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The Relevance of Bellah’s “Civil Religion” Thesis to a Theory of Secularization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
A nation is minimally constituted by a population which shares two experiences, that of occupation of the same territory and of exposure to the exercise of a central state authority. Some societies are more self-sufficient in their economies and cultures than others; some societies surrender more or less political autonomy to a larger body than the nation. Nations, however, are generally the whole of which other bodies are the parts; the nation, in turn, is not usually part of another, larger whole. Edward Shils argues that the state creates conditions which are conducive to a national culture. By giving a population a “common focus of attention,” a common experience of the state’s exercise of its authority among those who share the same territory, and a belief in the legitimacy of the state’s power, conditions are generated which lead, often if not always, to a central culture which defines and expresses the history of the nation, the meaning of membership in the nation, and its basic commitments. Such a national belief-system is the “civil” or “civic” religion which a variety of historians and sociologists have located in American schools, national ceremonies, the regalia of office, and in political rhetoric. It is this culture which provides a non-theoretical answer to the question of what makes a nation “more than” the interaction of organizations and groups coordinated and controlled by a central state. But it is also this culture which becomes the source of new ambiguities concerning the grounds and limits of political authority.
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- Copyright © Social Science History Association 1977
References
Notes
1 In the following discussion I am relying on the work of Edward Shils, Center and Periphery—Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975).
2 Ibid., 34-35.
3 For a recent discussion of the civil religion literature, see Winter, J. Alan, Continuities in the Sociology of Religion: Creed, Congregation and Community (New York, 1977), 85–89Google Scholar.
4 Bellah, Robert N., “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (Winter), 1–21Google Scholar.
5 McHugh, Peter, Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction (New York, 1968), 7–20Google Scholar.
6 Shils, Center and Periphery, 37.
7 The term may have other usages, since it is found in other professional and everyday contexts as well as in the psychoanalytic.
8 Gregory Bateson et al., Ecology of the Mind (San Francisco, 1974).
9 There is some question, of course, as to whether such efforts constitute a “theory” or merely an elaborate description of the interrelatedness of social patterns. I will not enter that controversy here, since it is well covered in the debates on Talcott Parsons’s work.
10 McHugh, Defining the Situation, 39.
11 Ibid., 40.
12 Talcott Parsons and Gerald Piatt, The American University (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 273 ff., 313.
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15 Ibid., 142-43, 151. The contrast is between the “external” and the “internal” covenants.
16 Arieli, Yehoshua, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
17 Ibid., Chap, xii, “Foundations of the American Ideal of Individualism,” 243-76.
18 Ibid., 253.
19 Ibid., 254.
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21 In this assumption Bellah has the support of other theorists, for example, Shils, Center and Periphery, 23.
22 By “native American” I mean the Anglo-Saxon as opposed to the later immigrants, not the tribes who have rightly appropriated the term in their conflict with the larger society.
23 Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 142.
24 Ibid., 49.
25 Quinley, Harold E., The Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism Among Protestant Ministers (New York, 1974)Google Scholar.
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