Sentences with phrase «term civil religion»

While the exact application of the term civil religion can be debated, the ubiquity of what can be called «the religio - political problem» can hardly be doubted.

Not exact matches

Sociologist Robert Bellah first applied the term «civil religion» to American politics in a 1967 essay.

Social - Gospel advocates in the early twentieth century and their mainline children continued to view Christianity's role in the project of American civil religion in terms of the social impact of its moral vision.

Madison's implicit assumption, and that of the entire tradition of religious toleration until the last few decades, however, was that religious diversity and conflict would involve competing sects that differ on some important questions of doctrine and practice but nonetheless share in common a basic Judeo - Christian orientation that is also, in very broad terms, our society's implicit civil religion.

In Habits of the Heart (1985) the term «civil religion» does not appear.

The meaning of every key term in the civil religion — certainly liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also equality and even life — differs in those two perspectives.18

But in taking the term «civil religion» from Rousseau's Social Contract I was also bringing in a much more general concept, common in America in the eighteenth century but by no means specifically American.

If we can see the connection between general civil religion and virtue defined as concern for the common good, we can begin to see the connections between general civil religion and special civil religion, for special civil religion defines the norms in terms of which the common good is conceived.

When I use the term «civil religion» I am pointing to that revolution in the minds of men that John Adams argued was the real Revolution in America.

Of these contemporary heresies, civil religion, or what Douthat terms «political theology,» emerges as perhaps the most heretical betrayal of Christianity because it encourages Americans to believe that patriotism is, in its essence, a Christian enterprise.

Yet having little in the way of any «theology» independent of the state, they are not fully civil religions in Rousseau's meaning of that term.

Although the two quasi-civil religions (ecclesiastical legitimacy and nationalism phrased in sacred terms) were historical options Mexico might have elected, the Rousseau - type civil religion must now be regarded as remote indeed.

America's public faith (a term I prefer to «civil religion») emerged precisely because denominationalism could be tolerated only if a creative relationship to the larger political and cultural dimensions of religious necessity were maintained.

First, the qualities of American civil religion must be seen in terms of their boundary posturing functions in relation to other dominant world powers.

More neutral terms such as «political religion» or «religion of the republic» or «public piety» would not have churned up the profound empirical ambiguities «civil religion,» with its two thousand years of historical resonance, inevitably did.

I shall turn from external speculation and from the introduction of tendentious terms like «civil religion» to the way the tradition has understood itself.

The founders of this republic had read most of those theorists and were concerned with the problem, even though they did not use the term.2 The difficult arises because for most of those two thousand years there has been a profound antipathy, indeed an utter incompatibility, between civil religion and Christianity.

Yet Jefferson's hope for a national turn to Unitarianism as the dominant religion, a turn that would have integrated public theology and the formal civil religion much more intimately than was actually the case, was disappointed and public theology was carried out predominantly in terms of biblical symbolism.

The term «civil religion» has spread far beyond any coherent concept thereof, or at least beyond anything I ever meant by the term.

The text is employed to speak of national «revival,» defined in terms of renewed civil religion and moral awakening.

Too complicated to be identified with Shintõ alone, the halo of symbols and slogans and emotions which congealed around Japan in those years would better be denoted by some more general term such as «civil religion.»

While Rousseau is generally credited with coining the term «civil religion,» analysis of civil religion in sociology has been influenced more by Emile Durkheim.

There is warrant for this broader usage in the origin of the term itself, in that «civil religion» is pretty clearly an outgrowth of the term «civil theology» that Augustine used to characterize the religion of pre-Christian Rome.5 That religion was, in terms of my typology, distinctly archaic.

Dr. Bellah clarifies the term «civil religion» and how the principle has worked out in our history, and he discusses the confusion about the nature of the American republic.

«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.

Whether we wish to call all such forms of institutionalization civil religions or confine that term to only some of such forms, it is here that we must locate the problem of civil religion.

Indeed, through the pressure of such groups as the American Civil Liberty Union, philosophical liberalism is rapidly becoming our orthodox civil religion, if I may indulge in a contradiction in terms, and traditional American views of the relation of religion and society are declared unconstitutiCivil Liberty Union, philosophical liberalism is rapidly becoming our orthodox civil religion, if I may indulge in a contradiction in terms, and traditional American views of the relation of religion and society are declared unconstituticivil religion, if I may indulge in a contradiction in terms, and traditional American views of the relation of religion and society are declared unconstitutional.

In a set of resolutions submitted by Madison to the First Congress we find the term «rights of conscience» as a third item after the prohibition of the abridgment of civil rights on account of religious belief and the prohibition of the establishment of a «national religion.»