Sentences with phrase «civil religion depends»

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.

But I am arguing civil religion depends upon conditions independent of particular individuals and events.

Not exact matches

«Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.»

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.

«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.