Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 3:00 PM
Joe Carter
Note: Earlier today I denounced as a waste of time the attempt by Republicans in the House to reaffirm ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto. A reader thoughtfully asked whether there is some value in reminding Americans that it is in God that we must trust. My answer is yes and no: Yes, it’s good to remind people to put their trust in God; no, it’s not good to ask them to put their trust in the deistic god of our civil religion. Is that what the House Republicans are doing? Yes, I think so. As a form of explanation I thought I’d dust off an old rant about civil religion.
Let us remember that it was the villain Jean Jacques Rousseau, who coined the phrase civil religion in his treatise, On the Social Contract (1762). Rousseau made the observation that in ancient times all governments were a form of theocracy with each nation serving their own god. States, therefore, never had religious wars since the governments “made no distinction between its gods and its laws.” Rousseau finds the genius of the Roman Empire was its ability to absorb both the nations and their gods and transform them into one pagan religion. This changed, he claims, with the appearance of Christ:
"It was in these circumstances that Jesus came to set up on earth a spiritual kingdom, which, by separating the theological from the political system, made the State no longer one, and brought about the internal divisions which have never ceased to trouble Christian peoples. As the new idea of a kingdom of the other world could never have occurred to pagans, they always looked on the Christians as really rebels, who, while feigning to submit, were only waiting for the chance to make themselves independent and their masters, and to usurp by guile the authority they pretended in their weakness to respect. This was the cause of the persecutions."
Rousseau claims that this division between religion and the state “made all good polity impossible in Christian States; and men have never succeeded in finding out whether they were bound to obey the master or the priest.” He believed that political leaders tried to restore this lost ideal but have been unsuccessful because of the influence of Christianity, which put devotion to God above that of the State. Since religious devotion is not only useful to the state but can become a hindrance to the state’s authority, a third way was needed—civil religion:
"There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them—it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.
"The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected."
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/02/a-civil-rant-agains-civil-religion/
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