Civil religion
Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the term in chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract (1762), to describe what he regarded as the moral and spiritual foundation essential for any modern society.
For Rousseau, civil religion was intended simply as a form of social cement, helping to unify the state by providing it with sacred authority.
In Britain, where church and state are constitutionally joined, the monarch's coronation is an elaborate religious rite celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Rome also had a civil religion, whose first Emperor Augustus officially attempted to revive the dutiful practice of classical paganism.
In this campaign, Augustus erected monuments such as the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, showing the Emperor and his family worshiping the gods.
He also encouraged the publication of works such as Virgil's Æneid, which depicted "pious Æneas", the legendary ancestor of Rome, as a role model for Roman religiosity.
[17] Michael Gladwin has argued that for Australians Anzac Day "functions as a kind of alternative religion, or 'civil religion', with its own sense of the mystical, transcendent and divine", while Carolyn Holbrook has observed that after 1990 Anzac Day commemoration was "repackaged" as a protean "story of national genesis" that could flexibly accommodate a wide spectrum of Australians.
According to Gladwin, "The emphasis of Anzac Day is no longer on military skills but rather values of unpretentious courage, endurance, sacrifice in the midst of suffering, and mateship.
Anzac Day provides universally recognised symbols and rituals to enshrine transcendent elements of Australia's historical experience, making it a quasi-religion, or at least a 'civil religion'.
In France's case, Baylac argues, the French government encouraged a veritable state religion, worshiping the flag and multiplying the national holidays and commemorative monuments. ...
However under Vladimir Putin in the 21st century the memory of Stalin has been partly rehabilitated in search of a strong leader who made the nation powerful.
For example, school textbooks were rewritten to portray "the mass terror of the Stalin years as essential to the country's rapid modernization in the face of growing German and Japanese military threats, and amid the inaction or duplicity of the Western democracies.
[8] The historian Conrad Cherry called the Memorial Day ceremonies "a modern cult of the dead" and says that it "affirms the civil religious tenets".
According to the sociologist Robert Bellah: Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth.
As historians have noted, the Revolution produced a Moses-like leader (George Washington), prophets (Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine) and martyrs (Boston Massacre, Nathan Hale), as well as devils (Benedict Arnold), sacred places (Valley Forge, Bunker Hill), rituals (Boston Tea Party), emblems (the new flag), sacred holidays (July 4) and a holy scripture whose every sentence is carefully studied and applied in current law cases (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights).
The application of the concept of civil religion to the United States was in large part the work of sociologist Robert Bellah.
Alvin J. Schmidt argues that since the 1700s, expressions of civil religion in the United States have shifted from a deistic to a polytheistic stance[example needed].
[29] Arguing against mob violence and lynching, Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1838 Lyceum speech that the Constitution and the laws of the United States ought to become the "political religion" of each American.
