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    From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics
    From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics
    From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics
    Ebook265 pages6 hours

    From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics

    By Marcela Cristi

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    Prompted by the shattering of the bonds between religion and the political order brought about by the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau devised a “new” religion (civil religion) to be used by the state as a way of enforcing civic unity. Emile Durkheim, by contrast, conceived civil religion to be a spontaneous phenomenon arising from society itself — a non-coercive force expressing the self-identify or self-definition of a people. In 1967, the American sociologist Robert Bellah rediscovered the concept and applied it to American society in its Durkheimian form.

    Ever since Bellah’s publication, most authors have sought to explain civil religion in terms of an alleged “spontaneous” integrative role for society. They have emphasized the religious and cultural dimension of the concept, but failed to give due consideration to its political-ideological foundations. Thus, the coercive potential of civil religion has received little attention or has been wrongly relegated to Third World countries.

    Cristi provides a critique of the civil religion thesis, and identifies the most basic deficiencies of literature on this topic. By contrasting Bellah’s Durkheimian conception with Rousseau’s original formulation, the author discloses the dubious conceptual and empirical basis of the former. She demonstrates the need to rethink Bellah’s thesis in the light of a reinterpretation of Rousseau’s and Durkheim’s classical approaches, and substantiates her critique with a brief comparative survey of state-directed civil religions, and with an informative case study of civil religion in Pinochet’s Chile.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2006
    ISBN9780889209381
    From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics
    Author

    Marcela Cristi

    Marcela Cristi is an assistant professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University.

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