Civil Religion

The term religion is generally derived from two Latin verbs: religàre, meaning “to bind,” and religere which, like the Greek verb alégein, means ”to care for, to be concerned about.” By extension, religion can be defined as the “careful observance of a binding divine rule.” “Civil religion” is the bond that unites a people under the same laws and rules and provides a sense of inclusion, belonging, identity, unity and structure, worth, confidence, transcendence, and purpose. It is the ethos of a given society and it may be so compelling that citizens might be driven to sacrifice their lives for the common good.

The nature of civil religions can be best understood by considering the distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, which roughly translate as “society” and “community” (Tönnies, 2001). Gesellschaft is the “artificial”, heterogeneous, and competitive social milieu of modern urban society in which ties between individuals are loose and personal interest, instrumental rationality, and the social contract are the glue that holds a society together. Gemeinschaft is the “natural,” organic model of society prevailing in rural areas, which are typified by cultural homogeneousness, cohesion, enforced harmony, common objectives, and emotional bonds.

As anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in chapter 8 (“De la Religion Civile”), book 4 of “Du Contrat Social” (1762), civil religions, with their quasi-religious rituals, liturgies, collective narratives, holidays, myths, heroes, symbols, and sacred places, as well as their empowering and galvanizing images, slogans, and principles, have become the cement of modern societies. Their function is to preserve “community” alongside “society.” They effectively mobilize people around key issues and common concerns and goals, while at the same time conferring a religious significance, and thus giving legitimacy, to the dominant cultural practices, rules, value orientations and institutions. Civic religions are alternative ways in which people may express their religiosity, and they generate that “collective effervescence” whereby a society venerates itself (Durkheim, 1954).

Understandably, the cult of secular institutions, which grows stronger when there is low demand for the available forms of religion and with the rise of material welfare, can sometimes be at variance with the orthodoxy of metaphysical religions, while at other times it becomes exceedingly difficult to draw a boundary line between civil religions and politicized faiths.

In the United States, “the nation with the soul of a church” (Chesterton, 1990), civil religion thrives on a comparatively high level of religiousness, and takes various forms. Presidential monuments and libraries, war memorials, the display and veneration of “sacred scriptures” such as the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Mayflower Compact, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his definition of the United States as “the last best hope of mankind,” Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving Day, the White House, Ground Zero, the Pledge of Allegiance, the rhetorical invention of the “City upon the Hill” and of the “Manifest Destiny,” and the national motto “In God We Trust”: these are the distinctive features of the American civil religion, a shaping ideology of religious intensity, future-oriented as well as past-oriented, which has the power to transform and integrate most of the immigrants who enter the United States.

The coercive potential of civil religions

People may be more or less aware of the existence of a civil religion, but there are circumstances, like September 11, 2001, when its presence is overwhelming, and principles such as gratuity, generosity, solidarity, and reciprocity intensify a drift toward a sort of ecstatic communal worship, calling for virtue and moral excellence and offering in return spiritual reassurance and fulfillment.

In extreme cases, civil religions may lead to the glorification and sacralization of nations and their political leaderships and to the repudiation of the distinction between the public and the private sphere. During the Depression and the Second World War, in Europe as in Japan, fascist and crypto-fascist governments were given full powers and states were treated as moral entities. With the convergence of religious and political authority, the cult of sacralized collectivities supplanted the liberal democratic emphasis on individual rights.

The fascist civil religion blended pedagogic moralism, collective responsibility, social utility and regimentation, technocratic and scientistic standards. It conferred an almost numinous quality and eschatological dimension – indeed, a vicarious sacredness – to the policy-making process, and reinscribed emotional attachment, spiritual yearning, and an idealistic sense of citizenship in a society in which individuals were expected to put their own interests after the interests of society at large. In the words of Joseph Goebbels, “It hardly matters what we believe in, so long as we believe in something.”

This radical version of civil religion promised an alternative, re-moralized modernity which would lead to a collective, mundane salvation, and to the redemption of the national community from an alleged fallen state. Fascists shared an invidious condescension for real people and their shortcomings and were prepared to employ all possible means to shape and discipline them, including the abolition of pluralism and fundamental rights, and the obliteration of all those forces and obstacles that they labeled a threat to the moral fiber of society. National Socialists were particularly successful in injecting “magic”, “sublime” and “epic” into a society awaiting its regeneration. Indeed, as Hitler himself remarked, “those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is even more than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew” (Rauschning, 1939, p. 242).

Ultimately, while the achievement of social cohesion and social justice may greatly benefit from a vibrant civil religion, citizens should remain vigilant to the risk that, in times of dislocation and crisis, civil religion itself might justify the belief that individuals exist for the state and the community, and not vice versa. Like any other religion, civil religion is not immune from the temptation to portray history as a perpetual battle between good and evil, to urge believers to prove their faith and commitment, and to underplay the question of the inherent worth of individuals.

Race and the Constitution

Thomistic philosophy and Enlightenment anthropology were premised on the tenet that reason was the distinguishing feature of humanity. Over time, however, a different theoretical orientation emerged, which stressed the importance of physiological constraints to rationality: not all people and not all races possessed intellectual faculties to the same degree; hence, many could not govern themselves and strive for excellence. This approach reaffirmed the continuity of biological explanations of social inequality, justifying a hierarchical conception of racial differentiation based on naturalistic premises and the subjugation and exploitation of non-European peoples for their own good – Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden”.

Thus, the belief in human biological determinism, which was originally confined to the circles of seventeenth century’s European aristocrats, was retained and adapted to serve the political aspirations of the middle-class. Furthermore, in the United States, the Founding Fathers were particularly fond of Platonic and Aristotelian political theories and, like their Greek precursors, they feared that racial diversity would lead to political fragmentation and, ultimately, to the dissolution of the Republic.

It is therefore unsurprising that the word “miscegenation” was first introduced into legal discourse in the United States, the only country in the world employing the “one drop of blood” rule and the hypodescent criterion, whereby people are black if they have some degree of African ancestry, irrespective of their phenotype, and that the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg laws, the 1937 racial laws of Italian fascism, and the 1949 miscegenation statute of South Africa were all inspired by the U.S. miscegenation laws.

“American exceptionalism” began in 1691, when Virginia legally banned interracial marriage for the first time in human history. By 1776, 12 of the 13 original states had followed Virginia’s example. Throughout the nineteenth century, racial segregation became a national phenomenon. In Roberts v. Boston 59 Mass. 198, 5 Cush. 198 (1849), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that segregation in Boston’s public schools was permissible. Similar legal provisions were enacted in California and in other states which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, barred South and Far Eastern Asians, as well as Native Americans and African Americans, from public schools. Meanwhile, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, and New Jersey passed the black immigrant exclusion laws.

Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the ratification of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Southern and border states ratified the Jim Crow statutes, which applied to African Americans, Asian Americans, and mixed-race individuals, prohibited interracial marriages, and led to the segregation of most public places, including railroad passenger seating, and residential districts. These statutes were upheld by the Civil Rights Cases 109 U.S. 3 (1883), which also declared the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional, for its provisions could not apply to private acts, and by Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896), a 7-1 decision which put forth the “separate but equal doctrine”, to the effect that racial separation could be deemed constitutional, provided that facilities for each race were equal. By 1910, the South had established a virtual caste system prescribing separate telephone booths, elevators, Bibles, and water coolers for blacks and whites.

In those same years, fear of immigrants from Ireland, Southern and Eastern Europe, and from Asia reached a high point. These immigrants were believed to pose a genetic threat to the vitality of the nation. It was argued that, due to a menacing differential birth rate, their blood might pollute the American gene pool and their lax morality might deteriorate white Protestant virtues. This called for immigration restrictions to halt the flux of unfit immigrants, as well as enforced institutionalization and compulsory state sterilization to prevent contamination from those already in the United States.

The 1920s and 1930s were the heyday of sterilization programs, mental testing, marriage restrictions, racial segregation, and discriminatory immigration quotas, which were allegedly needed to pre-determine the ingredients of the American melting pot. The anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act, based on the dubious claims of racial science, was passed in Virginia in 1924, the same year that the severely restrictive and racially selective Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was promulgated by the Congress., following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1917 Immigration Act, which excluded “all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons…professional beggars, vagrants…polygamists, and anarchists.”

Racial laws went largely unquestioned until the Fifties and Sixties, a period of economic expansion and relative prosperity. Then, Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954) held that segregated public education denied equal protection. But this decision could not abolish “de facto” segregation: in 1965, only two per cent of blacks attended desegregated schools. With the 1964 Civil Rights Act all public facilities and public education were desegregated, and discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, color, sex, or national origin was made illegal. The voting rights act of 1965 invalidated racially discriminatory measures that, prior to WWI, had restricted voting to less than four percent of Black citizens, with only 150,000 blacks being allowed to vote in 1940. Finally, in Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967), the concept of “racial purity” was removed from the American legal discourse and, in 1968, the Civil Rights Act ended “de jure” housing segregation.

This necessarily cursory examination of the racial question in the United States shows the extent of the devaluation of constitutionally sanctioned individual liberties for the members of ethnic and racial minorities, “the un-American others” who, from the perspective of the ruling majority, did not appear to act like truly independent moral agents, and therefore were in no position to fully exercise those rights. It is a bitter irony that a nation founded on the centrality of civil liberties has been historically so fearful of certain categories of individuals and their freedoms. In many ways, this is also witnessed by the startling imprisonment rates in the United States, unparalleled in Western countries. Rising incarceration reflects a zero-tolerance trend in law enforcement and sentencing that is in stark contrast with the corresponding European descending rates.

Over the past thirty years, the number or people incarcerated in the USA increased fourfold. As a result, despite falling crime rates, the U.S. current imprisonment rate is the second highest in the world after post-genocide Rwanda, and seven million American citizens are now in jail, on probation or on parole, that is, 1 in 32 American adults. Furthermore, over four million detainees or former detainees are denied the right to vote. Racial disparities are flagrant. In the 1940s, 77 percent of all detainees were white, and 22 per cent were black. Nowadays, 60 percent of state and federal inmates are black or Hispanic and about one in 13 blacks in the 25-29 age group is in jail. One third of black males born today are likely to serve time in prison during their lifetime. This “great confinement”, namely the over-representation of blacks behind bars in a state of mass imprisonment, has been explained as the result of the stronger emphasis that is placed in American culture on individual responsibility in deviant behavior – the rhetoric of “crime as a moral choice” –, and as a means by which the justice system manages ostensibly “unruly” human groups, neutralizing them by physical removal. In this sense, mass incarceration of racial and ethnic minorities as social cleansing by penal means falls along the same logical continuum from slavery, to segregation, to urban ghettoes, one premised on the belief in the ultimate unassimilability of most African Americans into American society.