilty? Protestantism enhanced the development of the concept of religious liberty and thus religious pluralism. But this in turn led, as Pound and others saw, to making everything a moral question yet also a legal question. Courts, then, could not resolve legal questions without resorting to moral answers. But the rhetoric and imagery available for expressing these moral answers could not be drawn from the language of orthodox religion as the implications of religious pluralism became clearer. Instead the rhetoric -- if it was to have general meaning -- had to be drawn from another sphere, but from a sphere no less religious in its functioning.

Thus says Bickel:

It would be difficult to find a better description of "religion" as it is outlined in classical sociology.

This change in rhetoric that the courts have felt obliged to use is readily illustrated in so-called church-state cases.

It is instructive to see what developed in the course of a century. In Reynolds the Court recognized that "religion" is not defined in the Constitution but agreed that even if the state had no power over opinion, it was free to regulate actions. And polygamy, it said, has always been "odious" to Western nations, leading as it does to "stationary despotism." Therefore though there is no implication that Mormon opinion is punishable by law, Mormon action clearly is. A few years later the Court can speak of the "Christianity" of the nation, of its people, and of its morality, which therefore permits a church (though not a secular employer) to import alien labor. Though a church is entitled to special exemption from a law for religious reasons, an individual is not. Even if "We are a Christian people," and even if Macintosh is a professor in a Christian seminary, the government’s interest in self-preservation is greater than a person’s right to religious free exercise.

In Zorach v. Clausen the remark that "We are a religious people" might be seen as gratuitous -- this is the only case here involving the establishment rather than the free exercise clause -- except that what is allowed by the Court is a religions program. Black, in dissent, wonders about the rights of irreligious people; are they protected by the First Amendment mention of "religion?" They might be, it would appear from the Seeger and Welsh cases, since what is "religion" gets an even broader interpretation, to the point in Welsh where Black says the law may have to regard as religious something persons themselves claim is nonreligious.

At this point it would seem the definition of religion is so broad as to be meaningless in deciding cases, at least free exercise cases. From a time when the rhetoric used to justify a decision could be presumptively Christian, there comes the time when it cannot even be presumptively religious. Seeger and Welsh set out a distinction -- any sincere and meaningful belief occupies a place parallel to that of orthodox belief. As Harlan argued in his concurring opinion in Welsh, however:

"Religion" for legal purposes becomes simply "conscience," and Congress, if it is to grant conscientious exemptions, "cannot draw the line between theistic or nontheistic beliefs on the one hand and secular beliefs on the other." For all intents, assuming the eventual "triumph" of Harlan’s position or something like it, the law simply dispenses with the notion of religion as commonly understood. Having tried for a century to regard it on its own terms -- as sacred, special, and compelling -- courts realize the attempt is futile. All efforts to allow "free exercise" of religion because it is religion conflict with the requirement of "no establishment" or special treatment. Religious pluralism requires articulation of "highest obligation" not in orthodox religious language but otherwise. What form does this take?

Religion in the Legal System: An Emerging Civil Religious Rhetoric

If the analysis here is correct, a new rhetoric is still in developing stages. Were this new civil religion -- this new moral architecture – fully mature, it would be part of the common culture, but instead considerable doubt is expressed over the shape, authenticity, even the existence of an American civil religion. I do not postulate a fully mature civil religion here, however. Instead I argued commitment to religion liberty (pluralism) makes impossible the use of the rhetoric of any one religious tradition; so pressures are great to create a new rhetoric, that is, find a new religion. In the American case this new rhetoric is found in the common law and develops in legal institutions. Procedure takes precedence over substantive precepts and standards, not because procedures are uniquely required in plural societies -- all societies require procedures -- but because the rhetoric of procedure is required to justify outcomes between parties whose erstwhile religions are different.⁴⁷ The rhetoric of procedure thus becomes the new common or civil religion.

It is in this context that the jurisprudence of Lon Fuller can best be understood. When he remarks on the impossibility of distinguishing the law that is from the law that ought to be or when he discusses the imperceptible line between the "morality of duty" and the "morality of aspiration," he is insisting the law itself has concretely the task of portraying the ideal, whether it wants to or not.⁴⁸ And though Fuller has not included this point in his argument, I argued here that the "law" takes on this task to the degree that "religion" is denied it as a result of pluralism. Thus the "internal morality" of the law informs and guides a judge even though the "external morality" (interests) of contending parties must remain of no concern to him.⁴⁹ Fuller finds a "natural law" rubric congenial for analyzing this process, a fact that bespeaks even more the degree of transcendency that the law takes on.

Conclusion

Legal institutions do not take on this transcendent or civil religious task single-handedly, of course. Public schools certainly play a critical role in socializing youngsters into the "transcendence" of the law. As Kohlberg has framed the issue:

One can, however, usefully distinguish agencies for socialization into the civil religion from agencies for articulating or elaborating it. Public schools are the new "Sunday schools," it might be said, whereas courts are the new pulpits.

Notes:

1. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life trans. Joseph Swain (New York: Collier,1961[originally published in French in 1912]), pp. 62 and 432.

2. Ibid., p. 432.

3. Talcott Parsons, Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, i937), p. 427.

4. Durkheim, Elementary Forms. p. 114.

5. Ibid., p. 475.

6. P. L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, "Secularization and Pluralism,")Yearbook for the Sociology of Religion, 2 (1966), pp. 73-85, refer to "sacred comprehensive meanings for everyday life."

7. Fredrick J. Teggart, The Process of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), p.118.

8. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan. 1963), p. 43.

9. Teggart. The Processes, p. 118.

10. Smith, The Meaning, p. 43.

11. Alasdair MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 54.

12. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 1964), p. 27.

13. MacIntyre. Secularization, p. 52.

14. Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 543.

15. Talcott Parsons. Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1969). p. 445.

16. Ibid., p. 455.

17. Ibid., p.452.

18. Roscoe Pound, "Law in Books and Law in Action," American Law Review. 44 (1910), pp. 12-34, and The Spirit of the Common Law (Francetown, N.H.: Marshall Jones, 1921).

19. David Little, Religion, Order and Law (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

20. Ibid., p. 185.

21. Little, Religion, pp. 239 and 240.

22. Ibid., p. 225.

23. C. J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 36.

24. Harold S. Bender, The Anabaptists and Religious Liberty in the Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1953). p. 8.

25. Little, Religion, pp. 255-256.

26. C. K. Shipton, "The Locus of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts," in G. A. Billias, ed., Law and Authority in Colonial America (Barre, Mass,: Barre Publishers, 1965), pp. 137 and 138.

27. Mark De W. Howe, "The Sources and Nature of Law in Colonial Massachusetts," in Billias, Law and Authority. pp. 14-15.

28. G. L. Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), esp. chap. 10.

29. Shipton, "The Locus," p. 143.

30. Pound, The Spirit, p. 92.

31. Alexander Pekelis, Law and Social Action (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950). p. 56.

32. Little, Religion, p. 177.

33. Pound, The Spirit, p. 43.

34. Pekelis, Law. pp. 45-46.

35. Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964).

36. Pekelis, Law, p. 4.

37. Ibid., pp. 66-67.

38. William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law. The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ‘975). pp. 165-166.

39. Ibid., p. 166.

40. Ibid., p. 171.

41. Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers (Philadelphia: Temple, 1976), p. 194.

42. J. Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law (Boston: Little Brown, 1950), p. 85.

43. Albanese, Sons, p. 218.

44. Eugene V. Rostow, "The Democratic Character of Judicial Review," Harvard Law Review. 66 (1952), p. 208.

45. Robert McClosky, The American Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 40.

46. Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), pp. 236-238.

47. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice.Hall, 1966), p. 27.

48. Lon Fuller, The Law in Quest of Itself (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and The Morality.

49. Fuller, The Morality, pp. 131-132.

50. Lawrence Kohlberg, "Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the Platonic View," in J. M. Gustafson et al., eds., Moral Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 67-68.

Not ever nation-state has a civi1 religion. Whatever the proclivity of enduring groups to project or represent themselves symbolically, not all succeed in doing so in transcendental terms. Only some make sacred their civil rituals; only some create theology out of their political myths. A several-faceted issue is thus raised: What distinguishes those nation-states with a civil religion from those without? Why might a civil religion develop in the first place? What needs, felt by whom, are met by a civil religion? And why are such needs not met by other (prior, noncivil) religions? To answer such questions is to advance our understanding of civil religion. At the very least the question of whether various ceremonies and ideologies should be regarded as rituals and theologies is clarified if a plausible reason can be given as to why they can be.

In this chapter I attempt only to illuminate some of the conditions that could give rise to civil religions, thus making plausible at least their existence. Briefly put, my argument is (1) the condition of religious pluralism prevents any one religion from being used by all people as a source of generalized meaning, but (2) people nevertheless need to invest their activity with meaning, especially when that activity brings together persons of diverse religious background. Therefore (3) a substitute meaning system is sought and, if found, the people whose activities have been facilitated by it will tend to exalt it.

I suggest a universalistic legal system can be such a substitute meaning system, though, as other chapters in this volume suggest, more than a universalistic legal system is surely involved.

Admittedly, the theory here is abstract. It suffers from the fault of so much of the social scientific study of religion, which in its efforts to show the sociological importance of religion has been forced to deal with global, far-reaching, and historical variables. In so doing, such study has frequently sacrificed the closely specified and carefully measured variables. This one is no exception. And yet I use quantitative data from a number of societies and may for that reason claim to avoid some of the pitfalls of mere theoretical analysis. Nevertheless the analysis makes several broad assumptions: regarding the time order of variables, regarding the meaning of "social complexity" (soon to be specified) found among present-day developing societies, and regarding the equating of contemporary nation-states with what in theory are "societies."

I previously identified a second caveat. The overarching theory states that a generalized legal system will be elevated to civil religious status insofar as it facilitates the interaction of religiously diverse people. In fact, however, the information (and thus the narrower theory examined here) pertains only to the first of the two implied assertions -- that a generalized legal system facilitates the interaction of religiously diverse people. The second assertion -- that such a legal system will then become sacrosanct -- remains unexamined by data in this chapter. It is in this sense that our understanding of civil religions will be advanced even if only a plausible reason for their existence can be given. With these two qualifications, then, I present and test the narrower of the two theories.

The Theory

John Courtney Murray put the first part of this narrower theory as well as it can be put: Civil discourse or civil unity is complicated and laborious enough, but under conditions of religious pluralism it is more so because discussion of concrete affairs goes on in abstract terms -- in "realms of some theoretical generality" -- and pluralism creates different sets of these realms. Discourse becomes "incommensurable" and confused.¹ Such confusion is easy to imagine since some taken-for-granteds get called into question. Would-be partners cease to be sure of each other’s commitments and thus trustworthiness. The relative strength of loyalties to kin, neighborhood, status group, and such are possibly challenged by one’s loyalty to one or another (or no) religious group. To the simple categories of believer and heretic get added the various ways to be a nonbeliever. Religious pluralism, to put it simply, complicates matters by ripping the once intact sacred canopy. Interaction, we might suppose, thereby is inhibited.

For this reason, and perhaps contrary to one’s initial guess, we can expect greater pluralism at the religious level to be associated with lesser amounts of social development (or "societal complexity"). At least we can expect no positive relationship between religious pluralism and societal complexity. This is the first proposition.

It is important to realize the meaning attached to "societal complexity" in this proposition, however. Since religious pluralism itself represents one kind of complexity, it should be clear that kind of complexity is excluded from this variable. The reference in the present complexity variable is rather to those "secular" activities that, if religious considerations can be ignored or overcome, may proceed unimpeded but into which religious considerations are likely to intrude unless special efforts are made. The type case is the market transaction wherein two parties can strike a bargain suitable to both if particularistic factors such as religion do not interfere. But the whole range of contacts generally regarded as "socioeconomic" also apply here. I recognize that the usual formulation is somewhat different, that is, as secular activities develop, such particularistic factors as religion diminish. In either view particularistic factors are held in abeyance to some degree; I am arguing that the condition of religious pluralism makes it more important for people to hold religious consideration in abeyance. What little difference exists between these two views revolves around whether religion’s diminution (secularization) occurs automatically with pluralization or instead will occur only if the "holding in abeyance" is helped along (as by a changing legal order).

In any event, though religious heterogeneity may very well appear alongside or as part of general social complexity, I expect a plurality of meaning systems or "sacred canopies" will inhibit development of those social interactions that typically cross religious lines, that is, secular or socioeconomic activities.

The second part of the theory deals with situations wherein secular activities have been or are in a position to be inhibited by religious pluralism. It states that the (threat of) impasse may be lessened by the existence of legal institutions that foster universalistic norms. In effect, this requires of the law some procedures to enable diverse parties to interact in spite of otherwise inhibiting characteristics. For example, two persons who are prohibited by religious scruples from transactions with each other may find it possible, through law, to use third parties (for example, the impersonal, universalistic procedures of a bank). Or, as another example, two groups who define themselves as "believers" and "heretics" or as "faithful" and "infidel" may nevertheless be convinced they will receive fair treatment in the courts and thus allow themselves to buy and sell, enter into contract, and so forth.

Max Weber’s distinction between substantive and formal rationality sets the terms for this part of the theory:

Weber, as usual, is speaking here of ideal-typical forms of legal systems. Nevertheless, he sees the strategic importance played by the shift from particularistic to universalistic standards -- from what he calls substantive to formal rationality. Related to this shift is the obvious fact that religious particularism is not the only particularism. Thus Weber refers to "patrimonial" as well as "ecclesiastical" sovereigns.³ The proper interpretation is to recognize that whatever loyalties and commitments people may have -- to kin, guild, caste, and so on -- are likely, when institutionalized, to be expressed religiously. It is in this sense that the opening paragraphs of this chapter refer to meaning systems or sacred canopies as religion. In a totemistic, endogamous, clan society, for example, the "kin" loyalty and "religious" loyalty would be identical. But in any society kin loyalty is likely to find expression in religious language, rituals, and so forth.

The proposition in this second half of the theory can be stated as follows, therefore: The higher the level of religious pluralism in a society, the more will societal complexity depend upon, and thus be associated with, the presence of a universalistic legal system.

This second proposition appears almost to represent common knowledge. A rationalized, generalized, predictable legal system will foster social interaction and thus societal complexity.⁴ The claim here is more than this, however; it is that, while a rationalized legal system may facilitate societal complexity in any situation, it may be even more helpful for people who are otherwise religiously different. Here is the argument locating this chapter in the context outlined in the opening paragraphs: The legal order in some significant measure becomes a substitute for the religious order -- the order that supplies meaning -- and thus sets the stage for the emergence of civil religion. ⁵

Granted, the outcome may not be a sharply defined "civil religion" -- one that could be universally recognized as such -- but at the least it can be anticipated that some kind of "political religion" will be more likely to emerge in societies where legal structures take on meaning-bestowal qualities.⁶ Obviously such political religion can emerge in "totalitarian" as well as "democratic" societies, but in either setting it will be the law and not mere coercion that facilitates social development. This is Kozolchyk’s point regarding "fairness" in the law. If law is to facilitate societal complexity, it must instill trust, which means it cannot deviate far from the will of those governed. Nation-states of considerable as well as meager development are variously located along the pluralism axis. I shall show that regardless of political style, the societal complexity of religiously plural societies is helped along more by universalistic legal systems than is the complexity in religiously homogeneous societies.

Testing the Theory

In an ambitious project to assess the correctness of Talcott Parsons’ theory of evolutionary universals, Gary Buck accumulated masses of data for 115 contemporary nation-states from every part of the world.⁷ He developed elaborate indices (as of 1960 wherever possible) of the ten variables Parsons discussed: (1) communication, (2) kinship organization, (3) religion, (4) technology, (5) stratification, (6) cultural legitimation, (7) bureaucratic organization, (8) money and market complex, (9) generalized universalistic norms, and (10) democratic association.⁸ Information was taken from such sources as the United Nations Statistical Yearbook, the Yearbook of Labor Statistics, and UNESCO’s World Survey of Education. One index (kinship organization) was measured by only three indicators, but the others were more extensively measured, some by over a dozen separate pieces of information. I have borrowed five of Buck’s ten indices in order to measure two of the three variables.

Societal Complexity

Societal complexity refers to the degree of complexity in "secular" activities, of which the market transaction is the prime example. Perhaps socioeconomic development is a suitable alternative phrase. Four of Buck’s indices -- communication, technology, bureaucratic organization, and money and market complex -- seem to measure this variable very well. Altogether they entail fifty indicators (making their listing here too space consuming), but one indicator from each of the four indices will give an idea of their nature (see Table 2).

Table 2. Four Indices of Societal Complexity and Sample Indicators of Each

_______________________________________________

For the index of: An illustrative indicator is:

_______________________________________________

Communication Motor vehicles in use

Technology Percentage of gross domestic

product originating outside of

agriculture

Bureaucratic organization Ratio of salaried employees

to wage earners.

Money and market complex Imports and exports per capita

_________________________________________________

While Buck found it necessary to keep these four indices separate -- if he was to test the sequential nature Parsons claimed for them -- I have no such requirement. Therefore since each measures a different but important aspect of "complexity," I merge all four indices. Each had a range of scale scores from one to seven, which means the composite index used here ranges from four to twenty-eight. For simplicity I have subtracted three from every unit, making the range from one to twenty-five. Countries were found at every score level. It is important to remember that all fifty indicators, despite their differences, refer to "secular" activities, that is to say, activities that can be engaged in by persons whether or not they "like" or "know" or "frequently see" each other. They measure how easily "strangers" are brought into interaction.

Legal Development

Buck also has an index he called, following Parsons’s terminology, "generalized universalistic norms." A legal system is generalized, Parsons says, to the degree it is "an integrated system of universalistic norms, applicable to the society as a whole rather than to a few functional or segmental sectors, highly generalized in terms of principles and standards, and relatively independent of both the religious agencies that legitimize the normative order of the society and vested interest groups in the operative sector, particularly in government."⁹ That is, a generalized legal system facilitates social relations. Such a process can be regarded as legal development (in the sense I have been using that concept here), and I therefore use the Buck index of generalized universalistic norms as its measure. He, in turn, built his index on eight pieces of information about each society contained in one of two sources.¹⁰

Seven of these pieces of information deal with the degree to which the law is used to "eliminate" opposition rather that to facilitate concerted action by disparate groups. Thus from Banks and Textor, Buck recorded the degree of freedom opposition groups enjoy, and from Feierabend and Feierabend he recorded (for the period 1948-1962) the amount of "repressive action against specific groups. "arrests of significant persons for political reasons," "arrests of insignificant persons," "significant changes of general laws," "politically motivated killing by the government," and the frequency with which the constitution is suspended and martial law is declared. The eighth indicator, from Banks and Textor, reflects a characterization (with the help of a legal scholar) of each nation’s legal system as ranging from "indigenous’’ (indicating low development) to "common law" (reflecting high development). While this final indicator can be criticized as being subjective (at least on the part of the legal scholar, if not on the part of those who appended the labels on each country’s legal system), it is worth pointing out that as only one of eight indicators, this one influences the index very little. Were it to be eliminated altogether, the relative scores on legal development in 115 nations would change hardly at all.

It may well be asked whether an index mainly of negative instances fairly measures the degree of something positively stated. Political reprisals and closing off opposition may reflect the absence of a widespread legal order, it might be argued, but is the nonappearance of such phenomena to be taken as indicating its presence? Two responses might be made. (1) The expedient one is that the Buck measure is available, and no preferable measure based on recorded data is known. (For example, information on the number of lawyers, law schools, and so forth in a society could be a substitute measure of legal development, but in that case the relationship with societal complexity would be well-nigh tautological.) (2) Moreover, I am not so much interested in the existence of law and lawyers as I am their effectiveness in subjecting persons’ behavior -- without coercion -- to legal rules. The record of legal repression seems, then, a reasonable measure of legal development, much repression indicating little legal development, and little repression more legal development.

Religious Pluralism

The third index measures the degree of religious pluralism with information from various sources.¹¹ Because a certain amount of arbitrariness was involved in this procedure, I want to be certain it is explicit. First, it became apparent that the highest levels of pluralism as measured by any available method are not found in those societies regarded today as very pluralistic (the Western industrialized democracies). To be sure, in the scoring scheme the United States would be quite plural -- with Catholics, Jews, and Protestants all in considerable number. But it is surpassed by a number of nations in Asia, Africa, and the Near East, where there exist not only Protestant and Roman Catholic or Christian and Jew but maybe Islam, Hindu, Animist, Shinto, and Buddhist as well. I decided therefore that though one could enumerate many sectarian expressions of Protestantism, the same information did not exist for Buddhism, Islam, Animism, and so forth; so I counted only the major groupings just listed (plus Eastern Orthodox and Confucianism), giving one point for the presence in any society of each of these ten religious categories.

Second, since even the most religiously uniform society is going to have a smattering of "deviants," it was decided that a religion must be represented by at least 2 percent of the population if it was to get counted. Without any firm evidence for selecting that cutoff point, I reasoned that clashing definitions of ultimate reality are likely to clash only when supported by at least a handful of opposing "believers." Moreover, it can be assumed the data are more imprecise on religious minorities; with a minimum of 2 percent the chances are good they are at least noticed.

The upshot, however, as already indicated, was that those societies generally regarded as most plural -- even to a point of the widespread exercise of religious freedom -- were categorized along with newly developing societies where tribal religions compete with the legacies of numerous missionaries. It was as if one were comparing a present-day African or Asian nation with the United States of 1825 (with Protestants and some Jews entrenched on the East Coast, Catholics entrenched in the Southwest, and "Animists" spread out in between). But in fact the measures of legal development and societal complexity are contemporary, thus making that comparison impossible or at least illegitimate.

The only solution seemed to be to eliminate those nations that had already "developed." Granted, this move has an arbitrariness about it, but the effect is to subject the theory to an immensely more stringent test. If societies like the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Luxembourg, France, United States, and New Zealand are known in advance to be (1) highly complex, (2) highly developed legally, and (3) religiously plural, it is not much of a test to determine if legal development and societal complexity are strongly related in religiously plural societies. But what of Burma, Sudan, North Vietnam, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Trinidad, and Ceylon? It seemed reasonable to treat all these latter nations as developing rather than developed and to inquire about their legal and religious circumstances.

Consequently, eliminated are the 23 nations (of the original 115) that scored twenty or higher on the societal complexity index (these are all so-called developed nations). The remaining 92 nations ranged in scores on religious pluralism from one (low) to four (high).

Another obvious weakness characterizes the religious pluralism index; it counts only orthodox, traditional, universally recognized religions. These may, but probably do not, exhaust the variety of "meaning systems" in a society. Thus to take an example, Belgium is nominally all Roman Catholic; yet the Walloon-Flemish distinction is known to pervade all social behavior. India, to take a different kind of example, contains sizable adherents of several "religions," but the adherents of any one religion are themselves divided by language, ethnic, and regional loyalties of great depth. The pluralism index measures none of these religious (but not orthodox religious) differences, though it can be hoped that errors are distributed randomly. To the extent they are, they mute the corelationships that do show up.

It is also worth noting that, while these variables were measured with data from around 1960, the relationships between variables are not necessarily time-bound. Particular scores for particular nation-states change through time, but the tendency for one characteristic of a nation to associate with another characteristic changes only very slowly if at all. A pattern of relationships found at one time, therefore, is likely to be the pattern found at other times as well.

Results

The first part of the theory states that religious pluralism and societal complexity are inversely related, the reasoning being that while religious pluralism is itself a kind of complexity, it has an inhibiting influence on those "secular" interactions necessary for the kind of development I have called societal complexity. Table 3 shows the findings on this first question.

A statistical fundamentalist would insist no guaranteed negative relationship exists in Table 3 because the number of cases is small and the differences are slight indeed. So be it. The argument is only that, contrary to idle speculation perhaps, religious pluralism is not just another aspect of social differentiation but is, if anything, inimical to societal complexity. The data seem to support this part of the theory.

Table 3. Religious Pluralism and Societal Complexity

Religious Pluralism

Low High

1 2 3 4

Average Societal Complexity Scores 10.8 10.0 9.8 8.9

(Number of Nation-States) (25) (24) (24) (19)

The second part of the theory is more difficult to test. It is not enough to show that legal development facilitates societal complexity, though Table 4 suggests it does.

Table 4. Legal Development and Societal Complexity

Legal Development

Lou, High

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Average Societal Complexity Scores 6.5 7.6 11.6 11.5 9.1 13.3 16.5

(Number of Nation-States) (11) (17) (19) (17) (21) (3) (4)

The less than perfect relationship reminds us societal complexity is an enormously involved phenomenon and therefore subject to a multitude of forces in addition to legal development. Had the relationship in Table 4 been reversed, I would have had to revise my thinking. But in a major way the finding of Table 4 is just what is expected: Nations with the least legal development are least complex; high legal development is associated with high complexity. Bear in mind, too, that putting back in the twenty-three nations already eliminated would, because they are both legally developed and societally complex, greatly sharpen the relationship in Table 4.

The evidence so far, then, supports the proposition that a universalistic legal system facilitates societal complexity. The theory states more than this, however. It states a universalistic legal system will be more facilitating of societal complexity the higher the level of religious pluralism. Operationally, this amounts to the prediction that with each increase in religious pluralism the association between societal complexity and legal development will also increase. Table 5 contains the evidence.

Table 5. Religious Pluralism, Legal Development, and Societal

Complexity

Rehgious PII,sm

Low High

2 3 4

Degree of Association Between

Legal Development and Societal

Complexity (Gamma) .16 .26 .53 .74

(Number of Nation-States) (25) (24) (24) (19)

*The nations contained in this table are found in table 6.

It would appear that the theory finds considerable support (recognizing, of course, that mere association does not necessarily signify the causal path the theory claims). One possible criticism comes immediately to mind, however: Might the increasing association between legal development and societal complexity be artifactual? Might earlier colonial regimes, for example, have left both the makings of an industrial (complex) society and a legal system somewhat more developed than what they found? Table 6 suggests not. The four societies at once most plural, most complex, and most developed legally (Bulgaria, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Trinidad) are drawn from widely divergent areas of the world. They represent different ways to be religiously plural, but so also are their legal development scores arrived at in different ways. Common law traditions are found in the background of one or two, and modern-day colonialism existed in two or three, but neither attribute characterizes all four. In other words these four nations are not closely aligned historically, geographically, politically, legally, or religiously. Similar statements can be made of the other eleven groups of societies listed in Table 6. As with all research using static data, of course, such arguments do not "prove" the theory being advanced, but they do make it plausible. To reiterate, legal development does appear to make more of a difference in the complexity of religiously plural societies.

Implications for Civil Religion (Ted: 2 more pgs. of tables)

The question then arises as to what civil religious implications there may be in the role played by legal institutions in religiously

Table 6.

Low Societal complexity: Medium Societal Complexity: High Societal Complexity:

(scores of 1 -- 7) (scores of 8 -- 12) (scores of 13 -- 19)

Legal Legal

Legal Development Development

Development Score

Score Score

Very High Religious

Pluralism Burma 4 Camaroun 2 Bulgaria 5

Central African Ceylon 5 Malaysia 5

Republic I Ghana 3 Philippines 7

Chad 3 Malagaysay 4 Trinidad 7

Dahomey I North Korea

Nigeria 2 South Korea 3

North Vietnam I

South Vietnam I

Sudan 3

Uganda 5

Medium High Religious

Pluralism Burundi 2 Albania 3 Hungary 3

Congo (Brazza) 2 China (P.R.) 4 Jamaica 6

Ethiopia 5 Congo (Leopold) 2 Japan 7

Gabon 2 Guinea I Lebanon 3

Laos 5 Haiti 4 South Africa 3

Rwanda 2 India 5 Yugoslavia 4

Togo I Ivory Coast 4

Upper Volta I Panama 5

Senegal 2

Tanzania 2

Medium Low Religious

Pluralism Cambodia 5 Indonesia 2 Brazil 4

Guatemala 4 Libya 5 Chile 4

Jordan 3 Morocco 5 Costa Rica 5

Liberia 5 Nicaragua 4 Cuba 4

Mali 2 Paraguay 4 Cyprus 7

Nepal I Syria 2 Rumania 3

Niger I Egypt 2 Uruguay 4

Pakistan 3 Venezuela 3

Sierra Leone 5

Very Low Religious

Pluralism Afghanistan 5 Bolivia 3 Algeria 2

Iran 4 Ecuador S Argentina 3

Somalia 3 El Salvador 3 Colombia 4

Thailand 2 Honduras 6 Dominican Repub. 5

Yemen 2 Iraq 2 Greece 6

Mauritania 3 Mexico 5

Mongolia I Peru 4

Saudi Arabia 5 Poland 3

Tunisia 5 Portugal 5

Spain 4

___________________________________________________________ Turkey 3

136 Varieties of Civil Religion

plural society. It can be ventured that if people experience conflict, they attempt to resolve it. If the conflict itself includes a clash of "resolution systems" (meaning systems or "sacred canopies") -- if, in other words, A and B cannot agree because neither accepts the other’s basis for agreement -- then some other resolution will be sought. It is here that the law may be turned to, especially to the degree it is ‘ universalistic," thus overriding whatever parochial conditions have stood in the way. Insofar as the law responds satisfactorily -- its procedures respected, its orders obeyed, its sanctions upheld -- a legal "order" can be said to exist. But if in addition the agencies of this legal order use the language and imagery of purpose and destiny, if they not only resolve differences but also justify their resolutions, it is easy to see how something identifiable as civil religion could emerge. There would exist already a cadre of "clergy," a set of "rituals," places for "worship," and a number of directives for behavior. Add to these a "theology" -- an ideology of purpose and destiny or theodicy -- and a civil religion may be close behind. Whether Bulgaria. Malaysia, the Philippines, and Trinidad are further along in the development of civil religions than other societies in Table 6 I do not know. But it seems reasonable to suggest, on the basis of the theory here, that whatever level of civil religion they may possess at this time will, more so in their cases, be reflected by their legal systems. At least such a perspective directs us to further research into the issue of civil religion.

Notes:

1. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 27-29. See also Talcott Parsons, "Religion in a Modern Pluralistic Society,’ Review of Religious Research, 7 (1966), pp.125-146 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 48-49, 135 - 138.

2. Max Weber, On Law in Economy and Society, trans. Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 225-227.

3. And Cowan speaks of "legal pluralism." "A second great complex of problems to which legal pluralism gives rise is that which has generally conic to be known under the heading of inter-personal conflict of laws, internal conflict of laws, or inter-gentile law. . . . How should one regulate disputes between members of different ethnic or religious groups living within the same political unit under different laws?" Denis V. Cowan, "African Legal Studies," in Hans W. Baade, ed.. African Law: New Law for New Nations (Dobbs Ferry. N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1963), p. 18.

4. Compare with Kozolchyk’s statement: "The main function of a legal system in bringing about economic development is to instill trust in legal institutions." Boris Kozolchyk. "Commercial Law Recodification and Economic Development in Latin America," Lawyer of the Americas, 4 (1972) p. 2.

5. Thus Kozolchyk, ibid., whose research is based on Latin American societies, goes on, "And this trust results not only from the efficient operation of legal institutions, that is to say, when these institutions perform predictably and in the least costly manner, but also from their fairness." The point, of course, is that "fairness" automatically spills over into the religious sphere.

6. See David Apter, "Political Religion in New Nations," in Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963).

7. Talcott Parsons, "Evolutionary Universals in Society," American Sociological Review, 29 (1964), pp. 339-357.

8. Gary Buck. A Quantitative Analysis of Modernization, Office of Research Analyses, Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, 1969. Buck found by scalogram analysis, incidentally, that the evolutionary sequence Parsons suggests (that is, the order in which I listed the ten variables) is strongly supported by the data on these 115 societies. I am indebted to Buck for his cooperation in this research.

9. Parsons. "Evolutionary Universals," p. 351.

10. Arthur S. Banks and R. B. Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963); I. K. Feierabend and R. L. Feierabend, "Aggressive Behaviors Within Polities, 1948-1962: A Cross-National Study," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (1966), pp. 249-271.

11. S. W. Coxill and Sir Kenneth Grabb, The World Christian Handbook (London: Lutterworth, 1968); Elisa Daggs, All Africa (New York: Hastings House Publications,1970); Deadline Data on World Affairs (Greenwich, Conn.: D.M.S., Inc.,1971); Facts on File (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1971);John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969).

This chapter takes as its point of departure and as recurring touchstones several texts of Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. The method of the chapter pretends to no more than elucidation, interpretation, and commentary on these and certain other related texts. The justification of such a method can only come from the exceptional grasp and penetration of these two men and the great influence they have had -- they are probably modern Italy’s two most important thinkers. Both were profoundly concerned with the meaning of modern Italian society in the broadest historical and philosophical perspective. It is not a question of accepting their views; indeed, they differed sharply from each other. But I have found that grappling with their views in the context of Italian history has been a serviceable way to understand the place of religion, in the sense of systems of ultimate meaning, in modern Italy.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the son of an aristocratic Neapolitan family, was a philosopher and historian of culture who became a living embodiment of liberal culture during the first half of this century. Believing "history is the history of liberty," he opposed all totalitarianisms. During the Mussolini period he withdrew from public life and, though never silenced, lived on the margins of political toleration. After World War II he was felt to be the greatest living symbol of the old liberal Italy and was as such both honored and disregarded.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was the son of a poor Sardinian family, ultimately of Albanian extraction. After coming to Turin he became one of the first outstanding leaders of the Italian Communist party. Arrested by Mussolini in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison, except for the few days he survived, diseased and physically broken, after his release in 1937. His greatest work was done in prison and became known only when it was published after World War II. Gramsci’s work has been widely popular among Italian intellectuals since the late 194os, but he has had no outstanding continuator or successor.

Both Croce and Gramsci, viewed in the proper light, can be seen as lawgivers and even as prophets. Both were intensely concerned with the ethical and political orders of Italian society. Both had a vision of a good normative order they hoped to persuade their society to adopt. Both based their norm giving or law giving on a fundamental conception of reality to which they gave ultimate respect and that they invoked as legitimation for their normative demands; so they can rightly be called prophets. To Croce the historical realization of liberty was the highest good; to Gramsci it was the dialectic of socialist liberation. But lawgivers require law takers, and prophets require followers. Each in his own way finally found himself alone. Each, though concerned with power, had to renounce power, to reject his society as it was, and to refuse to collaborate with it. Both of them joined that long line of Italians, saints and heroes, who refused the demands of the powers of their day. They are thus not unworthy guides to the study of the meaning of reality in modern Italy.

Croce and Gramsci

Benedetto Croce began his well-known book History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, with a chapter entitled "The Religion of Liberty." After describing various features of liberalism as it came to be expressed in the early nineteenth century, he writes,

It is clear that Croce wishes to broaden the definition of religion beyond the traditionally religious elements he heaps together in the last sentence and that point to Catholicism. Croce’s argument is close enough to my own that, following him, I will treat modern Italy as a land not of one religion, as common sense would dictate, but of several. Even the varieties I will consider are all but one to be found in Croce’s book. In his second chapter, "Opposing Religious Faiths," he discusses Catholicism and socialism as competitors to liberalism, and in his last chapter he discusses a more recent religion he calls activism, which includes, among other things, fascism, though that word is not mentioned.² I will add a fifth religion, or class of religions, which I will argue precedes temporally, and in a sense, logically, all the others, and which I will call pre-Christian or sub-Christian religion. But I will not be satisfied, as Croce largely was, to lay out passively and statically the five religions side by side.

Antonio Gramsci criticized Croce’s History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century for beginning in 1815 and his History of Italy for beginning in 1871, that is, just after but not including the French Revolution in the one book or the Risorgimento in the other.³ He thus excluded "the moment of struggle; the moment in which the conflicting forces are formed, are assembled and take up their positions; the moment in which one ethical-political system dissolves and another is formed by fire and steel; the moment in which one system of social relations disintegrates and falls and another arises and asserts itself."⁴ Gramsci’s view of the "religions is instructive because it emphasizes the element of struggle, of process, of politics. His conception of religion modulates from the Crocean to something more recognizably Marxist: "Note the problem of religion taken not in the confessional sense but in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct. But why call this unity of faith ‘religion and not ‘ideology, or even frankly politics’?"⁵ Gramsci sees two major functions of such "religions." One is essentially defensive or, one might say, "integrative":

The other is to provide new forms of consciousness appropriate for new stages of social development. Of particular importance to Gramsci is a religion or ideology that can provide a "national-popular collective will" such as he saw in Protestantism in the Reformation or Jacobinism in the French Revolution.⁷ For him the particular problem of Italy arose from the fact that the Renaissance was not in this respect the equivalent of the Reformation nor was the Risorgimento the equivalent of the French Revolution. It thus remained the task of Marxism ("The Philosophy of praxis corresponds to the nexus Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution") to awaken the national-popular collective will so long dormant in Italy.⁸ One need not accept fully the terms of Gramsci’s dynamic analysis to see it usefully supplements Croce’s more static structure.

In addition to the theoretical resources drawn from Croce and Gramsci I would like to apply two of my concepts developed from the analysis of American and Japanese society. In dealing with the religious dimension of American political life I borrowed the notion of "civil religion" from Rousseau and showed the extent to which a rather articulated set of religious beliefs and practices had grown up in the American polity that was independent from though not necessarily hostile to the various church religions that flourish in America.⁹ In applying the notion to Italy it becomes important to realize that all five religions are civil religions. This is above all because Italian Catholicism is and has always been a civil religion. Not only is it the nature of Catholicism generally, or at least until quite recently and in certain countries like the United States, to express itself in particular social and political forms, but above all because the papacy, with its ineradicably political implications, has been for centuries an Italian institution. It has therefore, and again until quite recently, been impossible to challenge the Catholic political system without challenging Catholicism as a religion. It is for that reason, especially in Italy, that liberalism, socialism, and activism have had to be civil religions religiopolitical organisms, in competition with the Catholic civil religion. The interrelations and interpenetrations are important, as we shall see, but the general point still stands. The sense in which the pre- or sub-Christian religions are civil religions is somewhat different and necessitates the application of still another concept, adapted from the language of music, of the "religious ground base."

I developed the notion of the religious ground bass to get at that aspect of Japanese religion that cannot be subsumed under the headings of "Buddhism" or "Confucianism."¹⁰ It is close to what is meant by Shintõ not in the more formal aspects of that not very formal religion but at the point where Shinto shades off into the religion of the basic social structure itself, the religion embedded in the family, village, work group, and so on. What is evident in Japan just because there is such a thing as Shintõ is more obscure in Italy but nonetheless important.

The Religious Ground Bass

As a figure of a much more general phenomenon and as an example of its most extreme form let us consider Carlo Levi’s description of the religious life of a village in southern Italy in which he lived for a year, a life so alien that he considers it not only pre-Christian but in a sense pre-religious.

This passage and the one that follows are interesting not only as descriptions of what Levi saw but of how a cultivated Italian intellectual thought about what he saw. The following is a description of the procession at the local feast of the Virgin Mary:

Not only, for Levi, do the peasants live at a level of "subterranean" intensity beneath the "clear-cut meanings" of reason, religion, and history, they are finally and deeply antagonistic to those meanings:

I would like to take Levi’s description of the pre-Christian or sub-Christian religion of a desperately poor village in the far south of Italy as standing for that particularistic religious life, embedded in the roots of the social structure, that I have referred to metaphorically as the religious ground bass. Here I would include all those loyalties to family and clan, to pseudokinship groups like the mafia, to village and town, and to faction and clique that so often in Italy, as elsewhere, ultimately define reality more significantly for their members than all the formal religions and ideologies combined. The musical metaphor of the ground bass is meant to suggest a deep and repetitious sonority, a drone bass that continues in spite of all melodic developments in the upper registers, the more formal theologies and philosophies, and not infrequently drowns them out altogether.

While something like a religious ground bass is probably universal, its strength relative to other components of the religiocultural system is certainly variable -- probably greater in Japan than in China, in Italy than in France or England. It’s strength within Italy also clearly varies in time and space; it was stronger a century ago than today, stronger in the south than in the north. But of the latter contrast I have come to suspect that the south stands not only for a geographical region but for a region in the Italian soul and that there is something of the "south" everywhere in Italy. The characteristics of the particularistic religion generally can be extrapolated from Levis description: It is emotional and intense in contrast to the ascetic rationalism of high Italian culture; it is fiercely closed to the outside world (there is not one such religion but as many as there are groups), as opposed to the universalism of high Italian thought; and it is presided over by a woman, an epiphany of the Great Mother of the Mediterranean world, only partially and uncertainly articulated with the Virgin of Nazareth.

To borrow an analogy from the political realm, I might say the religious ground bass has been traditionally the "real religion" and Catholicism the "legal religion." Certainly the attitude toward the church has often been legalistic and external -- one does what one must in terms of the deep loyalties and obligations of the particularistic structure and then squares it as best one can with the demands of the church. The statesman Minghetti, himself a religious man, described the Italian masses in the late nineteenth century as almost devoid of "religious sentiment." For them, he said, "habit counts for more than faith. The latter has little influence on thought, and even less on action."¹⁴ The degree to which a genuine Catholic piety has penetrated the Italian masses has varied in time and place over the last century, but it must certainly be said that Catholic identity has often been more of a shield for particularistic loyalties than an expression of deep inner faith. But then the same thing must be said for the secular religions of liberalism and socialism as well.

Only in this connection can we understand how a society that seems, if one considers its articulate and self-conscious classes, so intensely ideological can show such low rates of political and ideological knowledge and involvement when compared with other modern societies.¹⁵ The gap between intellectuals and masses, between conscious ideology and popular feeling, is probably greater than in most Western countries. This can be and has been interpreted in terms of fragmentation and alienation, but we need more than merely negative terms to describe what is going on here.¹⁶ The ground bass religion involves deep loyalties and even a kind of faith. It is understandable as a defensive reaction to a long history of bad government, oppression, and brutality, especially in the south, and to the partial failure of mass religious and ideological movements to penetrate the masses. But it is also the expression of a cultural continuity with an ancient past, a form of culture not only pre-modern but also pre-Christian and even pre-Roman. In particular there seems to be something central about the place of the woman in the ground bass culture, a place never quite adequately expressed in the writings of the self-conscious intellectuals. The position of the Italian woman is markedly less equal than in most modern societies, but as the female opposition to the divorce law suggests, there are rewards other than equality for women in the traditional system.

Finally we may consider the ground bass religion as a civil religion, not of the nation but of the particular group whose essence it expresses. As such it may be a powerful force in combination, alliance, or opposition to one of the great rival civil religions seeking dominance in the state. An Italian professor pointed out to me in Italy there is always a gap between believing and doing and between belief and action comes the political calculus. But here I think political refers primarily to group interest and group loyalty rather than to civic concerns broadly expressed. The priority of particular group loyalties has protected the Italians from the worst extremes of ideological passion of the twentieth century -- even fascism never went very deep -- but it has also operated to undermine a genuine commitment to democratic and liberal values when these did not seem to pay off for particular groups.

Catholicism

The presence of the papacy in Italy has always been a mixed blessing for Italian spirituality. It has inhibited the development of a national church in the sense that France and Spain have national churches religious patterns that are at the same time genuinely Catholic and expressive of the national popular culture. The ablest of the Italian clergy have been drawn into the international bureaucracy of the church, not into the formulation of a peculiarly national expression. At the same time the political priorities of the papacy seem to have inhibited in recent centuries the intellectual and devotional creativity the church has sometimes shown in other countries. Until a little over a century ago the papacy was itself a temporal power, one of the major states of Italy, and it remains to this day a sovereign state recognized diplomatically by many nations. It is impossible to understand the history of modern Italian Catholicism without understanding the politics of the papacy.

Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history focused on the recurrent problem of the isolation of a cosmopolitan intellectual elite from a national-popular base that the structure of the Italian church exemplified but did not originate. Indeed, he traces this phenomenon back to the formation of a class of "imperial" intellectuals in the early Roman Empire.¹⁷ Nor did, in his view, the modern secular intellectuals wholly escape from an analogous position relative to the mass of the Italian people. But in many respects the Catholic clergy remain paradigmatic of the place of the intellectual in Italy, and the two-class structure of the church the clear distinction between the religiously elite clergy and the common people, has had enormous general repercussions. It is in part to this phenomenon, emphasized especially by the presence of the central organ of the church, the papacy, that I would link the tendency of Italian thinkers of all persuasions to think in terms of elites, of governing classes and political classes, more or less clearly differentiated from the general population.

One of Gramsci’s central theoretical problems is the conditions under which an "organic" intelligentsia is formed, that is, one closely tied to a social group or class, which expresses its inner needs and aspirations, rather than, as has usually been the case in Italy, one that remains isolated from effective social involvement. This perspective explains why for Gramsci the lack of an Italian Reformation is such a significant fact: "The Lutheran Reformation and Calvinism created a vast national-popular movement through which their influence spread. . . . The Italian reformers were infertile of any major historical success."¹⁸ It is partly in response to that void of an Italian Reformation that we may understand Gramsci’s fascination, and not Gramsci’s alone but that of almost every major modern Italian intellectual with Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian contemporary of Luther and Calvin.¹⁹ Gramsci treats Machiavelli as a Reformer in secular guise, a "precocious Jacobin," with a vision of a people armed, a national Italy, and Gramsci used the figure of Machiavelli’s Prince to express the unifying and leading function of the modern Communist party. Gramsci does not mention that in the Discourses Machiavelli expresses an admiration for the religion of the ancient Romans, a truly "civil religion" relative to which he found Christianity largely impotent politically. Nonetheless Machiavelli’s Discourses were undoubtedly one of the sources for that political faith that Gramsci so admired under the name of Jacobinism.

The Counter-Reformation in Italy has often been condemned for its political and cultural effects, for its final confirmation of absolutism as against any kind of popular sovereignty, and for the stultifying consequences of its cultural policy. Its religious consequences were also negative, as for instance in the crushing of Sarpi’s "national-popular" Catholicism in Venice.²⁰ The externality and legalism of Trent encouraged not a deeply internalized piety but only the theatrical and mannered religious fervor of the baroque.²¹ Yet within the pores so to speak of Tridentine Catholicism other possibilities were growing. The sober and sincere piety of Alessandro Manzoni in the nineteenth century was perhaps only a harbinger of things to come: a serious lay piety that would penetrate and transform the popular consciousness, at least in certain areas of the north.

But long before the fruits of such an inner transformation could become evident, the church was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, confronted with a major crisis: the emergence of the national question in Italy and the implications of unification for the papacy and the church. After a brief neo-Guelph flurry in 1847 and 1848, the first years of Pope Pius IX, when Italy was momentarily swept by the wild hope of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the pope, it became clear that the papacy would not only not lead the process of unification but would vigorously oppose it. The church was ideologically still locked in an encounter with the French Revolution, which it saw as the work of a liberal sect spawned ultimately by the Protestant Reformation and inimical to the principles of true religion. Throughout the nineteenth century the papacy resolutely opposed every effort to develop a liberal Catholicism, and it always felt closer to absolutist regimes like that of Austria than to any liberal polity. The Papacy was, after all, one of the firmest of the remaining absolute monarchies of Europe, and within Italy after 1848 it felt closer to almost every regime than to that of Constitutional Piedmont, which was to form the territorial base for the unification effort. It was thus not surprising that Italy had to be unified in the teeth of papal opposition and that devout Catholics mourned instead of celebrating when in March of 1861 Cavour proclaimed the existence of the Kingdom of Italy. Italy could not be unified without that large block of territories in the center of the peninsula known as the Papal States, and given its hostility to the nature of the new regime and the continued assertion of temporal sovereignty it would not relinquish for decades, the papacy would not accept the legitimacy of the new state. The aggrieved papacy in effect declared its loyal followers to be without a country. By its famous non expedit decree it forbade Catholics to be electors or elected in the new nation. The Catholic press referred to "King Victor Emmanuel" (presumably of Piedmont) and not to "the king" (of Italy). The liberal leaders of the new state did not engage in a religious persecution but neither did they fail to take advantage of their moment of triumph over the temporal power of the church. Many religious orders were dissolved and their properties confiscated. Anticlerical demonstrations were not unknown and a certain anticlerical rhetoric was common to the more radical liberal politicians.²² A heritage of ill will was created in the first fifty years of the new nation whose full effects would not be evident until the Fascist period when the church, which on every conceivable ideological ground was antithetical to fascism, nonetheless found in it, at least at first, an ally, on the principle that an enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Finally the church consistently referred to its lay opponents as "sects." The issue was not religion versus politics but two kinds of religion and two kinds of politics or two kinds of civil religion.

Liberalism

Gramsci would have agreed with the Catholic apologists in seeing the French Revolution and its accompanying ideology as simply another stage of what had already been begun in the Reformation, though for him the valence would have been different:

That aspect of liberalism, as I am using the term in this chapter, which Gramsci describes and tends to call "Jacobinism" with a very positive value, Croce, in whose terms this "secular ideology" was certainly a religion, called "democracy" with a rather negative value compared to the "liberalism" with which he identified. Croce contrasted the "democracy of the eighteenth century as mechanical, intellectualist, and abstractly egalitarian, whereas the "liberalism" of the early nineteenth century was personal, idealistic, and historically organic: "The democrats in their political ideal postulated a religion of quantity, of mechanics, of calculating reason or of nature, like that of the eighteenth century; the liberals, a religion of quality, of activity, of spirituality, such as that which had risen in the beginning of the nineteenth century: so that even in this case, the conflict was one of religious faiths."²⁴ Transferring these general conceptions to the Risorgimento reveals a characteristic difference of evaluation between Croce and Gramsci. For Croce, Cavour is the great liberal hero of the Risorgimento, the man with a sense of organic continuity, of history, of the necessity of the monarchy. Croce viewed Mazzini as a mechanical democrat whose views would have ruptured the natural growth of Italian society and who justly failed. Gramsci sees the victory of Cavour and the moderates as a "passive revolution," a victory of the ruling classes that the moderates organically and effectively represented but a defeat for the people. His sympathies would have been with Mazzini and Garibaldi had they been able to link their Action party with the organic needs of the masses, especially the rural masses, but it was just this that they failed to do.

Both Croce and Gramsci underestimate Mazzini, the greatest liberal and popular prophet of the nineteenth century, perhaps because both of them are too imbued with a Hegelian historicism that tends to applaud the winners. In spite of the fact that for nearly forty years Mazzini was the heart and soul of the movement for Italian unity, it was not his ideas that were actualized in 1871 and he ended his days in sadness and disappointment. But Mazzini’s significance, as Luigi Salvatorelli has pointed out, is in his effort to reestablish the spiritual unity of the Italian people that had been draining away ever since the time of the medieval communes. His slogan, "Dio e popolo," was not an empty phrase but the expression of a deep national need:

In the end, of course, the Risorgimento did not lead to such a grand national regeneration. It was a revolution "from above," a passive revolution" leaving the Italian masses largely untouched. Cavour’s formula of "a free church in a free state" was not only entirely unacceptable to the Vatican, it woefully underestimated the religious transformation that would have been necessary to create the free people for whom the free church and free state could have had real meaning. This is not to say that Cavour’s vision was not ethical and indeed religious in its own right. But it remained the special property of a ruling elite and was not really translated into a national culture.

Even when liberalism became so widespread among the educated classes, as it did by the end of the nineteenth century, that it was almost taken for granted, it was by no means securely institutionalized among the masses, as the rise of socialist, Catholic and fascist parties uncertainly or not at all committed to democratic institutions would subsequently show. But even the greatest of the twentieth-century Italian liberals, Benedetto Croce, suffered from the elitist restriction that had always characterized Italian liberalism. Again it is Gramsci who makes the point when he criticizes Croce for not understanding that

Gramsci goes on to criticize Croce’s elitist distinction of religion for the masses but philosophy for the educated elite. The following passage from Croce’s The Philosophy of Conduct with its delicately patronizing tone toward the "younger brother" illustrates precisely the weakness to which Gramsci points:

Liberalism as an articulate movement remains elitist in Italy to this day. The parties that remain loyal to it in parliament are small and do not represent the popular masses, Yet who can say the Catholic and socialist subcultures who represent the Italian masses have not, over the last century, steadily and continuously felt the influence of liberalism and been in part transformed by it? Perhaps Croce was not wrong after all in his claim for liberalism.

Socialism

Many historians have described the first decades after the unification of the country as a period of mild disillusionment. The great battles of the Risorgimento had been fought and a victory of sorts had been won. Liberalism in the saddle proved disappointing compared to the heroic days when liberalism was in the opposition. The intense moral idealism of Mazzini was gradually replaced by the rise of positivism as the dominant philosophy -- Herbert Spencer was everywhere read and quoted. The unification of the country provided the basis for a gradually accelerating industrial growth, particularly in the north but this sign of positivistic "progress" seemed to be creating as many problems as it solved. It is these circumstances that make understandable the emergence of socialism as a major force in Italy. As Croce saw it: "The psychological conditions which we have described, uncertainty with regard to aims, doubt as to means bankruptcy of ideas all these symptoms from which Italy was suffering explain how it was that her young men were fired with such lively enthusiasm for the doctrines of socialism. Beginning about 1890, the cult of socialism grew rapidly and continued throughout the decade."³⁰ According to Croce the work of Karl Marx, "who created the new religion of the masses’ in the same sense in which Paul of Tarsus created Christianity" was at first known only second or third hand.³¹ But when Antonio Labriola discovered Marx’s writing and popularized his theories "Herbert Spencer whom every one had read and quoted as the highest authority, was no longer quoted or read, and was allowed to fall into complete oblivion."³²

Besides having a strong appeal for many of Italy’s educated youth, among whom Croce himself was numbered for a while, Marxian socialism early met success among the industrial workers, especially in the urban north. The Italian Socialist party gradually began to build up not only a network of institutions -- labor unions, mutual aid societies, and cultural organizations -- but a distinct subculture, what according to Arturo Carlo Jemolo might almost be called "a new religion." Jemolo vividly describes the quality of that early socialist culture:

Just as the policy of various ministries ranged over time from vigorous repression of the socialists to tacit encouragement of them, especially in their efforts to unionize the workers, so the policy of the Socialist party modulated from one of intransigent opposition to the entire "bourgeois regime" to one of gradual acceptance of the framework of democratic institutions. This tendency was set back at the time of the colonial conquest of Libya in 1911, which the socialists bitterly and in some areas violently opposed, and there ensued the dominance for a time of a militantly revolutionary faction led by Benito Mussolini. But all indications were that in the long run the Socialist party tendency to enter the political system and thereby bring the newly emerging working classes into active participation in political society would prevail. The Great War, however, in Italy as elsewhere, shattered the illusion that this and similar trends were "inevitable," as had been widely believed only a short time before.

Activism

The last of modern Italy’s five "religions" is what Croce calls "activism." For Croce, activism, which he defines as "morbid romanticism" and links loosely to incipient trends in the same direction in the early nineteenth century, is a parody or perversion of liberalism, a sickness of liberty.³⁴

Such trends were general in Europe in the first years of the twentieth century according to Croce, but in Italy they focused around the "morbidly romantic" figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom Croce calls libidinous and sadistic.

It was not an accident that D’Annunzio, who would play the role of John the Baptist to the movement that was to be the fulfillment of activism in Italy, namely Fascism, was a poet. Indeed, Fascism attracted many of the leading innovators in Italian literature of the day men like Marinetti and Pirandello. In this context a remark by Croce about socialism takes on a particular interest: "Thus not only political opinion but the whole of Italian thought and culture was permeated and invigorated by Marxian socialism. Only on literature and poetry it did not, and could not, have effective influence, owing not to lack of enthusiasm, but to its philosophical and practical character, which moved outside the mental process of poetry."³⁶ The strictly rational tendency of Marxian socialism was characteristic of Italian thought, since both liberalism and Catholicism were, each in its own way, highly rationalistic and in the early twentieth century, unpoetic. In all these traditions reason and intellect were highly valued, in part for their ability to control emotion and passion. In this regard activism was closer to the religious ground bass, with its intense emotional commitments and its relative lack of theoretical complexity, than to the other three traditions. However, in the years before World War I activism was a largely elite movement appealing to the educated but bored sons of the bourgeoisie, eager for excitement and glory and disappointed in the Italietta, the "Little Italy" of the liberal politicians. It seems likely that without the drastic disruptions resulting from the First World War activism would have remained little more than a literary mood and Fascism as a major political movement would never have been born.

There were, however, even before the war, a few connections between activism as a literary movement and a broader mass following, connections that would be broadened and strengthened when the Fascist movement emerged after the war. One such point of connection was the work of Georges Sorel, translated in about 1909 by Croce and enjoying a vogue in Italy, partly thanks to Croce’s efforts, that it never enjoyed in France. Sorel was the socialist closest to activism and also, not accidentally, a partial exception to Croce’s rule that socialism was not "poetic." Croce’s own ambivalent assessment, published after the triumph of Fascism, suggests Sorel’s importance:

Among many others, Mussolini was infected by the mood of Sorellian apocalyptic activism well before he left the Socialist party.

According to Gramsci even Marinetti’s rather esoteric movement of futurism held some appeal for the workers. In a series of manifestos and theatrical demonstrations Marinetti declared all traditional culture obsolete -- one of his most famous manifestos called for the filling in of the canals of Venice and the leveling of her marble palaces to make way for railroads and factories the true poetry of the future. Gramsci claimed many workers before the war "had seen in futurism the elements of a struggle against the old academic culture of Italy, mummified and alien to the popular masses."¹⁸ Gramsci also claimed four-fifths of the readers of Marinetti’s review, Lacerba, with a circulation of twenty thousand, were from the working class.

But one thing that differentiated all the activists, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, and Mussolini from a left-wing socialist like Gramsci and a conservative liberal like Croce was their glorification of war and more particularly their violent interventionism in the First World War. That war, traumatic for so many nations, was a major disaster for Italy. It seriously disrupted the economy and set off an inflation that was serious for wage earners and all but fatal for small property owners and produced a class of ultrarich war profiteers. It gravely overloaded the political system with serious problems at a time when it had not fully assimilated the consequences of universal male suffrage voted in 1912. One of the new political elements was the emergence of a Catholic party, the Popular party, for the first time since the unification of the country. The 1919 elections showed the two great popular parties were the Catholics and the Socialists; the Liberals, who had ruled Italy for half a century, were a declining political force.

In the disturbed period just after the war all the tensions and divisions of Italian society were exacerbated. Class conflict was intense; returning veterans were bitter toward the pacifist workers with their draft exemptions based on their essential occupations; small property owners were afraid of losing the last vestige of gentility in the galloping inflation; the Catholic left, genuinely dedicated to nonrevolutionary social reform, did not unite with the socialists, many of whom were coming under the spell of the Russian Revolution, but formed rival "white" labor and peasant unions in competition with the "red" ones. Above all the great wave of strikes and demonstrations of 1919-1920 led to the fear that a Bolshevik revolution was in the making, though nowhere, not even in the best organized Turin group around Gramsci, was there any real revolutionary plan. Under these very severe tensions and pressures Italian politics reverted to its subideological base in the particular loyalties of families and small groups. Only thus can one understand the triumph of Fascism, which never gained what Gramsci called ideological hegemony -- indeed, which never had an ideology at anything like the level of articulation and sophistication of the Catholics, liberals, or socialists.

Fascism in the immediate postwar period was a highly personal movement, an eclectic mixture of whatever Mussolini found that worked. Composed of veterans, former socialists and anarchists, and enraged bourgeois youth eager to fight the socialists as a substitute for the war they were too young for, fascism focused around the leader role Mussolini copied largely from D’Annunzio but with effective organizational forms Mussolini had learned in his years as a socialist. In the beginning its program contained a leftist flavor but the situation dictated that Mussolini shift to the right, for it was the antisocialist violence of his squadristi that swelled his ranks. In free elections Fascism never approached the vote of the Catholics and socialists. It only came to power through the tacit conviction of millions of Italians that Mussolini would protect family and home, property, and tradition. That tacit conviction created the possibility of Mussolini coming to power; it took the cowardice of the king and the weakness of the liberal politicians to ensure it.

Even though Fascism remained ideologically eclectic and chaotic -- Gentile’s systematizations never had any organic connection with the movement -- and in large measure it was simply the acting out on the national stage of some of the less pleasant aspects of the Italian underculture -- the band of thugs tied to their leader in bonds of personal loyalty -- it did develop an ideological style and became once in power, a church, as Jemolo describes it:

Given the hollowness of his ideology, the meagerness of his successes, and the fact that Mussolini never gained the kind of totalitarian control over Italian society that Hitler did over Germany, one must ask about the social and ideological bases of support of his regime. There is no question that the Italian liberal bourgeoisie convicted of impotence in handling the postwar crisis, surrendered control of the government though not of the economy, to Mussolini, some of them willingly some of them reluctantly, but only a few of them going into principled opposition. Even the latter as long as it remained theoretical, Mussolini tolerated particularly in the figure of Benedetto Croce, who continued to write and publish all through the Fascist years. But in tolerating it Mussolini largely neutralized that opposition. It was the socialists who took the brunt of Fascism. Already in 1921 and 1922, even before Mussolini came to power, socialism’s painfully built up network of institutions had been destroyed by the squadristi and many of its leaders murdered. Gramsci himself, by that time the leader of the Italian Communist party, was arrested in 1926 after his parliamentary immunity was violated and died in 1937 after years of bad food and maltreatment in a Fascist prison. Nevertheless, after the hurricane of terror it is probable that a sector of the working class grasped what comfort it could from the ideology of the corporative state and gave it its tacit consent. But, ironically for both parties, Mussolini’s securest basis of popular support came from his religious policy and derived from the Catholic church.

Fascism in its earliest days was both anticlerical and republican. in continuity with Mussolini’s earlier socialist position, but the Duce soon learned he had to swallow both monarchy and papacy to become dictator. The latter was for him the bitterest pill of all. After he had worked out the Concordat of 1929, which was to signal the high point of his popularity in Italy, Mussolini stipulated that in his audience with the pope he would not have to go through the ceremony of kissing the ring, and he forbade photographers when he participated in the religious service in Saint Peter’s during which he had to pray on his knees. There is no reason to believe Mussolini ever had anything but contempt for the church in his own personal life. On the other hand there is very little in Fascist ideology to escape condemnation at the hands of religious orthodoxy, had the church desired to apply rigorous standards. The relations between party and church were indeed not untroubled, and the church successfully resisted Mussolini’s efforts, soon after the Concordat, to destroy its lay organization Catholic Action. After the racial laws of 1938 and especially after the German occupation, the church became increasingly alienated from the regime, and the role of many of the clergy in the resistance was a heroic one. Yet the fact remains, and needs to be explained, that the relation of the church to the regime was for many years a close, indeed, an intimate one, as can be seen in Jemolo’s description:

The only thing that can explain how the church clung to this strange alliance for so long is the history of bitterness of the first seventy years of the Kingdom of Italy and the fact that the church was at last coming into its own, legally recognized as a central institution of society instead of existing in some limbo of marginal toleration and occasional minor persecution, that and the fact that the church was, for many people and in many areas, embedded in and serving the interests of the particularistic groups and their essentially pre-Christian group loyalties that regarded Mussolini as their savior.

The Recent Past

The aftermath of the Second World War was remarkably similar to that of the First World War, though the outcome was radically different. Once again there was the threat of revolution, this time from the armed partisans and workers in the north; once again there was the upsurge of a great fear from all those concerned about family and property, stability and tradition. Only this time all such elements coalesced under the leadership of a reborn Catholic party, the Christian Democrats. The 1948 elections were the high water mark of this upsurge, the greatest electoral party victory in modern Italian history.⁴¹ Italy after 1945 was certainly different from Italy before 1922. The Fascist regime itself, whatever its negative features, probably contributed to that "passive revolution" in another of the senses in which Gramsci used the term, in which important social changes can go on even under reactionary and repressive regimes -- the gradual erosion of particularistic and traditional authority structures and the development of more egalitarian social forms -- though it may be in the nature of the less effective Italian Fascist regime to have served more as a guardian for such structures and less as a corrosive to them than in the more efficient fascist regimes in Germany and Japan. In any case Italy after 1945 was neither a mass society nor a very mobilized one. Never having had a Reformation or a revolution, the formal religions and ideologies continued to float on the surface of Italian society appealing to a mobile educated elite but not permeating much of the substructure except in certain areas of the country where Catholic piety or socialist fervor were genuine popular phenomena (for example, the Veneto for the Catholics and Romagna-Emilia for the socialists). A culture of decadence reminiscent of the pre-World War I activism was again in evidence in the postwar period, though lacking in vigor and, fortunately so far, in any effective political expression. All the elements remain and remain with a viscosity that leads many to despair of fundamental change in Italian society. Yet there are a number of new factors in the Italian situation that give rise to at least the possibility of creative change.

An important contextual factor for much of the recent past has been a relatively favorable international situation that provided neither the threat nor the temptation of war nor with the decline of the cold war, any intense external ideological or political pressure either. Thus the kinds of external threats and disturbances that have frequently diverted modern Italian history from what might be thought of as a "normal" course have been on the whole less in evidence. The serious international economic crisis and the renewal of big power rivalry of the late 1970s threaten once again the fragile balances of Italian development.

The electoral triumph of Christian Democracy within the institutional framework of the liberal state created a new situation with respect to the problem of civil religion. The very logic of the early cold war forced the church into a defense of liberalism and democracy to a degree unprecedented since the French Revolution. The liberal state, instead of being the church’s persecutor, was now its defender and so had to be evaluated differently. Particularly now that liberalism was not a major independent political force or contender for rule its values could be accepted as the legitimate norms of the state and given religious approval. On the other hand in the immediate defensiveness of the first postwar years, instead of a rather clearly differentiated liberal civil religion toward which the church could maintain a nonantagonistic autonomy, there emerged a fusion of religious and political values, as the very term Christian Democracy suggests, which led almost to a clerical democratic state. Under John XXIII the tight bearhold union of party, church, and state began to be broken on the initiative not of the Christian Democratic party but of the church. With the "opening to the left," itself made possible by that incipient differentiation of the party and the church in the early 1960s, the possibility of an autonomous liberal civil religion became more real. It would be based on the symbols of the Risorgimento, inevitably, but it would include the celebration of democratic values to which at several crucial points Catholics had also contributed.

If such a solution to the civil religion problem does eventually emerge, a solution based on the common acceptance of certain political values rather than a struggle to the death between different religiopolitical ideologies, it will depend on changes in both the church and the socialist left. Relevant changes in the church have been clearly evident, as I have already mentioned, from the time of the aggiornamento of Pope John. Developments have not been smooth and recent years have seen something of a "reverse course," but the long-range tendencies do not seem likely to change. The basic implications of the changes are a greater freedom of the church from party and state on the one hand and a wider range of political options for Catholics than support of the Christian Democratic party, options that include support of more vigorously reformist or radical parties of the left. It is true that the church in Italy has probably not responded as quickly to the new freedoms of Vatican II as have some other national churches -- the habit of authority at the center of power has been too strong -- and opportunities have been missed, as when the church responded too defensively and too unsympathetically to the movement of so-called "spontaneous groups of idealistic youth in the late 1960s. But if the church will not lead the way to new freedoms, it has already lost its power to maintain strict discipline. A purely negative erosion of authority could prove dangerous for the church and for Italy, and there is no assurance that vigorous leadership will again be asserted. But the Italian church in the last fifty years has come a long way out of the wilderness. It faces no formidable secular enemy -- even the Communist party prefers not to face it head on -- and it has long been close to the sources of secular power. It can afford, as Pope John so well saw, to open up all kinds of new possibilities, not out of weakness but out of strength. Temporary reversals should probably not obscure the long-term trend toward liberalization.

If the Catholics have, in the last half century, gradually moved back into the centers of power, the same cannot be said of the socialists, who have never held effective power in Italy. Indeed, the history of socialism in Italy is a history of persecution from the very beginning, a persecution that reached catastrophic proportions in 1921 and 1922 and the long night that followed. Since the war socialists have been harassed rather than persecuted, but only in the last few years has a large socialist group, the left-wing Italian Socialist party attained a share of political power, and that certainly not the lion’s share. If there has been no aggiornamento within the Italian Communist party, no equivalent to Vatican II, it is certainly in part because an embattled defensiveness has been objectively warranted. Nevertheless the Italian Communist party (CPI) has a tradition of flexibility, humanism, and appeal to intellectuals that is perhaps unique in the Western world. This does not by any means mean the CPI is clearly committed to liberal democratic values; it only means in the right circumstances it might be possible to open the door on that question. There have emerged in recent years a number of groups to the left of the CPI, disillusioned by its flaccidity and, if anything, more authoritarian than the orthodox parent. These groups express a left-wing activism reminiscent of the Sorellian variety previously discussed. The terrorism a few of these groups have spawned impedes rather than advances the evolution of a national community. It rouses once again the anxiety that strengthens particularistic commitment. The main problem on the left, however, remains the Italian Communist party, the largest excluded group in modern Italian history. The eventual entry of the Communists into some share of governmental power, unthinkable only a few years ago, has come to be widely discussed. Such an eventuality would create the possibility for the transformation of Communist values in a way parallel to what has happened to the Catholics. But if such a transformation is to be something other than a sellout that will just produce a new mass alienated party to the left of the Communists, it will have to be accompanied by at least the beginning of the solution to some of Italy’s basic social problems. In other words the only way to democratize the socialists is to socialize the democracy. How difficult that will be is already evident from the fruits of the several efforts at establishing a center-left government.

But in spite of some grounds for optimism, no observer of Italian society today could call it a happy one. Corruption and cynicism, as so often in the past, go hand in hand, and basic demands for justice and welfare go unanswered. These are generic problems in all modern societies, but the will to meet them seems more lacking in Italy than in many other advanced Western countries. The immobilism of particularistic interest, far more than fervid ideological differences, threatens every effort to create a genuinely democratic society responsive to popular need. Centuries of failure to institutionalize the dreams and ideals that again and again have grown up on Italian soil have led to a certain fatalism. Whatever their differences, the greatest of modern Italian novelists -- Manzoni, Verga, Moravia, Silone, Lampedusa -- share a fundamental pessimism about the human capacity to alter social institutions. All of them opt instead for a certain dignity and integrity in the individual human soul.

And yet modern Italy has not been poor in individual souls who have had the courage to try to alter institutions. Arturo Carlo Jemolo, with his ceaseless struggle to defend religious liberty, critically, polemically, and legally, is such an example.⁴² So is Danilo Dolci, with his effort to find, outside of any religious or ideological orthodoxy, forms of social participation that will be neither impersonally bureaucratic nor boss dominated.⁴³ Nor should the achievements of many such men, working through parties and independently, be underestimated. Croce, who led at several points an active political life, always reminds me of the modest but real institutional successes of modern Italy. And Gaetano Salvemini, another man of conscience who was not afraid to enter the political arena, warns there are no paradises on earth and if we will not settle for some kind of purgatory, we are likely to end up in hell.⁴⁴

Italian history states with stunning clarity the central issues of the sociology of human existence: the very partial institutionalization of morality, the role of the moral hero and the immoral hero, and the problem of when to take power and when to renounce power. Italian history has produced a continuous series, century after century, of men larger than life, extraordinary as intellectuals but above all as moral virtuosi. But at the same time no other society has illustrated so clearly the problem of continuous inveterate corruption and ineptitude.

I shall close by quoting Ignazio Silone, whose words sum up many of the themes of this chapter in the way that they interweave the strands of socialism, liberty, and, implicitly, Christianity:

Notes:

1. Benedetto Croce, History of Europe In the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry Furst (New York: Harbinger, 1963), p. 18.

2. The book was first published in Italy in 1933 and it was necessary for Croce to be somewhat guarded in his language.

3. Benedetto Croce,. A History of Italy, 1871 -- 1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929).

4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International and London: Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., 1971), pp. 118-119.

5. Ibid., p. 326.

6. Ibid., p. 328.

7. Ibid., p. 130

8. Ibid., p. 45.

9. See Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America,’ in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row. 1970). p. 117.

10. Robert N. Bellah, "Values and Social Change in Modern Japan," in ibid.

11. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, trans. Francis Frenaye (New York: Noonday Press, 1970), p. 117.

12. Ibid., pp. 118-119.

13.Ibid., pp. 137-138.

14. Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 1850 -- 1950, trans. David Moore (New York: Oxford University Press and Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, Ltd., 1960), p. 39.

15. Joseph LaPalombara, "Italy: Fragmentation, Isolation, and Alienation," in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, i965), pp. 286-288.

16. Ibid.

17. Gramsci, Selections, p. 17.

18. Ibid., p. 394.

19. Ibid., p. 523. Croce, A History, p. i52, traces this modern interest in Machiavelli to the,8gos and says, "With the Marxists, Machiavelli returned to Italy." By that he meant the Marxists were the first Italians since the mid seventeenth century to take Machiavelli seriously. Croce’s own role in reviving Machiavelli scholarship was not negligible.

20. ‘William Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

21. "The Counter-Reformation in Italy was essentially an authoritarian superstructure raised over indifferent individual consciences, a baroque decoration covering the religious and moral void." Luigi Salvatorelli, The Risorgimento: Thought and Action (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 19.

22. Jemolo, Church and State, p. 42.

23. Gramsci, Selections, pp. 394-395.

24. Croce, History of Europe, p. 31.

25. Gramsci, Selections, p. 63.

26. Salvatorelli, The Risorgimento, p. 96.

27. Gramsci, Selections. p. 132.

28. Cited in Jemolo, Church and State, p. 95.

29. Croce, History of Europe. p. 358.

30. Croce, A History, p. 145.

31. Ibid., pp. 145-146.

32. Ibid., p. 154.

33. Jemolo, Church and State, p. 141.

34. Croce, History of Europe, p. 343.

35. Ibid. p. 342.

36. Croce, A History, p. 156.

37. Croce, History of Europe, p. 306.

38. Gramsci, Selections, p. 93.

39. Jemolo, Church and State, p. 191.

40. Ibid., pp. 268-270.

41. For postwar politics generally but particularly for a helpful treatment of the Catholic and socialist subcultures see Giorgio Galli and Alfonso Prandi, Patterns of Political Participation in Italy (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970).

42. See H. Stuart Hughes, The United States and Italy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 241.

43. My visit to Dolci’s headquarters in Sicily and my talks with him in Rome during my research visit to Italy in the spring of 1972 were the most impressive moments of that trip.

44. Gaetano Salvemini, Italy from the Risorgimento to Fascism, ed. A. William Salomone (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), p. 453.

45. Ignazio Silone. The God That Failed. ed. Richard Crossman, (New York: Bantam. 1965), pp. 101-102.

The discussion of civil religion often permits a mischievous conclusion that the existence of a civil religion is fortuitous, a mere cultural "choice." Thus Ferdinand Mount, in an otherwise astute essay on America’s bicentennial, comments on the shock effect of Watergate: What Europeans are bewildered by is the American’s affectation of pained surprise on receiving a specific proof of the corruption he knows to be endemic to his political system. This amiable hypocrisy surely derives from a more intense commitment to that system (italics added)."¹ Such word choice suggests a dash of reality or a sprinkling of cynicism is all that is required to keep Americans from having a civil religion or at least believing in it. The "intense commitment" Mount refers to is apparently seen as voluntary only, an individual matter of taste. However, such a view is hardly tenable if one regards a civil religion -- like any religion -- as more than a public relations matter. More is at stake than that, a point nicely exemplified in the following description of Shintõ: "traditionally speaking, a Japanese person could not divorce himself from Shintõ. Until recent times Shintõ has tended to define the weight of his cultural and religious heritage. On both the local and national plane Shintõ hallows his homeland and his people, as well as the nexus of the religious, political, and natural order. Given this situation, we can understand why Shintõ scholars proudly emphasize that Shintõ is a natural expression of Japanese life, rather than the product of a definite set of doctrines or a conscious conversion."² In other words, civil religion is a social phenomenon; sacred citizenship for Robinson Crusoe is not possible. In fact, a civil religion in a strict sense may be quite unusual.

The American Civil Religion

That there is a civil religion in America seems generally accepted. However, such assertion does not mean a single, overarching ideology serves to legitimate -- in a functional sense -- whatever the United States and/or its leaders do, since the ideology also provides the language in terms of which they are judged. Nor does the assertion mean all Americans believe equally in the ideology or mean by it the same thing in all respects. (There were probably some agnostics among the Arunta, too.) What the assertion does mean is a widespread acceptance by Americans of a few religiopolitical tenets regarding their nation’s history and destiny. And it also means an attention by the leader-elites -- perhaps especially the cultural elite but including the religious and political elite -- to the more elaborate implications of these tenets. Thus Wimberley and his associates have found in the 1970s, among a large if not absolutely representative sample of North Carolinians, 74 percent agreement with the statement: "Human rights come from God and not merely from laws." Fully 78 percent claim the U.S. flag is "sacred." And remarkably, inasmuch as this particular tenet has undergone considerable challenge since 1964, a third of the people assent to "America is God’s chosen nation today."³ As for the greater civil religious commitment of the elites, evidence is less clear perhaps but generally supportive.⁴

Irrespective of percentage agreements however, which have to be vulnerable to headline influences, politics and religion in America "from the beginning . . . contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved."⁵ The ideology underlying this alliance might be summarized as follows: (1) There is a God (2) whose will can be known through democratic procedures; therefore (3) democratic America has been God’s primary agent in history, and (4) for Americans the nation has been their chief source of identity.⁶

America’s civil religion is not all benevolent and approving, of course. God’s "New Israel" is not without fault in this doctrine, but it does have a special mission, even if that mission brings paradox and agony. There is the likelihood, moreover, as Ahlstrom concludes in his massive religious history of the American people, that by the 1970s "Americans, whether conservative, liberal, or radical, found it increasingly difficult to believe that the United States was still a beacon and blessing to the world. Even less were they prepared to understand themselves as chosen to suffering and servanthood."⁷

The folly of Vietnam accompanied by a failure of nerve in civil rights and followed by Watergate no doubt put American civil religion to severe test. The challenge at the cultural level may be too great, and Americans may be undergoing a profound change in the way they relate their society to the realm of ultimate meaning. Certainly one is more inclined to think so to the degree civil religion is viewed as mere individual choice, since one can observe cynicism replacing faith, pessimism replacing hope. But I am arguing civil religion depends upon conditions independent of particular individuals and events. As with all institutions, civil religion is the accretion of many individuals and events and may be eroded by them as well, but if the American civil religion is on the wane, an institutional analysis is required if one is fully to understand what is occurring.

The Concept Revisited

It is instructive to reflect on why Rousseau was concerned about civil religion, advocated it, and coined the term for it. No doubt part of the reason was to provide a substitute belief system for those whose faiths had been shattered by the forces of Enlightenment. But there is a more important reason. Civil religion was not to be just another religion; its purpose was precisely to harmonize religion and politics. Pagan religions had been so co-extensive with their political orders that "there was no way of converting a people but by enslaving them." Christianity, by projecting a "kingdom of the other world," changed all that. "Jesus came to establish on earth a spiritual kingdom, which, separating the religious from the political system, destroyed the unity of the State. . . . [A] perpetual conflict of jurisdiction has resulted from this double power, which has rendered any good polity impossible in Christian States; and no one has ever succeeded in understanding whether he was bound to obey the ruler or the priest."⁸

Authority, then, is the crux of the matter -- more precisely, authority to set jurisdictional boundaries and invoke transcendental sanctions. For these twin problems Rousseau offers a single solution: civil religion. Civil religion is religious because it is necessary that citizens be disposed to "love their duties," and it is civil because its sentiments are those of "sociability, without which it is impossible to be either a good citizen or a faithful subject." Therefore, "the dogmas of civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, precisely fixed, and without explanation or comment. The existence of a powerful, wise, and benevolent Divinity, who foresees and provides the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I would confine to one -- intolerance. . . ."⁹

Rousseau’s overall concern in Social Contract is to identify an effective but nondespotic government, a vehicle for expressing the general will. In the book’s final part, he discusses several means for "strengthening the constitution of the State," and it is in this context he introduces the notion of civil religion, an aid in governing. Clearly, by calling it "civil," he intended it in some sense to be independent of the church, and, by calling it "religion" he likewise intended it to be independent of the ruling regime. These two features, when cross-classified, not only identify Rousseau’s notion of civil religion but also suggest two other ideological situations that have sometimes been regarded as civil religions. ¹⁰

The two dimensions are continuous variables, not dichotomous; so one may speak of "degrees" of Rousseau’s civil religion. There are shadings -- between civil religion and ecclesiastical legitimizing or between civil religion and secular nationalism. For example, the "political religions" observed in some developing nations would appear to be more than secular nationalistic

Table I - Two Dimensions of Civil Religion p. 44

(Is it religious and not the state

not just secular?) NO Secular nationalism

(text, cont.)

ideologies. Yet having little in the way of any "theology" independent of the state, they are not fully civil religions in Rousseau’s meaning of that term.

The point is not to be arbitrary about definitions, however, but rather to reveal the following theoretical issue: All three kinds of ideologies in Table have been called civil religions, but there are obvious differences among them. All represent "links," as Coleman calls them, by which persons may connect their "society’s place in space, time, and history to the conditions of ultimate existence and meaning."¹¹ But these various links emerge from different social conditions. The conditions are what I explore here.

The point is furthered when it is recognized that, like all belief systems, civil religions must be "carried" by organizational "vehicles." The question is which organizations do the carrying. Rousseau seems to suggest the most fully developed civil religion relies exclusively on neither the church nor the state but to a significant degree at least counts on independent vehicles for its support. Whether this occurs depends not only upon the existence of such independent vehicles but also upon the capacity of church personnel and state personnel to cooperate. In the case of the former, can they relinquish a monopoly on "God talk" about the nation? In the case of the latter, can they adopt a theological rhetoric? If civil religious ideologies are thought of as balloons, I am asking who is able and willing to hold the balloon strings.

Conceived in this fashion the study of civil religion shifts some distance out of the Durkheim camp, where it has generally been. All communities of people may project their "collective representations," as Durkheim had it, but how they do so -- and whether in the manner of Rousseau’s civil religion -- depends upon particular conditions. These conditions are made clearer by a comparative analysis of the United States and Mexico.

Factors Conducive to a Mexican Civil Religion

The day following the inauguration of President Carter, Excelsior, a leading newspaper of Mexico City, reported the event in a story filed by its Washington correspondent. "More than political," the headline read, "it was an act almost religious." The story then detailed not only certain obvious religious features of the event, such as the use of a Bible and the invoking of God’s name, but it went to extraordinary length in describing the "mysterious silence," the "intense expressions as if in a "trance" on the faces of some participants, and the "patriotic tears" among many in the audience. ¹²

By itself the story is not strange, perhaps. But less than two months before, Mexico had inaugurated President José Lopez Portillo in a ceremony no less resplendent and public. And the following day Excelsior devoted many pages to stories and pictures of the event. But nowhere is there mention of "mystery," "intense emotion," or "tears." The president’s address is fully reported and the clothing worn by all the participants is carefully described, but no hint is given that Mexico was experiencing an event "almost religious"¹³

In some respects this absence of a religious flavor in the Mexican inauguration is puzzling because so much in Mexican history would augur a robust civil religion. As a result of immigration and intermarriage it early became an ethnically plural society. Its urge for independence became a reality, and without entangling alliances. For nearly as long as the United States, in other words, Mexico has been -- with the exception of a few years under Maximilian -- a politically autonomous nation-state.

Like the United States, Mexico fought a long and bitter civil war, a war in which ever inclusive rights to full citizenship were claimed and in principle at least were won. This war, begun in 1910, is called The Revolution, and Mexico even today exalts in its revolutionary past, so much so that the historian Brandenburg was able to identify what he calls the "creed" or set of values that emerged from the revolution and to which verbal commitment is nearly universal.¹⁴ This creed is embodied in the only political party to rule since the revolution, the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI. It has had no serious challenge at the polls, although opposition parties exist and are encouraged by the ruling regime.

Numerous heroes are remembered from this history, beginning with Hidalgo and Morelos, two Catholic priests who led the war for independence. Those who helped forge constitutionalism in the nineteenth century, especially Benito Juárez, who engineered the 1857 constitution and served as president, are regarded as "fathers" of the country and frequently compared with Washington or Jefferson. The revolution contributes many names to the patriotic platform: Madero, whose challenge to the Diaz dictatorship triggered the civil war; those generals, Zapata and Villa, whose exploits are now so romanticized; and those who led the transition to peace and established a stable government -- Carranza and Obregón. Even as recent a president as Cárdinas (1934-1940) is remembered heroically, in part because he accomplished some of the land reform the revolution promised but also because he brought about the nationalization of the oil industry, thereby flexing Mexico’s muscle in front of United States and English power. These are only the biggest of the heroes, however. Dozens of others are honored by statues, parks, fountains, and in the naming of streets, cities, and states. These combine with ubiquitous wall slogans, holidays, and the flag to give Mexico an overwhelmingly nationalistic flavor. Whether in city or remote countryside, the nation’s history is constantly remembered.

More pertinent to civil religion is the great influence Comte and Spencer exercised with Mexican public educators. Public education was practically nonexistent until the final decades of the nineteenth century, schools being largely church operated and attended by the well-to-do. But then education became a national endeavor, designed by men who have shared something of an outlook ever since.¹⁵ The first of these educational philosophers shared the positivism that marked the Diaz regime, the extreme "human engineering" view. Included was the idea that schools were to mold citizens for society, independent of church and home. Christianity could no longer be taught as such, but, said Ignacio Altamirano, "democracy as religion" should be. In the 1890sJusto Sierra became the center of an intellectual movement that has been called the "Athaeneum of Youth." While trying to temper the positivism of their predecessors with a non-churchly "spiritualism," Sierra and his adherents continued to regard education in terms of the "positivist sociology of Comte, Littré, and Spencer."¹⁶ Sierra oversaw the opening (in 1910) of the National University out of what had been the Pontifical University. This he did "to nationalize learning, to Mexicanize knowledge." But as minister of public education he also "wanted to ‘realize the religion of the motherland in the soul of the child,’ to create what he called ‘the civic religion, the religion which unites and unifies.’ "¹⁷ Toward this end Sierra even drew up a list of American "saints," which included Washington and Lincoln from the north, Bolivar and Marti from the south, and Hidalgo and Juárez from Mexico.¹⁸ This group who controlled public education during the decades prior to the revolution clearly wanted to create a civil religion.

The interruption for internal war disrupted public educational development for about ten years, but when President Obregón took office in 1920, he appointed as Minister of Education José Vasconcelos, who had been a young member of Sierra’s Athaeneum. Indeed, Vasconcelos had created the motto for Sierra’s national university – "By virtue of my race the spirit shall speak" -- and he attacked the problem of public education with the same religio-national zeal as had his predecessors. He was the "apostle of the new secular religion" as he sought teachers of comparable fervor who would join what he called "a holy crusade for civilization."¹⁹ Vasconcelos never accepted his predecessors’ positivism -- wherein are studied only "phenomena," he said, and not "noumena" -- but he advanced their goal of an education with strong national flavor.²⁰ Under his leadership the federal constitution was revised to permit greater federal participation and centralization. (Today a uniform curriculum and free textbooks for the primary grades are supplied by the government.) Federal appropriation rose from 1 percent of the budget just prior to 1920 to 15 percent in 1923. ²¹ Vasconcelos wrote La Raza Cósmica [The cosmic race], in which he imagined "the white, the Indian, the Negro, and the yellow, united in a synthetic ideal . . . the final inclusive race."²²

With the new pride in things Mexican, the sixteenth-century Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec commander, joined the parade of heroes, even as Cortés was forever condemned.²³ And in the effort to exalt in the indigenous, the grandeur of local artists was recognized and utilized. Vasconcelos, for example, commissioned the first of the famed Mexican murals. "Nowhere was the religious fervor of the Revolution more apparent than in the secular propagandistic painting of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros. In the colonial era, with the Catholic Church in its ascendance, the native artistic genius found its outlet in the building and decorating of churches. Under the Revolution this genius burst forth again, but now to glorify and explain the new gospel of the secular rival of the Church -- the nationalistic government."²⁴

It is clear that Mexico has had not only a dramatic past to exalt and an optimistic future to portray but also a means -- public education -- for doing so. Moreover, for decades it has operated with an educational theory that encourages and justifies a worshipful attitude toward the state. As recently as 1941 the Organic Law of Public Education was revised to direct the Ministry of Education to "weld Mexicans into a single spiritual nucleus."²⁵

Catholicism as a Means to Civil Religion

Mexico is a Roman Catholic society. Franciscans, beginning in 1528, followed by Jesuits and Dominicans, swarmed over New Spain and "in an amazingly brief period, completely replaced the native priests as the natural leaders of Indian society."²⁶ This spiritual conquest was made easier by the number of similarities between the Indian religion and Christianity, similarities in theology, organization, and especially ritual. If the friars had to bend a little in their European orthodoxy, they nevertheless found parallel practices regarding the cross, baptism, confession, communion, feast days, and fasting. Assimilation of Catholicism was relatively easy and nearly complete.

It was assimilation, however, and not wholesale substitution of Catholicism for its native predecessor. The result was (is) a "strange hybrid of superstition and idolatrous religious concepts."²⁷ (Good discussions of this hybrid are in Quirk and especially Brenner.²⁸) Since any imported religion is likely to take on characteristics of its host society, the hybridization of Catholicism in Mexico would not ordinarily be worth remarking. However, in this case the superstitions and idol worship have remained uncommonly independent of church and priest, a point whose importance will become clear presently.²⁹

With independence Mexico remained Catholic. During the war both the loyalists and the rebels invoked the name of the church, and clergy were active on both sides. While it is true that the two prominent priest-leaders, Hidalgo and Morelos, were denounced, excommunicated, and shot as traitors, they had no intention of giving up the Church. Indeed, Hidalgo was filled with remorse for all the blood he and his soldiers had spilled and, after his capture in 1811, returned to the bosom of the "Holy Mother Church."³⁰ And when Morelos drew up a constitution in 1814 -- the year before his execution -- he "specifically guaranteed the sanctity of Roman Catholicism as the only religion to be tolerated in Mexico."³¹

While Morelos’s Constitution of Apatzingán was never put into practice, the plan of Iguala (1821), drawn up by Iturbide after independence, also confirmed the official status of Catholicism as the state religion and denied toleration to all other religions.³² The war for independence, in other words, was reasonably conservative in purpose, especially with respect to the church. The rebel priests would have abolished clerical fueros (special legal jurisdictions whereby canon law courts superseded civil courts), but chiefly they wanted, as native-born priests, the same rights as Spanish-born priests. By extrapolation they wanted to abolish as well the marked distinction between the wealthy, land-owning (Spanish-born) class and the Mexican-born and mestizo peasant classes.

A few years later (1824) Mexico’s first Constitution reaffirmed both the relative conservatism of the independence movement and its commitment to a state church, which "will be perpetually the Roman Catholic Apostolic."³³ Such ecclesiastical concern was not surprising in view of the near-universal identification of Mexicans as "Catholic," along with church control of 20 percent to 70 percent of Mexico’s wealth. (The larger estimate is older and entrenched, but the smaller is probably more accurate.)³⁴

Even with the rise of "liberalism" in the 1820s and the formation of a so-called "anticlerical" party, clergymen were to be found among the leaders’ ranks. That is to say, while all liberals favored curtailment of the Church’s worldly power and proclaimed the supremacy of civil power, they were not necessarily "antireligious."³⁵ The role of Freemasonry in Mexican liberalism has been asserted, for example, but, while its presence is undeniable, its "anti-Catholicism" is by no means obvious. Instead, what the liberal reformers wanted was a classic separation of church and state, allowing each institution freedom within its own sphere – "as long as the government could define the spheres." ³⁶

For a forty-year period this issue of church-state separation was fought over. Benito Juárez, supreme court justice and then president, was the liberals’ foremost leader and engineer of the 1857 constitution (for which he is now honored by schoolchildren as the first among national heroes).³⁷ Earlier outlawed had been any but "secular" education and the use of civil machinery to enforce religious vows and payment of church tithes. In 1857 the Church was stripped of all real estate except worship centers, and the registration of births, marriages, and deaths was made a civil affair. Two years later a number of other curtailments on the Church -- known as the Reform Laws -- were passed. They officially separated church and state, forbade public officeholders from attending religious services "in any official capacity," made marriage a civil act, and legalized divorce.³⁸ (Rousseau saw the importance, in the struggle between church and state, of the authority to marry. Should the church succeed in claiming this sole right, he commented on the last page of the Social Contract, "it will render ineffectual . . . the Prince, which will no longer have any subjects except those which the clergy are pleased to give it. . . [I]s it not clear that by behaving prudently and keeping firm, the church alone will dispose of heritances, offices, citizens, and the state itself, which cannot subsist when only composed of bastards?")

Admittedly, these laws (and others yet to come) were anticlerical. But while there was some "atheistic" support for them, such sentiment was not controlling. The chief desire was to create a representative, republican, and democratic government. Most of the liberals remained Catholic. The i857 constitution preamble, after all, began, "In the name of God and by the authority of the Mexican people." And when Gomez Fariás approached the document as first signer, he knelt and "swore by the Holy Gospel to recognize and obey the Constitution." As Simpson says of the reformers’ leader: "To postulate an irreligious or atheistic Juárez is to make him a consummate hypocrite, which he most assuredly was not. He believed in God and Order. With the early Jesuits, he believed that government had its sanction in God’s will expressed through the will of the people. In thus elevating the popular will he naturally ran afoul of the clerical prejudices of the time, but he did so from religious conviction."³⁹

The Diaz regime followed (1876-1910). Freemason Porfirio Diaz was married to a devout Catholic, and his handling of the church-state matter reflected the ambivalence of this common situation. He confiscated Church property one day and permitted the Church to buy new property the next; "anti-clerical legislation was enforced by his left hand, retracted by his right."⁴⁰

Even in the extreme the constitution of 1917 following the revolution, while undeniably influenced by some delegates bent on destroying the Church, is best described also as "anticlerical" only. That is, like its precursors of 1824 and 1857, it recognized implicitly that the Mexican people are "Catholic" and will have churches; it simply asserted unquestioned governmental authority to set the limits on the churches’ domain.

Because of the nature of church-state relations in the history of Mexico, therefore, a current of anticlericalism has been a major force for over a century. Yet Mexico remains profoundly Catholic in its hybrid way. By 1960 Protestants still amounted to only 1.6 percent of the population and Jews 0.3 percent.⁴¹

Has Mexico a Civil Religion?

Given such an overwhelmingly monolithic and continuing religious heritage and given such an intense national experience, has Mexico blended them into a civil religion? Do politics and religion harmonize in Mexico? They do not in the sense of Rousseau’s meaning of that term. There is no transcendental ideology at once independent of both church and state. Mexico has a rather vibrant nationalism, but it is secular; it is not transcendent but remains the domain of the state. And Mexico continues to have a widespread appreciation for the transcendental, but this appreciation is largely apolitical; it remains, in a peculiar way, the domain of the church.

Consider, first, nationalism as a potential civil religion. That it is intense is hardly questioned.⁴² And it grows year by year, largely as a result of government effort to use education as a unifying, pride-producing agency.

Scott estimates that the proportion of Mexican citizens without even a concept of the nation has declined from 90 percent in 1910 to 25 percent in 1963.⁴⁴ Inasmuch as the population nearly tripled during that period, the expansion of nationalistic sentiment has been enormous.

But this pride, this nationalism, is decidedly secular. It is not believed God authored the laws of Mexico or "chose" Mexico as a divine instrument. At least that is my estimate. These kinds of questions have not been asked in opinion surveys in Mexico, as nearly as I could determine. Personnel at the Mexican affiliate of International Research Associates doubted that such questions would even have meaning to the Mexican public, a judgment shared by several prominent Mexican social scientists with whom I talked. The ruling party covers almost every available wall on main streets with political slogans (for example, "Fatherland is first," "To serve is the highest duty," "We work for the causes of Mexico," or "We follow the road of the Revolution"), but not one refers to God or any other sacred idea.

Another potential source of civil religious sentiment is the corrido, the ballad or poem detailing some event in the nation’s history. Existing both as an oral tradition and in print on cheap paper for wide distribution, these corridos are often sagas of heroic daring or noble suffering and thus candidates for expression of links between religion and politics. A careful review of a random sample of corridos from the revolutionary period (drawn from Vincente T. Mendoza, El Corrido de la Revolución Mexicana [The corrido of the Mexican Revolution], and Armando Maria v Campos, La Revolución Mexicana a Travez de los Corridos Populáres [The Mexican revolution through popular ballads]) reveals little or nothing to suggest that the troubadours saw Mexican destiny in any transcendental manner. As sponsor of the nationalism, in other words, the state makes no use of transcendental language nor, apparently, do citizens in thinking about their nation. The distance between this nationalism and a civil religion thus appears great.

Consider next the context of sacred ideas and language as a potential civil religion. There remains the church, which is still attended by some on a regular basis and by many on an occasional basis. More broadly, there is the vast "cultic" activity surrounding saints, giving rise to assessments of Mexico as the leading Catholic country in Latin America. The display of religious symbols is very common. It is not unusual to read on the dashboard of a taxi "God goes with us" or "Holy virgin, protect me. Shrines are not rare -- in homes, of course, but also in bus depots, in flower markets, alongside the melon stand, on the highway, and so forth. The most popular of these shrine figures is the Virgin of Guadalupe, a dark-skinned (Indian) Mary whose veneration goes back to 1531.⁴⁵ A basilica in her honor stands now at the place where she first appeared to a humble Indian, Juan Diego; and hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from all over the nation make pilgrimages there on the edge of Mexico City. They implore her and thank her, for in such manner a certain "predictable" order enters their lives. As Brenner says, "Countlessly, every day, Guadalupe is on the lips and in the thoughts of all Mexico."⁴⁶ Her cult is the strongest and most widespread.

There is no doubt the cult is national, moreover. Not only is the dark virgin "the single most powerful element in Mexican Catholicism," but her very darkness has enabled her to symbolize the postcolonial, miscegenized mestizo nation.⁴⁷ It is not uncommon today for recent immigrants (for example, from the Spanish Civil War) and their children to be targets of discrimination. One epithet for them is "whitey" and indicates not so much skin color as "incompleteness" as a Mexican. The educated and the wealthy may not publicly honor the Virgin of Guadalupe. Certainly they do not walk for miles to make her a pilgrimage, let alone cover the last hundred yards walking on bare knees, as do many poor people. But hers is a national symbol nevertheless. Her banner led in the war of independence and appeared again in the revolution. Not everyone believes the myth about Juan Diego and the miraculous image on his cape, but everyone recognizes the national character of the cult. Guadalupe’s basilica is, as Brenner puts it, "the Mexican navel."

But while the cult of Guadalupe is national, it is not particularly "civil" or political. Zapata’s armies may have carried her image into battle, but they did so knowing they had no monopoly on her. The other side carried her, too, and for the same reasons: to ensure one’s own safety, a loved one’s fidelity, improved health, and so forth. In other words, the cult of Guadalupe involves more personal than civic or political acts. The dark virgin’s office is implored so that God is on my side, not on our side. And so it is, to a large extent, with the other saints’ cults as well, a point vividly illustrated in the testimony of several of the children of Sanchez, for whom the Lord of Chalma (another cult, centered about sixty miles southwest of Mexico City) was the focus of their spiritual life.⁴⁸ Even when the cult is community oriented -- as in the case of agricultural saints -- it remains largely apolitical. Under these circumstances the distance between this theology and a civil religion also appears great.

So Mexico has no civil religion of the sort Rousseau discussed. It had in its history an ecclesiastical legitimizing of the state, a religious heritage that lingers now as cultish attention to saints and shrines; and it has now a vibrant secular nationalism. But these two ideological forces have not merged as they must if a single ideology -- which is both civil and religious -- is to occur. Mexico would seem to have been ripe for such a development; so why it did not appear requires an explanation. In the search for this explanation we shall discover something more of the conditions for civil religion.

El Cid Versus Cuauhtemoc: Church versus State in Mexico

Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec leader to defend against the Spanish invaders, has already been introduced here as a national hero, a symbol of the secular state. El Cid, for whom an occasional restaurant in Mexico is named and about whom Robin Hood-type movies sometimes appear, is somewhat more obscure. He was an eleventh-century Spanish figure who helped drive the Moors from Valencia. In a burst of religiopatriotic zeal in 1924, Father Cantú Corro tried to put these two characters together and extol them as joint symbols of the Mexican spirit: the true church and the true nation. He failed because while for centuries church and state did make common cause in New Spain, for the past century and a half the situation has clearly been one of church versus state. Therein lies the failure to develop a Mexican civil religion, but the explanation is not as clear-cut as it might first appear.

Mexican church-state mutuality -- an instance of what I have called "ecclesiastical legitimation of the state" -- began to deteriorate in the eighteenth century. That deterioration helped bring about the pressure for autonomy from Spain and helps to explain why priests figured prominently in the movement. The struggle between church and state can thus be dated from 1810, when the priest Hidalgo emitted his "Grito de Dolores" and touched off the war for independence. By the 1830s classically "liberal" sentiment was entrenched in Mexican politics. It was often manifested as anticlerical, and indeed some politicians probably were more anticlerical than proanything. But most of its supporters were converts to the Anglo-French-American political theories of liberty and equality. They desired freedom, and the church was one of the barriers. By 1857 these reformers had built significant constraints around the political and economic power of the Church, and by 1876 these constraints were firmly and legally established. Pope Pius IX responded to the 1857 constitution by declaring "null and void the said decrees and everything else that the civil authority has done in scorn of ecclesiastical authority and of this Holy See."⁴⁹ But the cause was lost. Maximilian’s defeat in 1867, followed by the presidency of Juárez and the constitutionalization of the Lerdo Law, meant the liberal reformers had won the political battle. For example, two priests in Saltillo in 1882 argued that the law requiring priests to get proof of civil registry of birth or marriage before performing Christian baptism or marriage violated the constitutional separation of church and state. They had to argue in civil courts, however, using the amparo (writ of judicial review provided for in the constitution); and they lost.⁵⁰ The Church was not then or ever again to share hegemony in Mexico.

Losing the political battle and losing the battle over symbols are two different things, however. It took the Church another fifty years to acknowledge losing the first battle, but the second battle has not been entirely decided even today. Former President Emilio Portes-Gil, who then became attorney general, wrote in 1935: "The Church is the formidable enemy which the Constitution of 1857 had to face. But in 1914 it found itself again facing that same enemy, and to show this we have had to review anew its attitude throughout the past. In our review we have shown that the stand taken by it against the Law and against the civil authority is exactly the same as in colonial time, just as in 1810, 1822, 1833, 1836, and 1865; and that after the lengthy period enjoyed by it for recovery it has again adopted the same attitude in 1913, 1914, 1917, 1926, and 1934"⁵¹ Portes-Gil exaggerates, however. The church never "recovered" after the 1857-1876 period; it had few political weapons, only symbols to fight with. According to Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores, exiled apostolic delegate to Mexico, "The Catholic Church recognizes no human power which can prevent Her from doing anything She Herself deems necessary for the salvation of souls; therefore in spiritual matters She is subordinate to no one."⁵² The rhetoric dates from the middle ages, but by 1934 such a statement was only rhetoric, an utterance of symbols.

"Mexican history might have been a different story," writes Brandenburg, "if Church had broken with State, hailed Hidalgo and Morelos as Catholic heroes, and encouraged them to lead the masses."⁵³ Indeed, it might have been a different story, but a different story of symbols, not of power. By 1876 the Church was broken from the state politically, whether or not it concurred. The Church’s only options were to join symbols in a combined venture with the state or to withhold them. It took the latter course.⁵⁴

During the years of the revolution, the Church had reason to side with the liberals, but because the latter were joined by anticlerical radicals (most notably Villa), it chose instead to back the conservative (losing) side. When the constitution of 1917 was drafted, therefore, "Catholic" representation was nonexistent, and the resulting document not only repeated earlier material restrictions on the Church (such as government ownership of all church property, civil registry of priests, and making marriage a civil matter) but also got in a symbolic lick or two (for example, religious garb was not to be worn in public; worship was to be only an indoor affair; alien priests were forbidden; and no religious labels were allowed for political parties). The symbolic nature of the struggle is stated succinctly in Roman’s discussion of the 1917 constitutional congress: "Although other arguments were also used against the clergy, the issue returned time and again to the saving and the building of the nation and to destroying the ideological domination of the church" (italics added).⁵⁵ Article 3. containing the above restrictions, also declared that primary education is to be free and secular. Since parochial schools constituted so large a part of education in Mexico, this goal was slow in developing. By 1974, 7.8 percent of primary students were still enrolled in private schools, of which half are estimated to be Roman Catholic. Private (and thus Catholic) schools figure more prominently in postprimary education. For example, an estimated 75 percent of the students in Normal Primeria (that is, training to be primary teachers) are in Catholic schools.⁵⁶ An obvious ambivalence surrounds Catholic education in an overwhelmingly Catholic country whose constitution calls for secular education. Many parents send children to parochial schools because they are believed superior. I was told the attorney general under a recent president did so. When asked how, as chief legal officer of the nation, he justified it, he replied his children’s education was his wife’s concern.

It was a symbolic defiance par excellence by the Church that led to the most recent (and probably final) church-state struggle, the so-called Cristero Rebellion of the 1920s. In 1923 the cornerstone was laid for a monument to Cristo Rey (Christ the King) on a peak in the state of Guanajuato, at the approximate geographic center of the nation. A crowd of forty thousand came and heard, among others, the Vatican representative to Mexico proclaim Christ the king of Mexico. The government, to counteract this blatant "outdoor worship," began registering (and limiting the number of) priests, something the constitution allowed but that had not been enforced. The Church responded by shutting down all churches, and military skirmishes broke out, a festering problem that lasted five years.⁵⁷

The Cristero Rebellion was serious, of course, but the outcome was never in doubt. Catholic leaders misjudged the nature of the people’s loyalty, for most found it easy enough to honor their saints at shrines whether or not priests were on hand. As Bailey puts it: "[Catholic] loyalty was still very great; few Mexicans had formally abandoned their faith -- but they had, like most people in other Western nations, compartmentalized their lives. The Mexican social cosmos by the 1920s was essentially secular. Religion was Sunday Mass, baptisms . . . the last rites . . . but it was not wages, working conditions, food, housing, and land."⁵⁸

Periodic stories circulate even today of Catholic conspiracies. The openly conservative Sinarquista party ("without anarchy") flourished briefly in the lg4os, and the second largest political party during the past several decades (PAN) is generally recognized as a "Christian Democratic" party. But even so, PAN ("National Action Party") gets at most 14 percent of regional votes, and its token seats in the legislature serve more to prove the ruling party operates a democracy."⁵⁹ In the battle of church versus state in Mexico, in other words, the state won. El Cid lost this time to Cuauhtémoc.

Catholic Ambivalence and the Failure of Civil Religion in Mexico

In the opening pages of this chapter, I suggested that development of a Rousseau-type civil religion depends upon the existence of independent organizational vehicles to "carry" it. The independence of those vehicles in turn depends upon whether church personnel are willing and able to relinquish their monopoly on God talk about the nation and whether other persons (in nonreligious roles) are willing and able to adopt such theological rhetoric. I used the metaphor of civil religious balloons and asked who held the strings. Can state (civil) people and church (religious) people grasp the same string, use the same language? For two hundred years in Mexico the general answer has been "no."

To a significant degree persons from the "church" side in Mexico have in recent decades made peace with a government that steadfastly refuses to sponsor them, that insists on religious tolerance instead. These persons have, so to speak, adjusted to a secular, constitutional system; they speak its language. But a comparable shift by civil officials has not occurred. Perhaps the last public official to conduct his office in ecclesiastical language was Octavio Véjar Vásquez, minister of education in the early 1940s. An avowed Catholic conservative, he "confessed his devotion to revealed truth" and wanted schools to train people for their "hierarchic position in creation There can be no education," he said, "without the sign of the Cross behind it."60

But Vásquez was an exceptional case. Without question the larger problem today is for persons in secular roles -- especially politicians -- to engage in God talk. In the 189os the dictator, Porfirio Diaz, had commemorative dinner plates drawn up showing his face and that of Juárez along with the Virgin of Guadalupe, a clear instance of how politics makes strange bedfellows. When President Avila Comacho announced in 1940 that he, too, was a "believer," a ripple was observed. And the government today provides money to build churches (for example, the new basilica honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe), since it owns them anyway. But these examples suggest how awkward it is for politicians to appear sympathetic to religion, how difficult it is for political rhetoric to include transcendent references. Other instances show how pervasive is this difficulty, this ambivalence.

These vignettes say nothing of a material power struggle between church and state, the sacred and the secular. They reflect instead the symbolic level of social activity. They are therefore trivial by most standards, indicating only the ease or difficulty persons have in grasping one or another ideological balloon by which to articulate their behavior. The argument here is that the civil (political) and religious balloons have not been easy to hold together because of the ambivalence toward the church so widely felt by Mexicans in the civic arena. Two more examples -- again symbolic and trivial -- can be given to help show the pervasiveness of this dilemma.

To summarize, Mexico has no civil religion of the sort Rousseau urged. It has a nationalism, and it retains a religiousness, but these two cultural themes have not merged. The symbols of the first have not mixed with the symbols of the second. The explanation for this failure to mix lies in the ambivalence toward the Church that followed bitter church-state struggles of the nineteenth century.

It is possible to imagine other paths the symbols might have taken. In Haiti, for example, when the Church excommunicated President Duvalier, he simply distributed a picture showing himself with God’s hand on his shoulder, with the caption "I have chosen him."⁷⁰ Despite hostilities, in other words, it is conceivable that the symbols of ecclesiastical legitimacy might have been taken over by the Mexican state. Or it is possible Mexican nationalism might have ceased to be secular only and developed its own sacred symbols, the situation approached in the Soviet Union.⁷¹

But neither of these happened either. Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, one of Mexico’s leading sociologists, suggests the legislative branch, in sanctioning the executive’s actions, fulfills a function similar to that of the divine powers that sanctioned the laws by which the "rulers of old" governed." Johnson is more accurate in describing the theory of the present Mexican Constitution, however, when he says, "Human rights were recognized not as inherent but as creation of the nation."⁷³

This muted moral rhetorical role for governmental institutions is illustrated by Mexican judicial behavior. The law can speak in profoundly religious ways, especially in matters undergoing judicial review. Mexican courts possess this review capability through the doctrine of amparo, a device allowing citizens to bring grievances against authorities directly to judges. Via Articles 14 and 16 of the Mexican Constitution, courts have expanded their oversight capability much as United States judicial power has expanded under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Moreover, the Mexican Supreme Court has not been merely a tool of the ruling regime but exhibits considerable independence. It "has pressed officialdom vigorously in several key policy areas. Amparo courts appear willing to tackle almost every kind of procedural abuse in the administration and interpretation of laws. . . . The high percentages of cases won by amparo plaintiffs and the great volume of cases initiated each year demonstrate that the Mexican judiciary is an important allocator of values, scarce resources, and sanctions in the National political system."⁷⁴

And yet the Mexican Supreme Court, for all its activity, remains passive with respect to great moral questions. For example, Schwartz’s examination of the 1917 -- 1971 period

Thus the court, though not constitutionally prohibited, has nevertheless been reluctant to adopt any role wherein it expresses the more profound values of the Mexican nation. In other words it articulates no Mexican civil religion.

Although the two quasi-civil religions (ecclesiastical legitimacy and nationalism phrased in sacred terms) were historical options Mexico might have elected, the Rousseau-type civil religion must now be regarded as remote indeed. But in retrospect, it is not puzzling that a civil religion never appeared in Mexico. The history of church and state seems "naturally" to have precluded a transcendent understanding of Mexico’s national destiny, an understanding independent of both church and state.⁷⁶

Stated this way, however, the puzzle is why there are situations where such an independent understanding does develop. Under what conditions will a civil religion appear? To answer this question I return to the case of the United States.

Having reviewed some of the features of Mexico that explain why no Rousseau-type civil religion is found there, one might be inclined to dismiss the finding with a "What did you expect?" Two things suggest the folly of such a dismissal, however. I mentioned one of these when I cited several characteristics of Mexico that would seem to have facilitated a civil religion: the strong nationalism, the powerful role of religion in its history, the recognition of a "Mexican" people that has emerged out of a diverse ethnic situation, and the deliberate campaign to erect a civil religion.

The other thing making casual dismissal of the Mexican case unwise is the implied assumption that the absence (and therefore the presence as well) of a civil religion can easily be explained, that the conditions for civil religion are not at all problematic. Against this second line of reasoning is the argument that civil religion (at least of the Rousseau variety) is rare, and the conditions for its development are not obvious, just as the explanation for civil religion’s absence is not obvious. The case of Mexico therefore redirects attention to the United States and how it is a civil religion developed there, a civil religion independent of both church and regime. An answer comes in several stages.

A Conducive Ideology

Without question the most common method of accounting for an American civil religion consists of tracing the history of the ideas that comprise it. In this view two currents of thought, staffed for the most part by two groups of people, dominated the formative years of the American civil religion. Despite their differences, they converged on the idea that Americans were the new chosen people. One current -- generated by the Puritans -- believed America was renewing a covenant with God. The other current -- originating in the deists or "philosophes" -- were fashioning a social contract based on divine law. Both thus imagined God to be intimately involved in national affairs, even as both upheld the separation of church and state and a voluntary religion. This point is very ably advanced by Dohen and many others. Howe, for example, suggests the "wall of separation" between church and state, which the First Amendment is to ensure, was not simply a Jeffersonian deist figure of speech but even more reflected the "evangelical" desire to keep the "wilderness of the world" out of the "garden of the church." Both positions, however, led to an insistence on "voluntarism" or nonestablishment of religion.⁷⁷

Nowhere was the resulting "republican religion" more apparent than in the "Yale theology" of the early nineteenth century, the goal of which was "the moral renovation of the American people through revivalism, reform societies, the religious press, and sumptuary legislation."⁷⁸

The beliefs of the founding generations then, whether Puritan or rationalist, whether inspired by Moses and Isaiah or by Locke and Montaigne, were conducive to a perspective that saw the American nation as the chief agent in the unfolding of history. Of such, it is said, civil religion is made; America had those beliefs, and Mexico did not.

At best, however, the ideas alone are a necessary but not sufficient explanation. Did they generate the evangelical fervor that made the expanding frontier a mission scene? Yes, but that fervor did not surpass the enthusiasm (and success) of the Franciscans and Jesuits in New Spain. Did those ideas generate a renewed interest in the Old Testament-inspired notion of a "chosen people?" Yes, but so were Catholic missionaries in Mexico imbued with beliefs that the New World was the new occasion to fulfill God’s promise.⁸⁰ Was the promised land of America found to be bountiful, thus confirming God’s compact? Yes, but the silver mines of Mexico were more than adequate substitutes for American milk and honey as signs of God’s grace.

One ideological difference does stand out between Protestant America and Catholic Mexico; it is the difference in those belief systems that Max Weber made explicit. In America, for Deist as well as for Puritan, God’s involvement was direct; in Mexico God’s influence was mediated by church, priest, sacrament, and saint. But even this difference, while obvious and of enormous theological importance, does not by itself explain the appearance of an independent civil religion in the United States but not in Mexico. Recall the balloon metaphor. This ideological difference alone does not reveal what enabled the church in America to relinquish its monopoly on holding the string of the religion balloon and what enabled government officials to grab it.

Other conditions were obviously necessary, conditions not unrelated to Protestant ideology. In this sense the common explanation for America’s civil religion -- that it arose out of Puritan and other ideas -- is not incorrect but only incomplete. It would be more accurate to say certain ideas found institutional roots in the Protestant soil of America that they did not find in Catholic Mexico, and these institutions -- not just the ideas -- were also necessary for a civil religion. The first of these, institutionalized religious liberty, explains how the church lost its monopoly on religious symbols.

Religious Liberty, Voluntarism, and the Separation of Church and State

One idea that took root early in American soil was that of religious liberty. There is no need to romanticize this chapter of history and make all the Puritans libertarians, "but the remarkable thing about the English settlements in America is that there, in the brief period between 1607 and 1787 these traditionally antagonistic groups of people learned to dwell together side by side in relative peace. First, they learned to tolerate one another, and eventually they began to think of freedom for all as an inherent or natural right."⁸¹

However, from the beginning that natural right, when institutionalized, became the government’s responsibility. Thus even during the first century of the Massachusetts colony, while Puritan Congregationalism was "established" and levied taxes, many Anglican, Baptist, and Quaker colonists sought and found relief by appeal to the provincial authorities. Here is but an early instance of what was to become a common American irony: In its efforts to protect religious liberty, civil government enlarges its own role as religious arbiter. Michael Novak puts it this way: "No one church was allowed to become the official guardian of the central symbols of the United States. Instead, the nation itself began to fill the vacuum where in many cultures a church would be. The nation became its own unifying symbol system, the chief bestower of identity and purpose." ⁸²

The church was left to compete as a voluntary association, a situation foreign observers sometimes interpreted as theological weakness and sometimes as community vitality but always as a blend of the civil and the religious. Clergy did not cease to preach on destiny, worth, and judgment; but they had to share the pulpit. And every time someone’s "free exercise" right was upheld, the government "established" further its own religious role. America became, as G. K. Chesterton said, a nation with the soul of a church.

Religious liberty and voluntarism thus led to an unusual "separation" of church and state, a situation in which the organizations are perhaps separated but the symbols are not. In exchange for the right to believe as they wanted. Americans relinquished any church’s monopoly on religious symbols and shared them with government. The result is a civil government with a religious flavor, a flavor nowhere more apparent than in the rhetoric of presidential inaugural addresses.⁸³

This unusual separation of church and state remains today a difference between "Protestant" America and "Catholic" Latin America, even where in the latter separation of church and state is secure. Ivan Vallier allows us to understand this difference with his distinction between "religious competition" and "political competition."⁸⁴ The Catholic Church in Latin America competed politically with government for a long time (and in some places still does), but only recently has it competed religiously. Churches in America. however, because of the doctrine of religious liberty, have always competed religiously but never politically, that is, over the rules governing competition. This situation is one factor that allowed, indeed encouraged, the emergence of an American civil religion.

To summarize the argument to this point: America’s ideological heritage, especially the Protestant idea of covenant and the rationalist idea of social contract, made civil religion possible in the United States. But inasmuch as these and similar ideas are also found in Mexico’s ideological heritage, the simple availability of the ideas is not enough to explain the presence of civil religion in the one country and its absence in the other. More is required.

I have suggested an additional factor: The doctrine of religious liberty accompanying Protestantism was institutionalized as an unusual separation of church and state. In this separation the church lost its monopoly on religious symbols, sharing them with civil agencies, and government therefore also dealt in religious symbols. The point is ironically illustrated in a 1935 report of the Congregational Churches of Mexico that attempted to explain the continuing tumult between church and state in that country. Catholicism, the report says, "put the Pope above the State, and finds it impossible to support a Government which no longer consents to be the tool of Romish machinations." By contrast, Protestants can support the state "as long as it does not seek to compel disobedience to God’s commands."⁸⁵ What the report fails to acknowledge, of course, is that Protestantism (as well as Catholicism) in the United States achieves this harmony by relinquishing to civil agencies the authority to define God’s commands. In protecting the "free exercise" of religion, government further "establishes" its own religious role. In return for the guarantee of flying any religious balloon, all churches’ balloon strings must be available for handling by government.

Political Activity by Churches

American churches never "competed" politically in that they never set the rules of competition or determined jurisdiction, but this did not keep them out of the political arena. Indeed, it might be argued the peculiar nature of U.S. church-state "separation" meant churches entered the political fray with greater abandon than was the case when they did compete. Even today, as countless studies show, greater political activity characterizes those Protestant groups with the more "republican" religion; groups asserting "the church should stay out of politics" are those whose Christianity rests less easy with religious liberty or the democratic regime generally. At the extreme, religious groups claiming the sole way to truth make common cause with fascist politics. Partly, too, this explains why more liberal political involvement is found in those denominations with more members of high economic standing. Churches serving the rich often take positions some of their individual rich members oppose. Historically, the charge against mainline Protestant churches has not been for political inactivity but for political naivete.⁸⁶

In America, therefore, one observes the role of religion in political life, even as clergy and churches are "nonpolitical" or, as Tocqueville noted, "disestablished." ⁸⁷ Protestants got there first, of course, and some still level accusations of a de facto Protestant establishment. But while top political leadership has come chiefly from members of one of the mainline Protestant groups, that membership has been of little political significance. Jews and Catholics have made a similar adjustment and seen their religious affiliation also become politically insignificant.⁸⁸ Anthony Trollope, following his visit in 1860, said in America "Everybody is bound to have a religion." But, he added, "it does not matter what it is."⁸⁹ Candidate John F. Kennedy, telling the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960 that his first commitment was to the U.S. Constitution, was merely echoing Trollope’s sentiment. The ease with which the Catholic hex disappeared following Kennedy’s election provided further confirmation. A politician’s membership in one or another denomination may have sizable significance at election time, of course, depending upon the use to which it is put. But so may a politician’s photogenic quality, ethnicity, ad lib ability, or money supply. Religious affiliation merely lines up with these other attributes and has no necessary relationship with the politician’s substantive record.

Any religion that does influence political life is thus "non" denominational even if its early roots were evangelical Protestantism. It is diffused throughout American institutions, even if it was shaped theologically by New England ecclesiastics. It is a civil religion and inspires clergymen as well as others to political activity, even if it is the unique theology of no denomination. How ingrained this religion became, even early in the nation’s history, is illustrated by the religious comments of another foreign observer. Harriet Martineau was a convinced Anglican who, coming to the United States in 1834 for a two-year period, compared the religious situation in America with what she perceived to be the "established" position of the church back home in England: "It appears to me that the one thing in which the clergy of every kind are fatally deficient is faith: that faith which would lead them, first, to appropriate all truth, fearlessly and unconditionally; and then to give it as freely as they have received it. . . . What would Paul’s ministry have been if he had preached on everything but idolatry at Ephesus, and licentiousness at Corinth? . . . what kind of an apostle would he have been? Very like the American Christian clergy."⁹⁰ Further reflection by Martineau would have led her to realize deficient faith was not the source of difficulty but rather the peculiar political role that must be played by disestablished clergy when they are politically active. A more accurate rendering than Martineau’s is one made a decade earlier by the Frenchman, August Lavasseur:

The closeness of religion and politics, more than their separateness, marks the church-state situation in America. Some have seen in this closeness the source of atheism’s unpopularity. Others have commented on the absence of a church-based political party in the United States, owing to the "religiousness" of all political parties. Still others point to the essentially ‘private" role to which church theology is reduced inasmuch as the church cannot compete politically.

All such observations may be true and probably are. From the standpoint of the development of a civil religion, however, the closeness of religion and politics in America has another meaning, a meaning in which a large number of foreign observers of the religiopolitical scene concur: Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, American politicians, government officials, and civil servants have been favorable to religion. Not having to compete politically with churches, politicians could draw their language, imagery, and symbols easily and unashamedly from religious ideology. People in the political sphere could hold the strings of religious balloons.

Civil Agents of the Civil Religion

Here then is a second and less obvious explanation for America’s capacity to generate a civil religion -- the opportunity and inclination of its government agencies to use religious symbols. The first explanation -- that the Protestant doctrine of religious liberty led to the kind of church-state separation wherein clergymen, even while politically active, did not "compete" politically -- is seen here in mirror image. Thus unlike politicians in Mexico, American politicians have felt little ambivalence toward the church because, unlike the Catholic church in Mexico, the various U.S. churches have competed not with the state but only with one another. Politicians are therefore free to deal in religious symbols.

When government agencies use religious symbols, they are typically not sectarian symbols but those common to all believers in the United States, which means political units (chiefly the nation), not ecclesiastical units, are the units of reference. For example, Bellah observes that presidential inaugural language always includes God but never Christ.⁹² God looks favorably (or unfavorably) on this country, not simply on the Presbyterians of this country. As noted, therefore, American churches have been politically involved in civil, not just ecclesiastic, affairs, and thus served as agents of the civil religion. But I turn now to the religious involvement of government agencies. For, it seems fair to presume. these agencies have also played a critical role in the development of American civil religion. It is not enough that religion attend to the civil; the civil must also attend to the religious.

I have referred to elected politicians’ use of civil religious symbols. Less obvious is the way other civil agents have used the civil religion. The several civil positions in Mexico already described have their American counterparts; comparing the two sets shows how easily in the United States the "civil" position became "religious" as well.

Education

As in Mexico, U.S. public education was seen as a vital agency for any civil ideal. Even before the American Revolution, "education became an instrument, deliberately used, by which dominant groups sought to recreate an ideal unity and minorities struggled to retain their group’s identity."⁹³ Moral inculcation, it was recognized, could not be "tied to sectarian or even religious teaching. . . . In the polyglot cities . . . the establishment of schools with any denominational coloring was sure to alienate some of the families. . . . [Horace] Mann did not -- nor did he wish to -- abolish the use of the Bible in the public schools. . . . But he was happy to report in 1844 that only a small fraction of the towns used the Bible as a devotional work; the rest used it as a reader."⁹⁴ The school promulgated national unity and "nonsectarian" morality. Unlike Mexico, however, public education was not inhibited in this promulgation from using religious symbols as long as they were thought common to all, which again meant politically defined, not denominationally defined, units were the units of reference. Even today in some places the religious symbols used are to Jews unjustly Christian and to Catholics unjustly Protestant. They are therefore not in reality "common" to all. But such an assertion does not negate the civil religious intention to use common religious symbols.

Educators

The designers of American public education were believers; schools were the nation’s way to do God’s will. The father of American public education -- the prophet of the common school and counterpart to Mexico’s José Vasconcelos -- is Horace Mann. During the mid nineteenth century he was secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and thus creator of the school system that served as a model for many other states. Mann rejected the sternly orthodox Calvinism of his youth, but who can doubt its impact in the following letter he wrote to a friend three decades later? "If I had a few thousand dollars I know I could, very perceptively, hasten the millennium. God having time enough on his own hands lets these things drag along strangely; but I confess I am so constituted that I feel in a hurry." A few years later he wrote to another friend, "schools will be found to be the way that God has chosen for the reformation of the world." ⁹⁵

Mexico’s Vasconcelos, we have reason to believe, was incapable of thoughts like these. The goal, he said while minister of education, was "to get back on the track of simple civilized normality." It is true he imagined himself engaged in what he called a holy crusade" and sought "teachers animated with apostolic fervor," but he "was resigned in advance to seeing the results disappear as soon as the political wheel turned."⁹⁶ Mann, it is safe to say, was incapable of thoughts like that.

Mann’s erstwhile Calvinism and his belief that education was to reform the world became civil religion as it emerged in the schools, most of all in Mann’s insistence upon public schools for all people. They were to teach and indoctrinate "those articles in the creed of republicanism, which are accepted by all, believed in by all, and which form the common basis of our political faith." Mann resisted the pressures to make public schools sectarian, even as he embraced their need to educate in the "fundamental principles of Christianity." Just four years before he assumed the secretaryship, Massachusetts had disestablished the Congregational Church. Now, writes his biographer, "Mann was about to preach a new religion and convince his constituency of the need for a new establishment, a nondenominational institution, the public school, with schoolmasters as a new priestly class, patriotic exercises as quasi-religious rituals, and a nonsectarian doctrine stressing morality, literacy and citizenship as a republican creed for all to confess."⁹⁷

To a remarkable degree he succeeded. Public education flourished in the nineteenth century and schools came to dominate small town America’s landscape in the way cathedrals dominated the landscape of European villages.

Along with Mann, Henry Barnard has been regarded as a "founder" of American public education. Barnard served many years as secretary of the Connecticut Board of Education, but his impact on the public school movement was perhaps greatest in the American Journal of Education, which he began in 1855 and edited for twenty-six years. This publication was the only national journal for pedagogy in the nineteenth century.

Like Mann, Barnard was reared on a New England Puritan ethic and trained in law, but then the public school movement "pulsed in his blood as he pictured himself as a missionary ‘captured and enlisted for life.’ " Friends and frequent correspondents, Barnard and Mann referred to public education as the "Ark of God" and the "Ark of the Lord." Education for Barnard was a "holy cause" and a "Christian crusade"; teachers were "the chosen priesthood."⁹⁸

Persons more committed than Mann and Barnard to the civil religion cannot be found, but plenty of persons in the public school movement shared their commitment. What they were involved in was not only a crusade on behalf of the republic; it was also a religious crusade. Combining intellectual instruction with moral admonition -- the mark of the popular McGuffey readers, for example -- was necessary in their view. "These peculiarities of our government," wrote Barnard in 1865, "require that the spirit of the people shall be educated in conformity to them."⁹⁹

This whiggish outlook -- that government has responsibility for the morality of its youth because morality is necessarily reflected in behavior -- was not (and is not) just a partisan difference, although then (as now) the viewpoint was stronger in one political party. The outlook is rather more American than partisan. One’s religious beliefs, everyone agreed, ought to be reflected in one’s citizenship. The civil religion is both parent and child to the public school.

The Judiciary

The court system in Mexico, though it possesses the constitutional authority for doing so, has not used judicial review as a moral-religious platform. Although the amparo is invoked frequently and judges therefore are put in a "final arbiter" position, they have not become involved in great moral issues. They have unsnarled administrative or procedural disputes, but Mexican courts have neither articulated nor sought to articulate "principles" of human governance.

The contrast with the American judicial system is striking. Puritanism, of course, had the capacity for making every issue a moral issue, as Roscoe Pound said, but Puritanism in religiously plural America transmuted moral issues into legal issues as well.’⁰⁰ Courts were asked to "interpret" law; they were charged with identifying not only "duties" but "aspirations"; and the result is a judiciary with a (civil) religious character.¹⁰¹ Here, along with education, is another way Puritanism’s innerworldly asceticism indirectly led to the development of American civil religion.

This judicial religiousness is often noted. U.S. Supreme Court justices, for example, have been called "the nine high priests," and the sacredness imputed to the Constitution and other artifacts of the legal order are often commented upon.¹⁰² No single church evokes the breadth of respect enjoyed by the Supreme Court. The reason, no doubt, is that the Court is a "vital national seminar" in ways and on issues that churches never have been in the United States.¹⁰³

It is perhaps more than coincidence that this expanding judicial role and the religious character accompanying it occurred during the same decades that the "republican religion" established theological hegemony in America. If the argument here is correct, the two developments result from some of the same causes: The American kind of church-state separation meant no church monopolized religious symbols; courts were called upon to articulate ultimate purpose and justice; and judges felt little ambivalence in doing so. Religious balloon strings, being no longer the property of the church only, could be grasped by anybody, including (perhaps especially) judges. However, a debate continues on whether judges "ought" to grab the religious balloon strings. This is part of the issue of ‘judicial activism," on which Alexander Bickel, in The Least Dangerous Branch, was so eloquent a spokesman on behalf of the Court’s "passive virtues." While the alacrity with which courts are prepared to step into political/moral issues can be questioned, the religious character their actions assume when they do step in cannot be.

As in the case with public education, then, the U.S. judicial system (especially at the federal level) has played a religious role. The nation is the chief agent in the drama, and so both education and the courts promulgate a civil, not sectarian, religion. That is to say, it is a religion independent of churches, just as, being little tied to the ruling regime, it is a religion independent of the state. Biased in favor of one or another ecclesiastic outlook at times, this civil religion can also at times be biased on behalf of the political status quo. But it is not just a political or secular ideology; its transcendent references are frequent and clear. Used to justify all manner of errant nonsense, it is nevertheless "essentially prophetic, which is to say that its ideals and aspirations stand in constant judgment over the passing shenanigans of the people, reminding them of the standards by which their current practices and those of their nation are ever being judged and found wanting."¹⁰⁴ It is, in the full Rousseau sense, a "civil religion."

No doubt public education, in its civil religious role, primarily transmits the civil religion -- however imperfectly. And courts, in their civil religious role, primarily apply and modify it -- however imperfectly. But in their civil religious roles both of these institutions derived from a single set of circumstances. First are the ideas that allowed the nation to be understood in a transcendent manner. Second is the way one of those ideas -- the doctrine of religious liberty -- gave rise to religious pluralism at the organizational level. Third was the need nevertheless for common symbols of national purpose, which, because of ecclesiastical pluralism, no church could supply. And fourth was the freedom felt by persons outside of church to use religious symbols. The result was that so-called secular institutions were called upon -- and their personnel were able -- to symbolize the civil religion. The American civil religion is thus a product of certain ideas, but those ideas have been filtered through particular social institutions. Mexico, though it entertained some of the same ideas, failed to create comparable institutions; so it did not develop a civil religion.

Conclusion

History records a number of ways religion and politics have been related, but with the coming of modern nation-states all the traditional ways required modification. Means of accommodating to "secularization" developed, the variety of which is illustrated by Smith in his sample of nations from around the world. It is the "church" that accommodates to the "state," however, at least in power terms; religion declines as power coalesces in the institutions of the state.¹⁰⁵

Rousseau, contemplating this religious decline and concerned about the consequences, coined the term "civil religion" for what he regarded as a viable solution -- an ideology at once transcendent but focused on the nation-state. The handmaiden of neither the church nor the state, this ideology was to have an independent existence. It would provide persons with ultimate meaning by locating them in their society, which in turn would be located in space and history. In such manner, at least in "Christian states," "perpetual conflict of jurisdiction" would be avoided.¹⁰⁶

Civil religions, in Rousseau’s meaning of the term, have not routinely developed, however. On the contrary, they are probably quite rare. Nationalisms abound, of course, but they typically are tied to the ruling regime, reflecting little of a transcendent or "ultimate" quality. And there are modern instances of nations enjoying the legitimacy provided them in a relationship with a single denomination, but they, being dependent on a church, are vulnerable to an inhibiting particularism.¹⁰⁷ The strategy advocated by Rousseau, in other words, has not been commonly adopted.

Interest thus shifts to the conditions that allow and/or encourage an independent civil religion. Durkheim may still be correct in suggesting all societies possess a common conscience," but not all states develop civil religions. In some respects the intrusion of Durkheim-like theorizing has inhibited the analysis of civil religion, even as it undeniably has alerted scholars to civil religious possibilities in the first place. The reason has to do with the nonuniversality of "totemism" or transcendental ideology featuring the state as chief agent. The elusive collective conscience may be a universal phenomenon, but its theological expression is not.

On the basis of the foregoing analysis of Mexico and the United States, perhaps this explanation can be offered: Civil religion depends for its existence upon circumstances allowing persons and institutions to be "religious" and "political" at the same time. The heavenly sphere of theology must blend with the worldly sphere of the,civil. It was one of Max Weber’s great insights that while "every . . . religion must, in similar measure and for similar reasons experience tension with the sphere of political behavior," religions differ in how they deal with this tension.¹⁰⁸ Innerworldly asceticism has an edge, at least when it comes to the development of a civil religion.

In most of Christian history the religious and political spheres have been thought separate. Augustine’s City of God was believed superior to the earthly city, just as on earth a vocation in the church was preferred over ordinary pursuits. Few had a choice in the second of these matters, and nobody had a choice in the first, but the separateness of spheres was unmistakable. Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, put it neatly: "When I am asked: Do you put Church before Country, or Country before Church? I reply: I neither put Church before Country, nor Country before Church. Church and Country are in altogether different spheres . . . The Church is supreme in one order of things; the State is supreme in another order."¹⁰⁹

Such a viewpoint eases the tension between religion and politics, however, only as long as no dispute arises over boundaries. When Archbishop Mora y del Rio responded to the 1917 Mexican Constitution by claiming church immunity from government regulation, he was hardly sidestepping an issue. The Church, he said, is "a perfect society, founded by God himself," a statement calculated to infuriate, not appease, the worldly sphere. ¹¹⁰

What Max Weber saw in the sequence of Protestant developments was a remarkably different way to "ease tension" between religion and politics: "inner-worldly asceticism can compromise with the facts of the political power structures by interpreting them as instruments for the rationalized ethica1 transformation of the world and for the control of sin."¹¹¹ Puritanism in America followed such a course, and the American civil religion was a result. Where medieval Catholicism politicized religion. American Puritanism sacralized politics.

As the foregoing analysis shows, however, the American civil religion resulted not just from the contents of Puritan ideas. In addition, the Puritan method of harmonizing politics and religion led to institutional changes, which in turn facilitated development of a civil religion. I noted several of these institutional changes: (1) Churches became voluntary associations in a strict sense, though lines around religious liberty or "free exercise" were (are) difficult to draw in this "separation" of church and state. (2) Churches engaged in much political activity, though generally in the same manner and with the same weapons as other voluntary associations. (3) Persons therefore found it easy to be simultaneously "religious" and "political." (4) Political institutions became embued with sacred meaning, educational and legal institutions (and their personnel) being the manifestations previously discussed.

In due time the medieval Catholic method failed -- as the case of Mexico illustrates -- but left the vestigial conception of religion and politics as separate spheres. The Puritan solution may have been worse from the viewpoint of a power-seeking church, but at least it left political institutions and their personnel theologically infused. The Catholic method meant that while church contended with state, individuals had to juggle their loyalties to the "separate" organizations. The Puritan solution did away with church-state struggle at the organization level but shifted the struggle to the personality level. Thus "conscience" enters the legal realm in America as it never does in Mexico. The Puritan way of resolving tension between religion and politics left the church, qua church, with no power, therefore, but it meant religious symbols entered politics. The conditions thus existed for a civil religion develop. And develop it did in America, to a degree of independence perhaps not matched by the civil religion of any other society. The importance of those conditions -- and not just the civil religious idea -- is what this comparison has shown.

Notes:

1. Ferdinand Mount, "The Last Hurrah?" Encounter. 48 (March 1977). p. 61.

2. H. Byron Earhart, Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity, 2nd. ed. (Encino, Calif. Dickenson Publishing Co. 1974), pp. 19-20.

3. Ronald C. Wimberley and James A. Christenson, "Civil Religion and Church Religions." Paper presented at the 1976 annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

4. See, for example, the particular data of Herbert McCloskey, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics," American Political Science Review, 58 June.964), pp. 361-382. For a summary statement see Robert E. Stauffer, "Civil Religion, Technocracy, and the Private Sphere: Further Comments of Cultural Integration in Advanced Societies," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 12 (December 1973). pp. 415-425.

5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Schocken Books, 196.), vol. 1, p. 300.

6. Three excellent discussions of this creed are John E. Smylie, "National Ethos and the Church" Theology Today, 20 (October 1963), pp. 313-321; Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper, 1963); and Sidney E. Mead, "The Nation with the Soul of a Church" Church History, 36 (1967). pp. 262-283. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960), focuses on the fourth creedal tenet. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation. The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), focuses on the third.

7. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 1094.

8. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. C. M. Andrews (New York: William H. Wise, 1901 [originally published 1762]), pp. 116; 117-118.

9. Ibid., pp. 123-124.

10. I have benefited from other efforts to classify civil religions, especially John A. Coleman, "Civil Religion," Sociological Analysis, 31 (Summer1970), pp. 67-77, and Martin E. Marty, "Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion," in R. E. Richey and D. G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), although some of their distinctions are not incorporated in my typology.

11. Coleman, "Civil Religion," p. 70.

12. Excelsior, 21 January 1977.

13. Ibid., December 1976.

14. Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.; Prentice-Hall,1964), chap.1.

15. See Irma Wilson, Mexico: A Century of Educational Thought (New York: Hispanic Institute in the U.S., 1941); George F. Kneller, The Education of the Mexican Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.); and Josephina Vasquez DeKnauth, Nacionalismo y Educacion en Mexico [Nationalism and education in Mexico], 2nd ed. (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1975).

16, Samuel Ramos, Profit, of Man and Culture in Mexico, trans. Peter G. Earle (Austin: University of Texas Press,1962), p. 164.

17. Leopoldo Zea in Frederick C. Turner, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1968), p. 93. See also Ramos, Profile, p. 165.

18. Wilson, Mexico, p. 37.

19. Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910 - 1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp.116 and 117.

20. Kneller, The Education, p. 170.

21. Ibid., pp. 46-47.

22. José Vasconcelos, A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography, trans. and abridged W. Rex Crawford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p.156.

23. With bitterness, the contemporary Mexican poet-critic-ambassador, Octavio Paz, points out this move to revere (create?) an indigenous past has led the otherwise magnificent Anthropological Museum in Mexico City to organize its presentation so as to "culminate" with the Aztecs. As Paz points out, however, compared with the Olmecs, Toltecs, or Mayas who preceded them, the Aztecs are not a good model. Octavio Paz, The Other Mexico. Critique of the Pyramid, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1972).

24. Quirk. The Mexican Revolution, p.116.

25. Kneller, The Education, p. 100.

26. Lesley B. Simpson, Many Mexicos, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), p. 70.

27. Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria [Forging the native land] (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1960), p. 111.

28. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, chap.1; Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars: The Story of the Mexican Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970 [originally published 1929]).

29. See also William Madsen, "Christo-Paganism: A Study of Mexican Religious Syncretism," Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1955.

30. Simpson, Many Mexicos, pp. 192-193.

31. William Weber Johnson, Heroic Mexico (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), p. 388.

32. W. H. Callcott, Church and State in Mexico, 1822-1857 (Durham. NC.: Duke University Press, 1926), p. 39.

33. Cited in Brandenburg, The Making, p. 183.

34. See Johnson, Heroic Mexico, p. 53, and Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1836-1875 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. l3.

35. David Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey (Austin: University of Texas, 1974), p.10.

36. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, p. 22.

37. Rafael Segovia, La Politizacion, del Niño Mexicano [The politicization of the Mexican child] (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico. 1975 p.91.

38. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey. pp. 11 - 13.

39. Simpson, Many Mexicos, pp. 243 and 248.

40. Brandenburg, The Making, p.41. A more church-positive Diaz is portrayed in J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America. rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), chap. 15.

41. Brandenburg, The Making, p. 41

42. See Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture, abridged (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965): Robert E. Scott, "Mexico: the Established Revolution," in Lucien W. Pye. and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1965); Turner. The Dynamic; and Peter Ranis, Five Latin American Nations: A Comparative Political Study (New York: Macmillan, 197l).

43. Ranis, Five Latin American Nations, p. 227.

44. Robert E. Scott, "Nation Building in Latin America," in K. W. Deutsch and W. J. Foltz. Nation-Building (New York: Atherton, 1963). p. 81.

45. Eric Wolf, "The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol," Journal of American Folklore, 71 (1958), pp. 34-39.

46. Brenner, Idols Behind Altars, p. 151.

47. Turner, The Dynamic. p. 142.

48. Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez (New York: Random House, 1961).

49. Quoted in Simpson, Many Mexicos, p. 245.

50. Karl M. Schmitt, "Catholic Adjustment to the Secular State: The Case of Mexico,1867 - 1911, Catholic Historical Review, 48, no. 2 (July 1962), pp. 187-188.

51. Quoted in Charles S. MacFarland, Chaos in Mexico (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 125.

52. Quoted in ibid., p. 136.

53. Brandenburg, The Making, p. 32.

54. Mecham, Church and State, chaps. 15-16, is a succinct history of Mexican church-state relations from 1821 to 1965.

55. Richard Roman, "Church-State Relations and the Mexican Constitutional Congress, 1916-1917,"Journal of Church and State 20 (Winter 1978) p. 79. On restrictions of the church see Henry B. Parkes, A History of Mexico, 3^rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1960), p. 362.

56. See Alberto Hernández Medina, "El Financiamento De La Educacion Privada En America Latina’ [Financing Private Education in Latin America] (Mexico, D. F.: Centro de Estudios Educativos, A. A,, 1976). The estimates of what percent of private school students are Catholic were given to me in a private communication from Hernández Medina,

57. See Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, and Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey, for accounts of this event,

58. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey, p. 309.

59. Donald J. Mabry, Mexico’s Accion Nacional (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973), pp. 52-69.

6o. Kneller, The Education, pp. 69 and 55.

61. Parkes, A History, p. 234.

62. Ramos, Profile, p. 85.

63. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, p. 16.

64. Kneller, The Education, pp. 61-62; Patrick Romanell, Making of the Mexican Mind (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), p. 98.

65. Vasconcelos, A Mexican Ulysses, pp. 180, 200, 173.

66. Daniel Cosio Villegas, American Extremes, trans. Américo Paredes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 22.

67. Quoted in Brenner, Idol, Behind Altars, p. 251.

68. Dan Hofstadter, ed., Mexico 1946 -73 (New York: Facts on File, 1974), p. 65; Bertram D. Wolfe, La Fabulosa Vida de Diego Rivera [The Fabulous life of Diego Rivera] (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1972), p. 310.

69. Mario Ezcurdia, Operacion Europa [Operation Europe] (Mexico City, 1974), p. 151.

70. Frederick C. Turner, Catholicism and Political Development in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 35.

71 Jennifer McDowell, "Soviet Civil Ceremonies," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 13 (September 1974), pp. 265- 279; Mary-Barbara Zeldin, "The Religious Nature of Russian Marxism," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 8 (Spring 1969), pp. 100-111.

72. Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Democracy in Mexico, 2nd ed., trans. D. Solti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 20.

73. Johnson, Heroic Mexico, p. 322.

74. Carl E. Schwartz, "Judges in the Shadow: Judicial Independence in the United States and Mexico," California Western International Law Journal, 3 (December 1972), pp. 313 and 332.

75. Ibid., pp. 289-290.

76. Ivan Vallier, Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization in Latin America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 43, states a similar thesis although he refers not to civil religion but to "a durable religio-moral foundation within which political processes can be stabilized."

77. Dorothy Dohen, Nationalism and American Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967); Mark DeWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

78. Elwyn A. Smith, The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 170-171.

79. Cushing Strout, The New Heaven and the New Earth. Political Religion in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 343. See also Ahlstrom,. A Religious History, pp. 552-564.

80. Simpson, Many Mexicos, Jacque Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe. The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813, trans. Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

81. Mead, The Lively Experiment, p. 3.

82. Novak, Choosing Our King, p. 107.

83. Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America." Daedalus (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

84. Vallier, Catholicism, p. 150

85. Quoted in MacFarland, Chaos in Mexico, p. 253.

86. See Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

87. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 364.

88. See Jacob Agus, "Jerusalem in America," in E. A. Smith, ed., The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971); Thomas T. McAvoy, "American Cultural Impacts on Catholicism," in Smith, The Religion; Thomas F. O’Dea. "American Catholics and International Life," Social Order. 10 (June 1960), pp. 243-265; and especially Dohen, Nationalism, for details.

89. Quoted in Dohen,. Nationalism, p.11

90. Quoted in Milton Powell, ed. The Voluntary Church (New York; Macmillan, 1967), p. 124.

91. Quoted in ibid., p. 64.

92. Bellah, "Civil Religion."

93. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), p. 99.

94. Robert L. Church and Michael W. Sedlak, Education in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 90.

95. Quoted in Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 403 and 441.

96. Vasconcelos. A Mexican Ulysses, p. 173.

97. Messerli, Horace Mann, p. 253.

98. Quoted in Vincent P. Lannie, ed., Henry Barnard: American Educator (New York: Teachers College Press, 1974), p. 13.

99. Quoted in ibid., p. 156.

100. Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of the Common Law (Francestown, N.H.; Marshall Jones, 1921), p.43.

101. These terms are from Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964).

102. Max Lerner, "The Constitution and the Court as Symbols," Yale Law Journal, 46 (1937), pp. 1290-1319; Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), pp. 29-33.

103. Eugene V. Rostow, "The Democratic Character of Judicial Review," Harvard Law Review, 66(1952), p.208.

104. Mead, "The Nation," p. 275.

105. Donald E. Smith, Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 117; Salo W. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion (New York: Meridian, 1960), p. 7.

106. Rousseau, Social Contract. p. 118.

107. The Afrikaners in South Africa are a good example. See Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

108. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press. 1963), p. 223.

109. Quoted in Dohen, Nationalism, p. 110.

110. Quoted in Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, p. 100.

111. Weber, The Sociology, p. 226.

Sidney Mead has emphasized the uniqueness of the American solution to the religiopolitical question. In so doing he has contrasted America to the long preceding history of "Christendom." The American republic has not had a state church in part because it has not had a state or church of traditional type. The "religion of the republic" is to be identified with neither stale nor church in their conventional form.’ Phillip Hammond in Chapter 3 and John Coleman elsewhere argue American civil religion is distinct from other forms of civil religion in that it is differentiated from both church and state.² Indeed, Hammond wonders whether the term "civil religion" ought not to be restricted to Situations typo-logically similar to the American case, which would make the term rather restrictive and perhaps therefore stronger in comparative perspective. Both Coleman and Hammond offer suggestions for a typology of possible civil religions. James Wolfe has developed a typology of civil religions linked to my typology of the stages of religious evolution.³ This chapter builds on these previous efforts to develop a comparative perspective. Not only are comparisons interesting in themselves; they often reveal new dimensions to the cases being compared. I hope some refractory features of the American case may be illuminated by a comparative context.

It has seemed useful, following Wolfe, to consider civil religions as varying with the stage of religious evolution. In this regard the contrast between Japan and the United States may be especially instructive since in Japan in the recent past and to a certain extent even today there seems to have survived a civil religion of archaic type (involving a fusion of divinity, society, and the individual), whereas the United States has a civil religion of distinctly modern type (with a high degree of differentiation between divinity, society, and the individual).⁴

In setting up my problem this way I am tentatively rejecting Hammond’s restrictive use of "civil religion." There is warrant for this broader usage in the origin of the term itself, in that "civil religion" is pretty clearly an outgrowth of the term "civil theology" that Augustine used to characterize the religion of pre-Christian Rome.⁵ That religion was, in terms of my typology, distinctly archaic. Whether the term may be usefully generalized beyond these two types of cases remains to be seen. Now I assert every society must link religion and politics somehow, though that assertion itself, I have learned, is somewhat tendentious.

One way to contrast archaic and modern society, or rather the modern West and all traditional societies, archaic or historic, is to point out, as Louis Dumont following Alexis de Tocqueville has been doing in recent years, that traditional societies are characterized by hierarchy whereas modern societies are characterized by equality -- at least in ideal.⁶ This contrast is rooted not just in political ideology but in fundamental conceptions of the nature of reality. It will therefore affect the nature of civil religion in the contrasting cases. Indeed, hierarchy or equality may be at the core of the respective civil religions. I can illustrate the difference by quoting from two fundamental documents from Japanese and American civil religion.

The first is article three of Shõtoku Taishi’s seventeen-article "constitution" of AD. 604 (though it may be later). This is one of the earliest conscious documents of what we might call Japanese civil religion. It is more a declaration of principles than what we would normally consider a constitution and in this regard is comparable to the American document I will turn to shortly.

In contrast consider a long sentence from the charter document of American civil religion:

It is clear in the Japanese case that all men are not created equal. Society is embedded in the natural cosmos. Just as heaven is naturally above the earth so are superiors naturally above inferiors. Any attempt to tamper with this natural hierarchy can only produce chaos and ruin. The ideas expressed in article three are clearly Confucian, but this ideology blended easily with Shintõ mythology in terms of which the Japanese emperor is descended from the sun goddess and takes his preeminence on earth just as she takes hers among the gods. Hierarchy is rooted in genealogy, which goes back to the so-called age of the gods.

Article two of the "constitution" of 604 brings in still another element of legitimation. It begins "Sincerely reverence the three treasures" and goes on to speak of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Here the emperor as protector of the sangha is the recipient of the divine protection of the Buddha and the dharma. But Buddhism, with its doctrine of individual enlightenment and its recurrent teaching that a monk should not bow down before a king, is only ambiguously supportive of political hierarchy. Even Confucianism, with its doctrine that the lowliest peasant could become, through virtue, a sage, has a nonhierarchical side, one that would be realized much later in the Tokugawa period when someone like Ishida Baigan could proclaim, "Every man is a small heaven and earth" and thus a focus of individuality and dignity.⁸

It is true that in Japan monks usually did bow down before political authority and sages from the common people were rare indeed. But one could give examples to show that nonhierarchical tendencies were never entirely absent. There are clearly egalitarian elements even in the overwhelmingly hierarchical context of Japanese culture and civil religion.

Conversely, there are hierarchical elements in the American symbolism. Human equality is asserted not only as self-evident but as the result of the action of a divine creator. Further, the declaration has spoken in its opening lines of ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God." There is thus a cosmic, divine hierarchy in which human values, including equality, make sense and there is a clear notion that God is above and superior to men just as the laws of nature transcend and take priority over the laws of political society.

If the Japanese case has egalitarian components, even if relatively minor ones, and the American case has hierarchical components, even if largely confined to the background, we might wish to consider that the contrast hierarchy/equality is a polarity or a continuum rather than an absolute antinomy.

It is easy for us as Americans and for modern Japanese influenced by Western ideologies to view the hierarchical aspect of Japanese ideology and civil religion as sheer defensive rationalization for political rule. There is much to support such a view. For one thing Japanese civil religion seems to be subject to conscious manipulation at least as early as the sixth or seventh centuries. The degree of self-consciousness in the process does not fit well with the picture of traditional Gemeinschaft society, changing by slow unconscious accretion. Neither does it fit well with the claims of modern spokesmen for State Shintõ that it has existed "for ages eternal" and has been "true at all times and in all places." Conscious rational manipulation seems more "modern" than "traditional." And yet conscious rational manipulation characterizes Japanese civil religion at crucial turning points throughout its history.

Not only do we find in the seventh century the conscious Importation of the continental religious ideologies of Confucianism and Buddhism -- mainly to bolster the position of the imperial lineage -- we find considerable evidence of conscious manipulation of Shintõ mythology. Indeed, the significance of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, and her shrine at Ise may have been sharply upgraded at this period to strengthen the position of the imperial lineage relative to other aristocratic lineages claiming divine descent. This flurry of conscious manipulation continues in the eighth century with the codification of the Shintõ myths in the Kojiki and the Nihongi and with the further spelling out of the implications of Confucianism and Buddhism for the Japanese context.

Another period of conscious concern for matters of civil religion extends from the later Sengoku period in the sixteenth century to the early Tokugawa period in the seventeenth century. Here particularly the development of an ideology of public Confucianism helped to bureaucratize the samurai -- turn them from private military henchmen into public servants -- and to bring the common people actively into the Tokugawa consensus through the idea of benevolent rule (jinsei). The rulers, who, as in Shõtoku’s constitution, represent heaven, are to provide a nurturant and paternal regime under which the people can flourish. In addition, thinkers associated with the Tokugawa House refurbished the somewhat tarnished image of the imperial line and derived the legitimacy of the Tokugawa regime from an emperor who was himself an embodiment of heaven and even, in Shintõ terms, a divine king. Thus much that we attribute to the Meiji period at the end of the nineteenth century was prefigured two and a half centuries earlier.

But clearly the prime example of conscious manipulation is modern Japanese civil religion, composed of the modern emperor system and its pervasive ideological influence, of which state Shintõ was only a part. Winston Davis, one of the chief American students of this development, has recently given a condensed account:

This description is suggestive in the vehemence of its hostility. In the face of such a powerful attack from the point of view of modern egalitarian ideology it is a thankless task to defend the hierarchical aspect of Japanese civil religion, and I will not attempt to do so. Nonetheless, since modern ideology obscures many of the meanings of the system it criticizes, I shall reiterate some of those meanings. Hierarchy in Japan as elsewhere is linked to an ethical system and a set of values. Clearly, from the Confucian point of view, which has been most explicit about these matters, the legitimacy of rule is contingent upon the embodiment of values. Rulers who are not benevolent and righteous do not deserve to rule, Only virtuous rulers deserve respect. Though in Japan the enormous importance of lineage muted this ethical conception of politics, it did not entirely destroy it. Not only did ethical conceptions moderate the behavior of rulers, but, very explicitly in the Tokugawa period, complaints from commoners and even revolts were justified in the name of ethical failure of those above -- their lack of "benevolent rule." Finally, as I have already noted, the assertion of values left open the possibility that those of any class or status might claim to embody them. The rise of new popular religions in the nineteenth century and again after 1945 gave practical expression to that possibility.

I have shown that the strong assertion of individual equality in America took place against the background of religious hierarchical ideas -- the Christian conception of divine/human relations -- and classical philosophy, as in the idea of natural law, also ultimately hierarchical. Both Christianity and classical philosophy had clear sets of values around which society could agree as well as a principle of equality in that anyone, however humble, who embodied those values was worthy of dignity and respect.

But the Declaration of Independence does not spell out those ethical values very clearly. What is essential is the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the necessity of government by the consent of the governed. "Liberty" is as close as we get to an ethical norm, and that term is deeply ambiguous, depending on whether it is, in John Winthrop’s words, freedom to do the just and the good (Christian freedom) or freedom to do what you list (the freedom of natural man).¹⁰ While American civil religion remained extremely vague with respect to particular values and virtues, the public theology that fleshed it out and made it convincing to ordinary people used it with more explicitly Christian, particularly Protestant, values. But even here the great stress of the Protestant clergy on the providential, indeed millennial, meaning of the American republic was on the triumph of "civil and religious liberty," with all the usual ambiguity about that central term.

Sydney V. James has indicated one important way traditional conceptions of virtue could be reconciled with the new civil religion. ¹¹ He speaks of a shift from organicist to individualist conceptions of religious unity. In the organicist view (almost inevitably traditional and hierarchical) all must agree on common conceptions of ultimate truth and good. But in the individualist conception religion is seen as contributing to social order not through the assertion of truths all must believe but, with acceptable theological variations among all the religious groups, through the inculcation of virtues in individuals that would make them good citizens. Certain common beliefs remain -- such as belief in God. Sidney Mead even speaks of "some conceptions of the nature of man and his relation to the cosmos" as characterizing the "cosmopolitan, universal theology of the republic"¹² But if so, they remain sufficiently abstract and general that plenty of room is left for the churches as schools of virtue for the creation of democratic citizens -- as Tocqueville saw so clearly.

The egalitarian potentialities we saw as implicit and incipient in Japanese religion became explicit and fulfilled in modern Christianity -- without, however, breaking the hierarchical religious mold and its assumption that values have an objective existence in the world. Modern egalitarianism owes at least as much to modern secular philosophy as it does to Christianity. But when we look at the conceptual basis of modern secular individualism and egalitarianism, we find the hierarchical mold and with it any objective set of beliefs and values just about gone.

The degree to which modern philosophy represents a radical break with all traditional ideas is only gradually becoming clear, in part because the early modern philosophers were concerned to disguise the full implications of their teachings. John Locke in particular was extremely devious, and the theoretical incoherence of his Second Treatise on Government, so often noted, is produced in part by his attempt to obscure the Hobbesian radicalism of his thought with a cloak of references to the Bible and the Anglican theorist Hooker. For us as Americans, Locke’s ambiguity may have been fortunate, for it allowed biblical Christianity and classical republicanism to coexist with what we might call radical liberalism, that is, secular atomistic individualism.

But for a variety of reasons the cloak has been more and more torn away in recent American history, leaving in its stead a radical secular individualism whose implications for social coherence are ominous indeed. Beneath the benign visage of John Locke the harsher face of Thomas Hobbes has grown ever clearer. And it is Hobbes’s choice between the war of all against all and the absolute rule of the Leviathan state that begins to haunt us in the closing years of the twentieth century.

It has recently been argued that Locke’s Second Treatise was itself an effort to provide a myth of modern society, indeed, a civil theology. If so, in its stark uncloaked form it is a strange civil theology indeed. Its first tenet is that individuals are equal not by dint of divine creation but because of their sheer biological similarity. Locke does not reiterate but perhaps implies Hobbes’s argument for equality because each of us is capable, as a biological entity, of killing any other under the right circumstances. The primary relation is not that between individuals but between the individual and nature. Economics is prior to society. Our appropriation of property is logically prior to our entry into political society, and indeed, the purpose of our entering into political society is "the protection of our property." Thus society is not an organic unity embedded in a divine or divinely created cosmos but rather a conscious creation of adult individuals designed for the rational end of the mutual protection of their interests. It is significant that the words "moral" and "morality" do not appear in the entire Second Treatise. Hobbes had already taught us there is no such thing as the good. "Good" is only a word individuals use to designate what they desire. Desires are as various as individuals. Thus it is possible to create a society based on the interests of individuals but not on common values or ethical norms, for there are none.

The Lockean doctrine of toleration that made such sense in eighteenth-century America, with its plethora of churches and sects, could actually operate to undermine any sense of common values or public morality, hardly a consequence anticipated by the Christians who embraced it. If matters of ultimate religious and moral truth are declared to be essentially private -- of concern only to individuals and not to society at large -- then their claim of public truth is sharply undermined. There is little doubt the modern philosophers considered the teachings of the religious bodies untrue.

Of course civil religion and, even more, public theology -- the noncoercive religious truths addressed by particular confessions to the nation at large or on occasion articulated by a great political leader such as Abraham Lincoln -- for a long time postponed the implication of modern philosophy that religious teachings are publicly untrue. But the rise of what Peter Berger calls the "cognitive elite" in the twentieth century, particularly in the universities and the mass media, has created a powerful group asserting the radical beliefs of modern philosophical liberalism. Indeed, through the pressure of such groups as the American Civil Liberty Union, philosophical liberalism is rapidly becoming our orthodox civil religion, if I may indulge in a contradiction in terms, and traditional American views of the relation of religion and society are declared unconstitutional. The implication of philosophical liberalism is that all matters of religious and moral belief are purely private. Any attempt to articulate common beliefs and practices is an infringement on individual freedom.

The result is we have individuals in society linked not by common beliefs and morals but only, if at all, through common interests. But whereas Locke could speak of the natural harmony of interests, that harmony has become dubious indeed today. Where common values and common religious beliefs have been banished and the natural harmony of interests has proven illusory, only naked interest is left and a society where there are great disparities of wealth and power. The great philosophy of liberation, classical liberalism, turns out to be a justification of the rule of the stronger. The ultimate individual right is the right to commit suicide. And the alternatives seem to be, as I have said already, anarchic social war or authoritarian rule.

But in spite of the cognitive elite, philosophical liberalism has not completely destroyed biblical religion as public theology or republicanism as the ideology of the common good and the public interest. It has thus not wholly vitiated the traditional civil religion. Indeed, in the face of recent crises rearticulation of our traditional views has taken place. In response to the grave challenge of Watergate to the survival of our constitutional regime we reasserted the rule of law. But if law is, as the liberal utilitarians and positivists have told us, only the expression of the interests of individuals and groups, how could it prove superior to the machinations of Watergate? If law is only the rule of the stronger, how can it check the executive power? If the "rule of law" in the context of Watergate is to have any meaning, it is law as grounded in morality and morality as grounded in ultimate reality. It is the "higher law" of the eighteenth century, the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to which we have to return.

Whatever we may think of the political consequences, it was probably not accidental that the first man to be elected president after Watergate was also the first in a long time to use the language of evangelical Christianity. Outside the cognitive elite beliefs in the objectivity of religion and morality are widespread. Tocqueville said religion is the first of our political institutions and our freedom depends on it, and perhaps that is still true. It is doubtful that any society, certainly any free society, could long persist on the basis of secular liberalism alone.

I have suggested that hierarchy and equality are interrelated poles rather than absolute opposites and their relation to freedom is dialectical and not linear. Too exclusive an emphasis on hierarchy results in the authoritarianism Japanese society in most of its history displays. But we would not understand the dynamism and vitality of Japanese society if we did not see that within the ideology justifying hierarchy there has been an ethic that encouraged a kind of moral heroism among the common people. Japanese society has seldom been a system of amoral exploitation, and individual Japanese have not been reduced to the fearful and spiritless automatons despotism classically creates. Indeed, the presence of public spirit and concern for the common good in Japan rivals the public consciousness of the great republics. Without facing this paradox Japan remains an enigma. And only in this context can we see the seriousness of the vacuum of moral values in Japan today.

But America, the very homeland of political freedom, has pushed egalitarian individualism almost to the point of no return. As Tocqueville pointed out so clearly, emphasis on individual interest with no ethical or moral restraint so each is "shut up in the solitude of his own heart"¹³ is the road to a new despotism, perhaps far harsher than traditional authoritarianism.¹³

If this analysis is correct, the subject of civil religion and its environing climate of religious and moral belief is not something of mere antiquarian interest, a concern for a past now irrevocably lost. On the contrary, the health of our civil religion may be a subject intimately linked to the survival of our republic.

Notes

1. Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church, (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), esp. chap. 4.

2. John A. Coleman, "Civil Religion," Sociological Analysis. 31 (Summer 1970), pp. 67-77.

3. James Wolfe, "The Kennedy Myth: American Civil Religion in the Sixties," Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif., 1975.

4. For a fuller development of this terminology see Robert N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution," in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 20-50.

5. Augustine, City of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), book VI, chap. 5, pp. 234-236.

6. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

7. Ryusaku Tsunoda, William Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, Sources of the Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press. 1958), p. 50.

8. Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (New York: Free Press, 1957). chap. 6.

9. Winston Bradley Davis, Toward Modernity. A Developmental Typology of Popular Religious Affiliations in Japan, East Asia Papers Series (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 68-70.

10. Winthrop in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). pp. 138-139.

11. Sidney V. James, personal communication.

12. Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 69.

13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1967). vol. 2 pt. 2. chap.2. p. 508.

Civil Religion, Term and Concept

In 1967 I published an essay I have never been allowed to forget.¹ In it I suggested there is such a thing as civil religion in America. My suggestion has roused passionate opposition as well as widespread acceptance. The opposition to the idea has shown little unity. Some of my opponents say there is no such thing; I have invented something that does not exist. Some say there is such a thing but there ought not to be. Some say there is such a thing but it should be called by another name, "public piety," for example, rather than civil religion. Unfortunately for me, my supporters are in even greater disarray. The term "civil religion" has spread far beyond any coherent concept thereof, or at least beyond anything I ever meant by the term. Perhaps the commonest reaction is a puzzled, "Yes, there seems to be something there, but what exactly is it?" Among the professional specialists in American studies there is another reaction: "We knew it all the time. What Bellah says is nothing new." And then there is perhaps a vague reference to Tocqueville. But, with one or two exceptions, little in the way of conceptual clarity has been forth-coming from the specialists. I would like to try once again to clarify this most troublesome problem. The burden of what I want to say is that the confusion about civil religion is rooted in a confusion about the nature of the American republic and that genuinely to clarify the nature of American civil religion would involve a reform of the American republic.

I must admit I am partly to blame for the confusion by my choice of the term "civil religion," which turned out to be far more tendentious and provocative than I at first realized. I think now the choice of the term was fortunate and the controversies it generated are fruitful. More neutral terms such as "political religion" or "religion of the republic" or "public piety" would not have churned up the profound empirical ambiguities "civil religion," with its two thousand years of historical resonance, inevitably did.

On the face of it, what would be more natural than to speak about civil religion, a subject that has preoccupied theorists of republican government from Plato to Rousseau? The founders of this republic had read most of those theorists and were concerned with the problem, even though they did not use the term.² The difficult arises because for most of those two thousand years there has been a profound antipathy, indeed an utter incompatibility, between civil religion and Christianity. There is even a question, which I cannot explore here, whether there has not been a historic antipathy between republican government and Christianity. Most Christian political theorists down through the ages have considered monarchy the best form of government (Christian religious symbolism would seem to be much more monarchical than republican) and the great republican theorists -- Machiavelli, Rousseau, even Tocqueville -- have wondered whether Christianity can ever create good citizens.³ Augustine in the opening books of the City of God denounced Roman "civil theology" as the worship of false gods and the Roman Republic as based on false ideals and therefore as finally no commonwealth at all. Rousseau, in arguing for the necessity in a republic of a civil religion other than Christianity, wrote, "Christianity as a religion is entirely spiritual, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christian is not of this world . . . . imagine your Christian republic face to face with Sparta or Rome: the pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed. . . . But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes."⁴ And yet at the beginning of our history we were that mutually exclusive thing, a Christian Republic. (Samuel Adams even called us a Christian Sparta.) Or were we? Christianity was never our state religion, nor did we have in Rousseau’s strict sense a civil religion, a simple set of religious dogmas to which every citizen must subscribe on pain of exile. What did we have? What do we have now? That indeed is the question.

Religion and Politics

Tension between church and state lies deep in Christian history. The idea of a nonreligious state is very modern and very doubtful. Through most of Western history some form of Christianity has been the established religion and has provided "religious legitimation" to the state. But under that simple formula lie faction, intrigue, anguish, tension, and, on occasion, massacre, rebellion, and religious war. Through much of history the state has dominated a restless church, exploited it, but never destroyed its refusal of final allegiance. On occasion the church has mastered the state, used it for its own ends, and temporalized its spiritual loyalties into a kind of religious nationalism. In all this Christianity is no different from other religions I have characterized as being at the historic stage.⁵ Even religions that seem to be much more intrinsically political, such as Islam or Confucianism, have for most of their histories been involved in uneasy and unhappy alliances with state power. Relative to the first four caliphs all Muslim rulers have been viewed as at least faintly illegitimate by the religious community. Relative to the ancient sage kings all the Chinese emperors have lacked fundamental legitimacy in the eyes of the Confucian scholars.

The very spirituality and otherworldliness of Christianity has provided a certain avenue for reducing the tension not always open to other historic religions: the differentiation of functions, the division of spheres. Yet no solution has ever dissolved the underlying tensions described by Augustine and Rousseau. The tendency has been for every solution to break down into religion as the servant of the state or the state as the servant of religion.

Yet there have been great periodic yearnings in Western history to overcome the split, to create a society that would indeed be a Christian republic, where there would be no split in the soul between Christian and citizen. Savonarola had such a dream in fifteenth-century Florence, as did the Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Germany and some of the sectarians during the civil war in seventeenth-century England. Most of these experiments were highly unstable and illustrated rather than refuted Rousseau’s argument for mutual exclusiveness. Yet John Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva created a city that was Christian and republican in an organic way that had few precedents (and that stood curiously behind Rousseau’s own republican theorizing). Church and state were not fused; indeed, formal distinctions were sharply maintained. Yet Christian and citizen were finally two ways of saying the same thing. Even more to the point, the New England colonies in the seventeenth century were Christian republics in a comparable sense. In Massachusetts, for example, only Christians could be citizens, though the church did not control the state and both church and state were governed by their members. Even though the reality of this experiment had evaporated by the early eighteenth century, the memory was still strong in the minds of the founders of the republic.

The civil theology of the youthful Hegel in Germany during the decades after the French Revolution shows the yearning for the union of Christian and citizen was still vigorous at the end of the eighteenth century.⁶ These youthful speculations stand behind Hegel’s mature political theory as well as, curiously, behind the thought of Marx about man and citizen.

Could there be a sense in which the American republic, which has neither an established church nor a classic civil religion, is, after all, a Christian republic, or should I say a biblical republic, in which biblical religion is indeed the civil religion? Is that what it means to say we are "a nation with the soul of a church"?⁷ The answer, as before, is yes and no. The American solution to the problem of church and state is unprecedented, unique, and confused. I shall turn from external speculation and from the introduction of tendentious terms like "civil religion" to the way the tradition has understood itself.

The Work of the Founders

Today the almost Pavlovian response applied to all problems in this area is "the separation of church and state." That phrase, especially when it is intensified with the unfortunate Jeffersonian image of the "wall of separation," is pernicious precisely to the degree it seems to offer a clear solution when in fact it creates more difficulties than it eliminates. The first thing to remember is that the phrase "separation of church and state" has no constitutional standing. The first clause of the first amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." That clause has a long history of interpretation that I shall not review here, but it certainly does not mean and has never meant the American state has no interest in or concern for religion, or churches either, for that matter, and it certainly does not me and politics have nothing to do with each other.⁸ To the extent the "wall of separation" image leads to those conclusions it distorts the entire history of the American understanding of religion and leads to such absurd conclusions as that religious congregations should have no tax exemption and legislative bodies should not be opened with prayer. To attribute such intentions to the founders of the republic is not only a historical error but a political error about the nature of the republic. Inspection of the second clause of the first amendment, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," should begin to dispel the distortions of the extreme separationist position.

The Constitution, while prohibiting a religious establishment, protects the free exercise of religion. It is this second clause to which that other common phrase, "religious freedom," refers, a phrase that has often been used to sum up the American teaching about religion. This phrase too has a significant Jeffersonian source, for Jefferson pointed to his authorship of a bill for "establishing religious freedom" in Virginia as one of the three things he most wanted to be remembered for. The phrase "establishing religious freedom," which is not constitutional but which explicates the free exercise clause, suggests the positive institutionalization in this area. Indeed, religious freedom or free exercise is the controlling idea. The prohibition of the establishment of a particular religion is required because it would be an infringement on religious freedom. Even so, today it is not uncommon for the religious freedom concept to be swallowed up in the separation concept because freedom here as elsewhere is interpreted in purely negative terms, as the liberal philosophical tradition tends to treat it. Religious freedom becomes then merely the right to worship any God you please or none at all, with the implication that religion is a purely private matter of no interest or concern to political society. I will argue that "establishing religious freedom" means something much more than that, indeed, that it has a powerful positive political significance. But the difficulty of interpretation is not entirely in the mind of the analyst. It is not just a question of reading late twentieth-century ideas about religion into the minds of the founders, though there is much of that. The difficulty is rooted in certain fundamental unclarities about the American political experience and the nature of the American regime, unclarities that go back to the formative period of the republic.

The basic unclarity rests on whether we are a republic in recognizable relation to the republics of classical and modern times and dependent on that inner spirit of republican character and mores that makes for republican citizenship or whether we are a liberal constitutional regime governed through artificial contrivance and the balancing of conflicting interests. What we wanted was to have our cake and eat it too, to retain the rhetoric and spirit of a republic in the political structure of a liberal constitutional state. In so doing we blurred every essential political consideration, including the place of religion in our public life. Indeed, we artfully used religion as a way of evading the incompatibilities in our political life. For as long as the religious bodies remained vital and central in our public life, the evasion was (at least partially) successful. Today, when religion, more even than our other institutions, is uncertain about itself, the evasion is no longer tenable. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The great political philosophers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founders of the republic) all believed a political regime is an expression of the total way of life of a people, its economics, its customs, its religion. The way of life correlates with the type of person the society produces and the political capacities that inhere in that person. As Montesquieu said a despotic society will have despotic customs -- the arbitrary use of power, dependence of inferiors on superiors, slavery -- that will produce a person primarily motivated by fear, just the right kind of subject for a despotic polity. But a republic will have republican customs -- public participation in the exercise of power, the political equality of the citizens, a wide distribution of small and medium property with few very rich or very poor – customs that will lead to a public spiritedness, a willingness of the citizen to sacrifice his own interests for the common good, that is, to a citizen motivated by republican virtue. It would be as absurd to expect a people long inured to despotism to create a successful republic as for a republican people to tolerate a despotic regime. And yet these patterns are not fixed. There is indeed constant flux and a tendency toward degeneration -- good customs become corrupted and republican regimes become despotic. Since republics go against gravity, so to speak, it is essential if a republic is to survive that it concern itself actively with the nurturing of its citizens, that it root out corruption and encourage virtue. The republican state therefore has an ethical, educational, even spiritual role, and it will survive only as long as it reproduces republican customs and republican citizens.⁹

But the much newer form of political organization, which I am calling liberal constitutionalism though it grew in the very seedbeds of modern republicanism, developed a markedly different idea of political life, partly in response to a newly emerging economic order. Though formulated by some of the toughest minds in the history of modern philosophy -- Hobbes, Locke, Flume, and Adam Smith -- this tradition gave rise to what would appear to be the most wildly utopian idea in the history of political thought, namely, that a good society can result from the actions of citizens motivated by self-interest alone when those actions are organized through the proper mechanisms. A caretaker state, with proper legal restraints so that it does not interfere with the freedom of the citizens, needs to do little more than maintain public order and allow the economic market mechanisms and the free market in ideas to produce wealth and wisdom.

Not only are these political ideas, republicanism and liberalism, different; they are profoundly antithetical. Exclusive concern for se1f-interest is the very definition of the corruption of republican virtue. The tendency to emphasize the private, particularly the economic side of life in the liberal state, undermines the public participation essential to a republic. The wealth the liberal society generates is fatal to the basic political equality of a republic. And yet the American regime from the beginning has been a mixture of the republican and the liberal regimes and has never been a pure type of either. The republican moment emerged first, however, out of the revolutionary struggle and crystalized in a document the Declaration of Independence. The liberal moment emerged second, during the complex working out of interests in the new nation, and crystalized in the Constitution. Even that division is too simple, for there are liberal elements in the Declaration of Independence and republican elements in the Constitution, but it does suggest from the very beginning the balance has never been very easy or very even. The Declaration of Independence has several central references to God and the Constitution has none at all. It is time, then, to turn to religion as a means of mediating the tensions within the American regime.

Religion in the Early Republic

In the early republic religion had two vital locations: in the superstructure and in the infrastructure of the new political regime. It is to the superstructural location of religion that the Declaration of Independence points. By superstructural I mean a locus of sovereignty taken to be above the sovereignty of the state. Perhaps the most striking recognition of this superordinate sovereignty comes from the hand of Madison in 1785 during the debate on the bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia: "It such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign." Here Madison confines himself to the superordinate sovereignty of God over the individual citizen, which precedes the sovereignty of political society over him.

The Declaration of Independence points to the sovereignty of God over the collective political society itself when it refers in its opening lines to "the laws of nature and of nature’s God" that stand above and judge the laws of men. It is often asserted that the God of nature is specifically not the God of the Bible. That raises problems of the relation of natural religion to biblical religion in eighteenth-century thought that I do not want to get into here, but Jefferson goes on to say, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it." We have here a distinctly biblical God who is much more than a first principle of nature, who creates individual human beings and endows them with equality and fundamental rights.

It is significant that the reference to a suprapolitical sovereignty, to a God who stands above the nation and whose ends are standards by which to judge the nation and indeed only in terms of which the nation’s existence is justified, becomes a permanent feature of American political life ever after. Washington a Jefferson reiterate, though they do not move much beyond, the language of the Declaration of Independence in their most solemn public addresses, such as their inaugural addresses or Washington’s Farewell Address. The existence of this highest level religious symbolism in the political life of the republic justifies the assertion that there is a civil religion in America. Having said that, I must also say American civil religion is formal and in a sense marginal, though very securely institutionalized. It is formal in the scarcity and abstraction of its tenets, though in this it is very close to Rousseau’s civil religion. It is marginal in that it has no official support in the legal and constitutional order. It is in this connection that I must again point out the absence of any reference to God, and thus of any civil religion, in the Constitution of the United States, Belief in the tenets of the civil religion are legally incumbent on no one and there are no official interpreters of civil theology. Indeed, because of the formality I have just pointed out, there was very little civil theology to interpret, although we did produce at a critical juncture in our history at least one great civil theologian, Abraham Lincoln.

The marginality of the American civil religion is closely connected with the liberal side of our heritage and its most important expression, the Constitution. This side has led many to deny there is a civil religion or there ought to be in America. And indeed, from the point of view of the liberal political idea there need not and perhaps ought not to be. The state is a purely neutral legal mechanism without purposes or values. Its sole function is to protect the rights of individuals, that is, to protect freedom. And yet freedom, which would seem to be an irreducible implication of liberalism on etymological grounds alone, no matter how negatively and individualistically defined, does imply a purpose and a value. Since I believe a pure liberalism is a reductio ad absurdum and a sociological impossibility, I would locate here at least one of the reasons a pure liberal state has never existed and why in America the rhetoric and to some extent the substance of republicanism has always existed in uneasy tandem with liberalism.

Precisely from the point of view of republicanism civil religion is indispensable. A republic as an active political community of participating citizens must have a purpose and a set of values. Freedom in the republican tradition is a positive value that asserts the worth and dignity of political equality and popular government. A republic must attempt to be ethical in a positive sense and to elicit the ethical commitment of its citizens. For this reason it inevitably pushes toward the symbolization of an ultimate order of existence in which republican values and virtues make sense. Such symbolization may be nothing more than the worship of the republic itself as the highest good, or it may be, as in the American case, the worship of a higher reality that upholds the standards the republic attempts to embody.

Yet the religious needs of a genuine republic would hardly be met by the formal and marginal civil religion that has been institutionalized in the American republic. The religious superstructure of the American republic has been provided only partially by the civil religion. It has been provided mainly by the religious community entirely outside any formal political structures. Here the genius and uniqueness of the American solution is to be found. At the 1976 Democratic convention Barbara Jordan called for the creation of a national community that would be ethical and even spiritual in content. This is what Talcott Parsons calls the "societal community." It is what might be called in Europe the nation as opposed to the state. It is in a sense prepolitical, but without it the state would be little more than a mechanism of coercion.

The first creation of a national community in America it is now widely recognized, preceded the revolution by a generation or two. It was the result of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, a wave of religious revivalism that swept across the colonies and first gave them a sense of general solidarity. As the work of Professor Nathan Hatch has shown, this religious solidarity was gradually given a more political interpretation from within the religious community in the 750s and 1760s with the emergence of what he has called "civil millennialism," namely, the providential religious meaning of the American colonies in world history.¹⁰ It is the national community with its religious inspiration that made the American Revolution and created the new nation. It is the national community that was, in my sense of the term, the real republic, not the liberal constitutional regime that emerged in 1789.

The liberal regime never repudiated the civil religion that was already inherent in the Declaration of Independence and indeed kept it alive in our political life even though the Constitution was silent about it. From the point of view of the legal regime, however, any further elaboration of religious symbolism beyond that of the formal and marginal civil religion was purely private. From the point of view of the national community, still largely religious in its self-consciousness, such elaboration was public even though lacking in any legal status. Here we can speak of public theology, as Martin Marty has called it, in distinction to civil religion. The civil millennialism of the revolutionary period was such a public theology and we have never lacked one since.

As a number of scholars have begun to recognize, the problems of creating a national community in America did not decrease with the establishment of the constitutional regime but in a sense became more severe. With the formation of the new nation the centrifugal forces that were restrained during the revolutionary struggle came to the fore and a sense of national community actually declined. To some extent a national community in the new nation was not fully actualized until after the trauma of the Civil War, though that event set in motion new problems that would later create even greater difficulties in maintaining a genuine national community. But, as Perry Miller has pointed out, to the extent we began to create a national community in the early national period it was again religious revivalism that played an important role.¹¹ I would not want to minimize the role of enlightenment thought in complicated relation with the churches that Sydney Mead has so brilliantly emphasized. From my point of view enlightenment religion and ethics were also a form of public theology and played a significant role. Yet Jefferson’s hope for a national turn to Unitarianism as the dominant religion, a turn that would have integrated public theology and the formal civil religion much more intimately than was actually the case, was disappointed and public theology was carried out predominantly in terms of biblical symbolism.

Even though I have argued that the public theology that came out of the national community represented the real republic. I do not want to idealize it. As with all vigorous young republics it had an element of self-intoxication that has had ominous consequences for us ever after. The "chosen people" or "God’s new Israel" symbolism that was pretty well eliminated from the formal civil religion was common in the public theology, though it also had its critics. The public theology provided a sense of value and purpose without which the national community and ultimately even the liberal state could not have survived, but it was never entirely clear what that value and purpose was. On the one hand it seemed to imply the full realization of the values laid down in the Declaration of Independence but certainly not fully implemented in a nation that among other things still legalized slavery. On the other hand it could imply a messianic mission of manifest destiny with respect to the rest of the continent. It may be a sobering thought, but most of what is good and most of what is bad in our history is rooted in our public theology. Every movement to make America more fully realize its professed values has grown out of some form of public theology, from the abolitionists to the social gospel and the early socialist party to the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King and the farm workers’ movement under Caesar Chavez. But so has every expansionist war and every form of oppression of racial minorities and immigrant groups.

The clearest and probably the purest expression of the ethical dynamism I have located in the realm of the public theology broke through at one crucial moment in our history into the civil religion itself in the person of our greatest, perhaps our only, civil theologian, Abraham Lincoln. Basing himself above all on the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, in the Gettysburg Address he called us to complete "the great task remaining before us," the task of seeing that there is a "new birth of freedom" and that we make real for all our citizens the beliefs upon which the republic is based. In the Second Inaugural Address Lincoln incorporated biblical symbolism more centrally into the civil religion than had ever been done before or would ever be done again in his great somber tragic vision of an unfaithful nation in need above all of charity and justice.

It has not been my purpose here to evaluate the whole checkered story of civil religion and public theology in our national history but only to point out they have been absolutely integral to one aspect of our national existence, namely, our existence as a republican people. But so far I have spoken only of what I have called the superstructural role of religion in the republic. Now I would like to turn to the infrastructural role.

Religion and the Creation of Citizens

As I have already pointed out in describing the classical notion of a republic, there is a necessity in such a regime not only for asserting high ethical and spiritual commitments but also for molding, socializing, and educating the citizens into those ethical and spiritual beliefs so they are internalized as republican virtue. Once again, however, when we look at the liberal constitutional regime we will see a complete lacuna in this area. The state as a school of virtue is the last thing a liberal regime conceives itself to be. And yet the liberal regime could not do the national community as the real republic could.

The problem was partly handled through federalism. What would not be appropriate on the part of the federal government could appropriately be done at lower jurisdictional levels. Just as religion was much more open and pervasive at local and even state levels through most of our history than it ever was at the federal level, so the state as educator, and educator in the sphere of values, was widely accepted at lower jurisdictional levels. Robert Lynn has brilliantly shown how the McGuffy readers purveyed a religious and republican ideology, including a powerful stress on the common good and the joys of participation in the public life, during much of the nineteenth century.¹²

And yet, as important as the public schools have been, the real school of republican virtue in America, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw with such masterful clarity, was the church. Tocqueville said religion is the first of our political institutions. It was a republican and a democratic religion that not only inculcated republican values but gave the first lessons in participation in the public life. More than the laws or the physical circumstances of the country, said Tocqueville, it was the mores that contributed to the success of the American democracy, and the mores were rooted in religion. As a classic theorist of republican government would, Tocqueville saw that naked self-interest is the surest solvent of a republican regime, and he saw the commercial tendencies of the American people as unleashing the possibility of the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest. But he saw religion as the great restraining element that could turn naked self-interest into what he called "self-interest rightly understood," that is, a self-interest that was public spirited and capable of self-sacrifice. In this way Tocqueville showed how religion mitigated the full implications of American liberalism and allowed republican institutions to survive. Late in his life he began to doubt that such a compromise would really work in the long run, and his doubts have been all too fully confirmed by our recent history. Yet for its time and place Tocqueville’s analysis was undoubtedly right. It gives us an essential clue to understand this strange, unique, and perhaps finally incoherent society in which we live.

What Tocqueville saw about the role of religion in such a society as ours was well understood by the founders of the republic. It is significant, for example, that John Adams, during his first year as our first vice-president under the new liberal constitutional regime, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ¹³ And Washington in his Farewell Address wrote, "Of all the suppositions and habits which lead to political prosperity Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and cherish them." Perhaps the recognition by our first and second presidents of the necessity of religion and morality, of the basis in the mores and religious beliefs of a people, for a successful republic, in the rather negative, circuitous, and almost apologetic terms of the quotations, expresses the uneasy compromise between republicanism and a liberal regime I am arguing was characteristic of the new nation. But it also suggests the founders of the republic fully understood the relation between the way of life of a people and their form of political organization.

The Corruption of the Republic

It is inevitable, having celebrated only several years ago the two hundredth anniversary of our republic, that we should look around us to see how well our heritage is understood and how much of it is still operative in our public life. We might have hoped that a political campaign for the presidency in that bicentennial year or the recent 1980 campaign would have been educative in the high republican sense of the term. We have had such campaigns in the past. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates the deepest philosophical meaning of our republic and of our history was plumbed by two men of enormous intelligence and sensitivity to the crucial issues. Alas, we did not get that in 1976 or in 1980. Perhaps the Illinois farmers who drove into the towns from miles around to hear the Lincoln-Douglas debates were a different kind of people from the millions in their living rooms in front of the television screen. Perhaps there were other reasons. But in recent campaigns what we got was vague and listless allusions to a largely misunderstood and forgotten past and an attitude toward the present that seemed to be determined, above everything else, not to probe beneath the thinnest of surfaces. And yet the great themes I have been probing here were present, not in any articulate form but present in the uncertainty, the groping, the yearning for something that has so slipped out of memory as to be almost without a name. It is the ethical purpose of our republic and the republican virtue of our citizens, or rather the loss of them, that has haunted our recent political life.

Our rhetoric speaks in the terms of another day, another age. It does not seem to express our present reality. And yet our politicians and those to whom they speak are surprised and troubled by the lack of fit, concerned less to find a new rhetoric than to find an easy formula to make the old rhetoric apt again. Such an easy formula is the assertion that we must restrain, control, and diminish government, as though the enormous growth of our government were some fortuitous thing and not a sign and symptom of the kind of society in which we live.

To ask the questions the 1976 and 1980 campaigns did not ask is to ask whether under the social conditions of late twentieth-century America it is possible for us to survive as a republic in any sense continuous with the historic meaning of that term. If we discover the republican element in our national polity has been corroded beyond repair, we must consider whether a liberal constitutional regime can survive without it, a question it seems to me not too difficult to answer, but I am prepared to listen to contrary arguments. Finally we must ask, if we have the courage, if both our republic and our liberal constitutional regime lack the social conditions for survival, what kind of authoritarian regime is likely to replace them, remembering that republican and liberal regimes have been in the history of the planet few and brief. Perhaps we can even discern, beneath the battered surface of our republican polity, the form of despotism that awaits us. Of course, I would hope to discover how to do what Machiavelli says is that most difficult of all political things, reform and refound a corrupt republic. But we must not flinch from whatever reality is to be discovered.

I have mentioned corruption. Corruption is a great word, a political word with a precise meaning in eighteenth-century discourse even though its use has become narrowed and debased with us. Corruption is, in the language of the founders of the republic, the opposite of republican virtue. It is what destroys republics. It might be well for us today to remember what Franklin said on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, 17 September 1787. Old, sick, tired, he had sat through that long hot Philadelphia summer because his presence was crucial to the acceptance of the new document. He was the very symbol of America. He rose on that last day to call for unanimous consent in hopes that that too might help the document be accepted, and he said, "In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe further that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall have become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."¹⁴ Can we not see in those words the sentiments of an old republican, aware of the compromises contained in the new Constitution but hoping almost against hope that the republican virtue of the people would offset them, at least for a time?

Corruption, again using the eighteenth-century vocabulary, is to be found in luxury, dependence, and ignorance. Luxury is that pursuit of material things that diverts us from concern for the public good, that leads us to exclusive concern for our own good, or what we would today call consumerism. Dependence naturally follows from luxury, for it consists in accepting the dominance of whatever person or group, or, we might say today, governmental or private corporate structure, that promises it will take care of our material desires. The welfare state -- and here I refer to the welfare that goes to the great corporations, to most above the median income level through special tax breaks, and to the workers whose livelihood depends on an enormous military budget as much as to the welfare that goes to the desperately poor to keep them from starving -- in all its prolixity is the very type of what the eighteenth century meant by dependence. And finally ignorance, that is, political ignorance, is the result of 1uxury and dependence. It is a lack of interest in public things, a concern only for the private, a willingness to be governed by those who promise to take care of us even without our knowledgeable consent. I would need to explore throughout our society the degree and extent to which corruption in these forms has gone in order to assess whether there is strength enough in our republic for its survival.

Sources of Revival

I would also need to look at religion, following today the brilliant sociological analysis Tocqueville made of the role of religion in our public life, a role all the founders of the republic discerned. To what extent do our religious bodies today provide us with a national sense of ethical purpose? Certainly here there are some notable recent examples. The religious opposition to the Vietnam War was certainly more effective than the opposition of those who spelled America with a "k." And if we have made some significant progress with respect to the place of racial minorities in our society in the last twenty years, it is due mostly to religious leadership. Yet is the balance of American religious life slipping away from those denominations that have a historic concern for the common good toward religious groups so privatistic and self-centered that they begin to approach the consumer cafeteria model of Thomas Luckmann’s invisible religion? And to what extent is the local congregation any longer able to serve as a school for the creation of a self-disciplined, independent, public-spirited, in a word, virtuous citizen? Have not the churches along with the schools and the family, what I have called the soft structures that deal primarily with human motivation, suffered more in the great upheavals through which our society has recently gone than any other of our institutions, suffered so much that their capacity to transmit patterns of conscience and ethical values has been seriously impaired? I am not prepared to say the religious communities, among whom I would include the humanist communities, are not capable even today of providing the religious superstructure and infrastructure that would renew our republic. Indeed, I would look to them, as always before in our history, for the renewing impulse, the "new birth" any ethical institution so frequently needs. But the empirical question as to whether the moral capacity is still there on a sufficient scale seems to me open.

If we look to my own community, the scholarly community, there is not a great deal to be proud of. We have left the understanding of our basic institutions, as we have left everything else, to the specialists, and with notable exceptions they have not done a very good job of it. Somehow we have never established a strong academic tradition of self-reflection about the meaning of our institutions, and as our institutions changed and our republican mores corroded, even what knowledge we had began to slip away. On the whole it has been the politicians more than the scholars who have carried the burden of self-interpretation. The founders were all political thinkers of distinction. Lincoln’s political thought has moments of imaginative genius – his collected works are still the best initiation into a genuine understanding of the regime under which we live. Even as late as Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge we had presidents who knew our history in intricate detail and understood the theoretical basis of our institutions. In contrast we have never produced a political philosopher of the first rank. The only profound work of political philosophy on the nature of the American polity was written by a Frenchman. Still we have produced works of the second rank that are not without distinction, though they are usually somewhat isolated and eccentric and do not add up to a cumulative tradition. Such works are Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic and Raymond Croly’s The Promise of American Life. But in a barren time we must be grateful for such works as we have. If we turn to these works, we will be referred once again to the great tradition with which I began this chapter. Croly quotes the European/ American philosopher George Santayana: "If a noble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see, therefore, how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu’s saying that the principle of democracy is virtue."¹⁵ How ominous indeed! In that context we can understand the bicentennial epigram written by Harry Jaffa, one of the few political scientists who continues the great tradition today: "In 1776 the United States was so to speak nothing; but it promised to become everything. In 1976, the United States, having in a sense become everything, promises to become everything. In 1976, the United States, having in a sense become everything, promises to become nothing."¹⁶

One would almost think the Lord has intended to chastise us before each of our centennial celebrations so we would not rise up too high in our pride. Before the centennial he sent us Grant, before the bicentennial, Nixon (in whom we can perhaps discern the dim face of the despotism that awaits us -- not a despotism of swastikas and Brownshirts but a despotism of game plans and administrative efficiency). It is not a time for self-congratulation. It is a time for sober reflection about where we have come from and where we may be going.

Notes:

1. Robert N. Bellah. "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus, 96 (Winter 1967). Reprinted in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

2. Benjamin Franklin came close when he spoke of "Publick Religion" in his pamphlet of 1750 entitled proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. See Ralph L. Ketcham, ed., The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill,1965), p. 55.

3. Tocqueville wrote in a letter to Gobineau of 5 September 1843: "The duties of men among themselves as well as in their capacity of Citizens, the duties of citizens to their fatherland, in brief, the public virtues seem tome to have been inadequately defined and considerably neglected within the moral system of Christianity." Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Resolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, John Lukacs, ed. and trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,.1059), p. 192.

4. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract trans. Willmoore Kendall (Chicago, Ill.: Gateway, 1954), book 4, chap. 8, pp. 204-223.

5. See Robert N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review. 29 (1964), pp. 353-374. Reprinted in Bellah, Beyond Belief

6. See Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) chap. 1.

7. See Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

8. It is worth noting that while the Constitution specifically forbade a non-republican Form of government in any state, the First Amendment did not forbid the states to establish religion.

9. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill,1972), pp. 29-30, is contemptuous of a people who are not ethically prepared for it espousing liberty:

10. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977). See especially chap. 1.

11. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,.965), chap. 1.

12. Robert Wood Lynn, "Civil Catechetics in Mid-Victorian America: Some Notes about American Civil Religion, Past and Present," Religious Education. 68, no. 1 (1973), pp. 5-27.

13. Quoted in John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press,1966), p.185.

14. Ralph L. Ketcham, ed., The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 401.

15. Raymond Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), p. 454.

16. Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About the American Revolution (Durham, NC.: Carolina Academic Press,1978), p.1.

My initial essay on civil religion in America opened a debate that has continued to this day.¹ Much of that debate has been rather sterile, focusing more on form than content, definition than substance. From the beginning, however, Phillip E. Hammond has entered the discussion with significant and original substantive points of his own.² It is therefore a pleasure for me to join with him in this volume in an effort to extend the consideration of civil religion to societies and issues that have not been prominent in the discussion hitherto. This volume seeks to be broadly comparative. It does not, however, attempt to avoid the United States. Both authors continue to be fascinated by the American case in its sometimes baffling intricacies. It is our hope that the present comparative treatment will deepen the understanding of American civil religion at the same time it opens up issues that can be explored in many other societies.

While the exact application of the term civil religion can be debated, the ubiquity of what can be called "the religio-political problem" can hardly be doubted. In no society can religion and politics ignore each other. Faith and power must always, however uneasily, take a stance toward one another. The polity, more than most realms of human action, deals obviously with ultimate things. With respect to both internal deviants and external enemies, political authority has claimed the right to make life-and-death decisions. Religion, on the other hand, claims to derive from an authority that transcends all earthly powers. The possibility of conflict between these potentially conflicting claims is always present, yet collisions are not necessarily constant. At various times and places politics may be little more than the pragmatic art of getting things done and religion may confine itself to "spiritual" matters. Or religion and politics may simply be two different pragmatics concerned with distinct spheres of existence.

One area of overlap and potential conflict is what sociologists call the problem of legitimacy, which includes among other things the question whether existing political authority is moral and right or whether it violates higher religious duties. Most societies have institutionalized ways of dealing with this potential tension. Whether we wish to call all such forms of institutionalization civil religions or confine that term to only some of such forms, it is here that we must locate the problem of civil religion.

Fairly distinct types of solution to the religio-political problem (Or fairly distinct types of civil religion) seem to correlate with the phases of religious evolution as I have described them.³ In primitive society neither politics nor religion is very well differentiated, so there is not much point in talking about the relationship between them. Still, persons with high status and influence on collective decision-making are often seen in such societies as possessing more sacred power than others. Hierarchy in such societies is not well developed, but what there is of it is simultaneously religious and political.

In archaic societies, by which I mean typically the great Bronze Age monarchies of the old world in the second millennium BC., political power has become highly developed and centralized. State structures at least partly independent of kinship have been established and a hierarchy of religious specialists has appeared. Characteristically, the focus of both political and religious attention is on the single figure of the ruler, often identified as a divine king. In such societies political submission to the divine king is often equated with entry into the realm of cosmic order, and political opposition is equated with alliance with the demonic forces of cosmic chaos. The realm of the divine king may be equated with the realm of cosmic harmony, and those beyond the borders may be felt to live in outer darkness.

Though in the first millennium BC. this fusion of political and religious power was broken through by the emergence of what I have called the historic religions, it remains a permanent possibility in human history. The Egyptian pharaoh and the Shang emperor were not alone in considering their political enemies to be cut off from the source of divine order. Even within the historic religions, archaic forms reassert themselves, as when Christians divide the world into "Christendom" and the pagan realms of devil worshipers, or when Muslims divide the world into "the house of Islam" and "the house of war" -- that is, all those domains beyond the reach of Muslim political power. The American tendency to divide the globe between "the free world" and the Communists, and the Communist tendency to reverse the picture, are only recent versions of the same thing. Similarly, elements of divine kingship tend to develop around strong political leaders whenever they appear. In totalitarian societies such tendencies may be very marked, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. But even in democratic societies some such tendencies may appear: The cases of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy come to mind in our own history. The Japanese case discussed in Chapter 2 of this book is particularly interesting because it is an example of a full-fledged archaic solution to the religio-political problem (or a full-fledged archaic civil religion) that has survived into the twentieth century.

The emergence of the historic religions, though never fully overcoming archaic tendencies (or primitive ones either, for that matter), does mark a new degree of differentiation between the religious and the political. Whereas in archaic society ordinary people relate to the divine through the mediation of the divine king, once the historic religions arise there can be a direct relation to the divine, unmediated by political authority. The new situation is often expressed through a radical reorientation of divine-kingship symbolism. Confucius, a minor official in a small state, is declared in retrospect to be the uncrowned king of the whole Chinese realm. Plato offers us the ironic picture of the philosopher-king who ought to be but never will be the actual ruler. Irony turns to tragedy in the case of Jesus, whose throne is a cross and whose crown is thorns. What all these symbolisms suggest is that there is a much more problematic relation between political authority and ultimate meaning than had ever been thought before.

Correlative with these new symbolisms of religious meaning is the emergence of structures of religious authority that are in principle independent of the state. The Christian church and the Buddhist sangha are the clearest examples. In situations where clearly differentiated religious structures do not emerge, as in the Confucian case and in quite different ways the Jewish and Muslim as well, there is a strong sense that political authority is illegitimate as long as it does not conform to transcendent ethical norms, as in almost all empirical instances it does not.

Whether or not there is a clearly differentiated religious structure, there tends to be in societies with historic religions a particularly sharp tension between the representatives of religious truth and political authority. This tension can on occasion break out in prolonged power struggles. The conflict between pope and emperor in medieval Europe, the tensions between Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism at the T’ang court, and the struggle between the mullahs and the politicians in Iran today are all examples. The most stable solution to these conflicts in historic societies is a division of labor in which the religious authorities recognize the legitimacy of the state in return for political recognition of their own dominant position in the realm of religion. Under such conditions the state expects the church to help maintain social tranquility and the church expects the state to conform to at least minimal ethical norms. Even at their most harmonious, the Buddhist principle that "a monk does not bow down before a king" is maintained.

During periods of intense struggle, however, the division of labor breaks down. Political authority falls back on archaic archetypes. The Israelite king claims to be the Lord’s anointed even when denounced by the prophet speaking in the name of Yahweh. The Chinese emperor reminds the critical Confucian literati that it is he who is the Son of Heaven. The Shah of Iran turns to ancient Persian symbols of kingship to suggest in only slightly veiled ways that it is he who is God’s agent, not the mullahs. On the other side, religious authorities in the moment of conflict with the state may claim political authority themselves. The pope in the early Middle Ages comes close to claiming to be the head of an international superstate to which all secular political authorities had to bow. Brigham Young enters the wilderness to become the ruler of his own church-state. The Ayatollah Khomeini is in effect the arbiter of political power in Iran. As the example of present-day Iran suggests, these conflicts have not disappeared from the contemporary world. We will see them still operative in some of the examples discussed at length in this book.

Nonetheless, in terms of my scheme of religious evolution, there is another possibility that emerges in the early modern and modern phases. This is the possibility that a distinct set of religious symbols and practices may arise that address issues of political legitimacy and political ethics but that are not fused with either church or state. It is this rather special case for which Phillip Hammond wishes to reserve the designation "civil religion."⁴ Without necessarily agreeing that the term should be so restricted, I nevertheless do agree that this solution to the religio-political question, the solution that characterizes the American case, is quite unique and requires special conditions to bring it about. Hammond’s essays in this book suggest what some of those conditions are. They have to do with the dominant form of religion in the formative period (in the American case, Protestantism) and perhaps even more with the pluralism of American religious life. In addition to these factors one would probably also need to mention, following Sidney E. Mead, the importance of enlightenment thought in the formative period.⁵ Since most of the chapters in this volume concern themselves with the special conditions and ambiguities of the American solution, this is not the place to examine them further. It does seem, however, from Chapters 3 and 4, that we take the differentiated civil religion as at least a hypothetical norm for modern society and seek to explain the conditions that may block its emergence in the case of such societies as Mexico and Italy. (This is not to say that the American case is in any sense ideal. Some of its specific pathologies are discussed in this volume, and I shall refer to them again in this introduction.)

The case of Italy is an interesting one, for it is a society in which church and state have long existed in uneasy balance, with occasional bitter periods when one attempted to subordinate the other. As will become clear in detail in Chapter 4. liberalism, socialism, and fascism in modern Italy have each shown tendencies toward an archaic regression in which political authority claims its own sacrality. "Nationalism" in its various modern forms frequently shows this tendency in its effort to break the hold of all sacred traditional loyalties. On the other hand, Italian liberalism and socialism, especially since World War II, have tended to give up their totalistic claims and opt for a civility and a tolerance of difference that Hammond sees as essential in a modern civil religion. Italian Catholicism in the same period has gone at least halfway in the same direction. It thus seems possible that if the forces of particularism, what I will call the "ground bass" of Italian society, do not prevent it as they often have before in Italian history, a differentiated pattern of symbols and practices emphasizing individual liberty, social justice, and Christian charity might emerge to underpin a more legitimate and more effective Italian state than has hitherto been known.

The Mexican case as Hammond analyses it has certain parallels to the Italian. Here too both a strong Catholic Church and a secular liberal state have existed side by side for quite a while. In Mexico, however, there seems to be less diversity and less movement toward a differentiated symbol system. Only in its effervescent stage, and then only partially and fitfully, did the revolutionary state make ultimate claims for itself. On the other hand, the Mexican church seems to have remained aloof from the major forces of social transformation in modern Mexico. Although it has not given up its dramatic claims to social authority, it has not articulated them in ways that are socially effective. It is my reading of the Mexican case that this situation creates something of a stalemate. From the religious point of view the state is faintly illegitimate. But it lacks the courage of its own secular liberal convictions and so does not pursue a strong political policy of social and moral reform. This situation of impasse and weakened claims of legitimacy seems to be less severe than in other Latin American societies, but Mexico also suffers from this malaise to some extent.

Both church and state are unitary in Mexico, whatever the difficulty in linking them or mediating the linkage through a differentiated civil religion. North of the United States border there is another case that contrasts sharply with both the American and the Mexican. Canada is unitary neither politically nor religiously. But pluralism in the Canadian case, unlike the American, has not aided in the development of a differentiated civil religion. The lack of a revolutionary experience, the long history of special ties of English Canadians with England and English symbols of civil religion, and the existence of a large province that is linguistically, ethnically, and religiously distinct from the rest of Canada -- all these conditions have militated against not only the emergence of a Canadian civil religion but of any very clearly defined sense of national identity. Serious doubts have been expressed about the survival of the Canadian union that would make no sense in the case of Mexico or the United States.⁶

Hammond suggests in Chapters 3, 6, and 8 that American civil religion has resided significantly in the educational and particularly the legal systems in ways that have led to a distinct tradition of civility, openness, and tolerance. Other aspects of the American tradition have not been so benign. The church-state fusion of early New England, together with ideas of a special providential chosenness of the American colonists, has exercised a pull toward archaic regression in the American civil religion.⁷ Notions that America is God’s country, and that American power in the world is identical with morality and God’s will, have not died even today. Fortunately, these ideas never shaped the normative documents of the American civil religion, nor have they characterized its greatest heroes -- men like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King -- but they have formed an important tradition of interpretation, one carried by nationalistic clergymen more often than by jingoistic politicians. The best antidote to this tendency to. ward archaic regression is the critical tradition that has characterized American political life from its beginning. This critical tradition has been expressed in what Martin Marty called a public theology and what Walter Lippmann called a public philosophy. A strong public theology has opposed our more unjust wars, especially the Mexican-American, Spanish-American, and Vietnamese wars, demanded racial and social justice, and insisted on the fulfillment of our democratic promise in our economic as well as our political life. The role of public theology has remained vigorous even up to the present, but the intellectual validity of religion among the intelligentsia has been steadily undercut for a century or more.

In the formative period of the American republic a vigorous public philosophy complemented our public theology. It justified a strong normative concern for the common good that was implied in the symbolism of the differentiated civil religion. But public philosophy faded with the founding generation. It was largely replaced by the overwhelmingly private philosophy of liberalism, which justified public action almost exclusively on the grounds of private interest. The common good was expressed in religious terms or not at all. Fitful expressions of public philosophy have occurred in our history, perhaps most notably in the twentieth century in the work of John Dewey, but no continuous tradition has developed. At a moment when civil religious symbols are more and more co-opted by ultraconservatives and the philosophy of liberalism seems less and less adequate as a guide to our public or private lives, a revival of public philosophy seems urgently needed.⁸ One of the tasks of such a revival would be to make the religious aspect of our central tradition understandable in a nonreactionary way.

It is not only the American republic that seems bewildered and at sea in the late twentieth century. We live in a troubled world in which the danger of nuclear holocaust constantly grows. Nation-states are still the most important power-centers in our world, but none of them alone seems able to accomplish much. Clearly military, economic, and environmental problems demand a global concord for our very survival. We have at last for many purposes a world civitas, but it does not have much civility. American civil religion with its tradition of openness, tolerance, and ethical commitment might make a contribution to a world civil religion that would transcend and include it. Any archaic claims to our own special righteousness or messianic mission, however, can only further the process of global disintegration. In this book we have concentrated on problems of religion and politics at the national level. It is time that we raise our sights to consider the relation of religion and politics in a global order of civility and justice.

Notes:

1. "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus, 1967. Reprinted in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

2. "Commentary on Civil Religion in America" in The Religious Situation: 1968, ed. Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 381-388.

3. "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review, 29 (1964), pp. 353-374. Reprinted in Bellah, Beyond Belief.

4. See Chapter 3 of this volume. John A. Coleman has developed a useful typology on which Hammond in part relies. See Coleman’s "Civil Religion," Sociology Analysis, 35 (.970), pp. 67-77.

5. Sidney E. Mend, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

6. A much fuller discussion of Canadian civil religion or the lack thereof is contained in a doctoral dissertation on the subject currently in progress at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, by William A. Stahl.

7. Among the many discussions of this aspect of the tradition, perhaps the most interesting is Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

8. William M. Sullivan has made an important contribution in this direction in his Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).