Title and Abstract:
Uncivil Religion

by Paul Christopher Johnson

The problem of civil religion, if not always the phrase itself, has typically been formulated as an interested intervention in a moment of perceived crisis: the declining authority of the ancien regime (Rousseau), the anomie of industrialization and urbanization (Durkheim), the fascist transformation of Italy (Gramsci), or the Viet Nam War (Bellah). The aftermath of September 11, 2001, presents another propitious moment for its invocation. Indeed, the post-September 11 context has produced the most dramatic display of civil religion in the U.S. since a half-century ago-the Cold War and McCarthyist moment when "In God We Trust" was inscribed on hard currency, and "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Yet just when it appears that we most need the analytical category of civil religion, it lies bowed and beaten on the sideline.

This essay presents a critique of the concept of civil religion in order to resurrect it as a particularly powerful form of ideology. As ideology, the post-9-11 objective of civil religion was to counter intra-national divisions with a radical emphasis on the nation's outer boundary. It reduced internal dissent by increasing symbolic violence directed toward "outsiders." This is not to debunk the idea of civil religion as a shared repertoire of religious action superceding specific traditions, but rather to argue that those shared repertoires of action are quite different, and quite distinct from official expressions by government speakers.

In the second half of the essay, I consider the distinction between civil religion as popular practice and civil religion as official spectacle. The method employed is a comparison between actions at spontaneous altars erected around the wreckage site of the destroyed World Trade Towers, on one hand, and official speeches on the other. The essay shows that official forms of civil religion do not express a collective will, as relatively bloodless formulations from Durkheim to Bellah would suggest, but rather seek to generate and enforce collective will by discursively linking social distinctions, moral values and sanctioned emotional directives. The objective of such civil religion is to reduce internal dissent by directing symbolic and actual violence against national and religious "outsiders"

E-mail address and/or mailing address:
Paul Johnson

Department of Religious Studies
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211-4140

C.V. or relevant publishing history:

Paul Christopher Johnson received the Ph.D. in History of Religions from The University of Chicago and is currently (as of June 2003) Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, and Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Michigan (2003-4). His first major project, Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. His current project, Building the Transnational Indigenous: Religion and Migration between the Caribbean and the U.S., relates empirical data on a single transnational society, the Garifuna of the Caribbean coast of Honduras and of New York City, to broader comparative issues of religion and migration.

Johnson was the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities Grants in 2001 and 2003.