Civic Religion or Civic Faith is a term that most of us have heard used before in many settings. But it is not necessarily something we fully understand or the impact of the ideas the term means on our lives and to the church. However Civic religion has played a significant role in our nation since its inception and in the church throughout our nations history. Civic religion has changed and impacted the church in ways that most of us have never seen but have felt and if we don’t have a simple understanding of its impact our efforts to move forward as a church may be hindered.
The significance of civic religion came into play back before our nation was founded. The intellectuals of the time in the colonies were struggling with a couple of issues. First, they wanted to figure out how we can govern ourselves as a people rather than rule by a dictatorship of some kind, i.e. a king or queen. Second, they then wanted figure out a way for us to get along so that we would not kill each other in the name of God repeating the thirty-years war in Europe, which killed off a third of the population in the name of Jesus.
What the intellectuals did was combine two forms of democracy, one based on ideas from John Locke in England and the other based upon ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. From Locke the most significant idea taken was the right to own property and from Rousseau it was the idea of civic religion.
In Europe, at the time, a king or a queen along with an aristocracy ruled most countries. Together they owned all of the land and believed that they were born into their lot in life by God’s will and therefore no one could move up or down in class because this was the way God ordered the world. This wealthy ruling class was meant to be rich and in charge and the poor servant class was meant to be poor and serve their rulers.
The intellectuals in the colonies wanted something different; they were all children of the enlightenment and emerging modern world. This meant that they were beginning to believe that God made all “men” equal and that “men” could govern themselves without a King or Queen. So to make this happen the right to own property became a critical idea to implement because it allowed each person to become a king over their own little mini-kingdom. They then need a system to legitimate the right to own property and to protect the property and individual’s rights so they develop the idea of rule by constitution or rule by laws rather than a King. But if Kings are appointed by God then no laws can stand over them, hence the need for a civic religion.
What Rousseau discovered was that a generic civic religion that appeals to God, but no specific God can be used to legitimate a set of rules that assumed all “men” are created equal and given the ability by God to govern themselves as their right. This allows Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. to believe that the generic God is theirs and that God believes in them as individuals and has given them the right to self-govern. This became the seedbed for revolution.
Once the civic religion has legitimated rule by law and the right to own property it takes on a new role. What the civic religion then does is legitimate what we do as a nation. It allows us to believe that if things go well for us it is because God is on our side. It also helps us to keep from fighting each other in the name of God because the civic God is generic enough that each faith tradition can believe that the God we trust in is referring to the God of their tradition.
In the U.S. Christianity was the dominant voice with no real challengers so the church, in general, wed itself to the civic faith and became the justifier for what we did as a nation and the standard bearer for correct morality for the nation. A Christian Mythos took hold of the nation and dominated the public identity for about 150 to 200 years with mixed results. On the negative side many people began to believe that we were a Christian nation and that God blessed everything that we did as a nation and we simply pretended that there was no real crimes in our communities because we were a Godly nation. A second negative aspect was that Christian faith was reduced with the civic religion to a belief that if I am a good person then God we take me to heaven and if I am a bad person then God will send me to hell when I die.
United Church of Christ pastor and author, Anthony Robinson, describes the role of civic religion in our culture in this way; “the role of the church was to be one of the civic institutions gathered, if not on the town green, then on Main St. The church was there to preserve social order, morality, and decency. The church was, as they saw it, the conscience of the community, a source of aid to the least fortunate, and a center of community and family life.”
The church, in general, wed itself also to certain pillars of the modern world and began using those pillars to define the faith. Secular reason, self-sufficiency, progress, and optimism permeated the church and lead to a huge boon in building and expansion that took place in the forties and fifties. The Christian church was the civic religion for the country without people realizing what this meant. No other faith existed in large enough numbers to challenge the notion that Christianity and the civic religion were two different things.
The first real challenge to Christianity as the civic religion occurred after three major events, World War I, the great depression, and World War II. These events combined to bring about a cultural split in the Civic religion. This split began to reflect more clearly the working out of the modern intellectual understandings that were the brainchild of our culture. What happened was that a Liberal Civic religion began to develop along side of a developing Conservative Civic religion dividing Christians and the nation in new ways.
Both of the two civic religions, the liberal and conservative held some core beliefs in common, such as, the importance of religious values to the political process; assumed the existence and importance of transcendent values in relation to which the nation may be judged; agree on the relevance of certain biblical principals: compassion, equity, and liberty; drew on a common heritage of Judeo-Christian symbols and stories.
Where they began to differ was as follows. The Liberal Civic religion began to move with these values in tow.
•Tried to create a vision of the church that did not reduce down to concrete forms.
•What was important was good behavior stemming from the correct values
•Began to focus on the actions taken by good people to roll back the social conditions inhibiting free individuals.
•The test became not what one believes but how one arrived at their beliefs.
•The goal of religious instruction was to connect people with divine power to help them overcome evil.
•Repentance became more about acting correctly than the individual heart.
•Usually became involved with: protest activities, antinuclear coalitions, holistic health groups, positive thinking seminars, and therapy groups.
•Change is brought about through quick direct action that affects the structures, and rules of society to change the hearts of the people.
•Christians need to meet the needs of the people first in order for them to be able to hear the good news.
•Morality was socially derived but framed in the private realm for individuals.
•Focus on Humanity over the U.S. believing we have a global role to play because of our resources. It is a God given mandate to build the global community
•Religion keeps us going in dark times against difficult opposition.
•We need to work with the world in making life better for everyone.
•We fix things by looking after the greater good for humanity over U.S. interests.
The Conservative Civic religion began to develop with a different set of core values that impacting how people lived their faith.
•Literal kingdom/second coming/ Spiritual world vs. concrete world; keep them separate
•What was important was the right motivation behind the behaviors stemming from the proper values.
•Began to emphasis the values that good people held internally.
•Usually became involved with: healing ministries, prison ministries, Bible study groups, charismatic groups, and groups concerned about world hunger.
•Change is brought about through slow deliberate action geared at changing the hearts of the people so that they themselves begin to change the structures and rules.
•People need to hear the good news and save their soul because we may not be able to meet their immediate needs in time.
•Framed morality in a public context. Morality was God given and absolute.
•U.S. has a special place in the divine order.
•Grants a high degree of legitimating to capitalism drawing biblical parallels to the system. This is done because it opposes communism, which destroys the individual’s rights and freedoms.
•We fix things by putting better leaders with better values in place running the country.
So what changed? The farther apart the two civic religions grew the more they began to cancel each other out and make the Church look irrelevant because of its internal contradictions arising from the two different civil religions. In the void created by this tension a new third civic religion has arisen to replace the two competing Christian civic religions. This third religion uses Progress & Technology justify our political and economic system. Religion is seen as irrelevant because both versions of the civil religion connected with Christianity negate each other. As a result of this third civic religion arising to replace the irrelevant Christian forms the Christian Church has been finding its place in culture decentralized and in part irrelevant creating significant new challenges for each church.
Anthony Robinson maps out five of the challenges that these shifts in the civic religion create for the church.
1. Norm: Obligation-Both church, public society, and government supported going to church and the right thing to do especially for a good law abiding citizen. Came to church out of duty, saw being a Christian as fulfilling a set of moral laws defined by ‘good works.’
•Change: Motivation replaced Obligation (60’s). If people were motivated, found some value or meaning in something, they would come. Grace, new life, and forgiveness replaced moral obligation.
2. Norm: The Church was Trusted and scene as a Reliable Authority.
•Change: Social Trust and Confidence were shattered (60-70’s). People’s problems seemed deeper and darker than a simple set of right and wrongs could express or control. Key social events shattered our confidence such as Viet Nam, Kennedy, King, Civil Rights, Equal Rights, etc. People started coming to church for healing, hope and salvation for themselves and their family.
3. Norm: Christianity was primarily the only major religion (Judaism was scene as a semi-Christian faith). The Christian story was the primarily the only story that worked along with the national story.
•Change: Immigration act of 1965 changed the ethnic and religious diversity in the US broadening it significantly with Hindu’s, Buddhists, and Muslims. The civic religion had been propped up by public life and government life which both began to lesson their support around the same time. This pluralism along with the loss of public and government support left civic Christians in crisis because they could not define their faith adequately against these new religious people.
4. Mainline Churches wed themselves to the liberalism of modernity seen in these values: reason, individual and human self-sufficiency, great sense of optimism, and a strong belief in progress. The mainline churches wed themselves to these ideals of modernity and lost any critical perspective as a result. This was done in a liberal and fundamentalist way known as foundationalism.
•Change: WWII, the holocaust, Korean War, Viet Nam, Rwanda, El Salvador, and the like have weakened our sense of optimism and progress. Science has brought into question the limits of our reason and the reality of our self-sufficiency.
5. Norm: Complacency of the Establishment-Civic Faith churches assumed that they would always be relevant, important, and prominent in place. As a result they could ignore the world changing around them and keep doing things the way they were taught to do them in the past.
•Change: Society moved in an exponentially increasing rate of change in every aspect of people’s lives leaving the church in the past looking very dated and irrelevant.
