From Civil to Political Religion is a book written by a sociologist and primarily for sociologists, although its subject matter, “civil religion,” is of intrinsic interest for political science. Although Marcela Cristi sometimes refers to elements of civil religion as “quasireligious” (pp. 49, 73, 155, 210) or even “secular” (pp. 57, 142–47, 215), she most frequently uses the term to name the use (whether by political institutions or not) of explicitly religious symbols, rituals, and beliefs for the “sacralization” of a political regime. Examples (these are mine) range from the Archbishop of Canterbury's coronation of the British monarch to the belief that “America, God shed His grace on thee.”

Civil religion is the subject of a lengthy debate among sociologists that was sparked by the work of Robert Bellah. Bellah's theoretical approach has established the frame for the debate, and his approach, Cristi claims, is onesided and doctrinaire. She traces the doctrine underlying Bellah's approach to Emile Durkheim's work on the origins of religion. Religion, Durkheim speculated, arose as a necessary support for the shared beliefs and morality required by every human society. Religion may point to something superior to society, but its essential function is to serve society, from which it originates spontaneously.

What sociologists tend to neglect under the influence of the Durkheimian doctrine is the conscious manipulation of religion by political leaders for political ends. Cristi finds the theoretical expositor of this sort of civil religion (to which she sometimes, as in her title, refers as “political religion”) in Rousseau, who coined the term (although not the notion of) “civil religion” in the Social Contract. Rousseauean civil religion also comes into being for the sake of society (i.e., a particular political society). It does not, however, arise spontaneously, but is instead “imposed … from the top down,” as a “result of conscious political determination” (pp. 231, 232). However much Rousseau may have wished civil religion to be compatible with, and indeed make possible, the general will of the people as a whole, his notion of civil religion, Cristi says, is a ready instrument of tyranny and the oppression of some portion of society by another.

Cristi does not mean to reject Durkheim's approach in favor of Rousseau's. Her thesis is that Durkheim and Rousseau present two useful theoretical poles for understanding civil religion, and that one will find some degree of each sort of civil religion in any given society. Part of the reason the Rousseauean view has been neglected is that the literature has been dominated by American scholars and a concern with the American case. With its constitutional disestablishment of religion, the United States would seem to have evidence in black and white that it seeks to avoid any manner of religious imposition of the Rousseauean sort. Thus, insofar as one does find religious support for American institutions among the people, such a civil religion would appear better explained by Durkheim's sociological doctrine than by Rousseau's political “top-down” doctrine.

But, Cristi contends, the United States is not as free of political top-down religion as it may appear. The evidence she presents in support of this claim is sparse. Political religion, as she presents it, needs some institutional instrument for its promulgation. Where does one find such a state instrument in the United States? Cristi finds that instrument (or perhaps it is merely an example?) in the public schools, whose “role as a powerful instrument for the indoctrination of American civil religion cannot be easily dismissed” (p. 132). She does little to support this admittedly weak assertion. It is not the most persuasive example prima facie, given that most public school instructors in the United States today will not touch the topic of religion with a ten-foot pole, let alone pursue a conscious policy of religious indoctrination, civil or other. Cristi fails to consider an alternative top-down explanation, namely, the possibility that the American regime exercises a profound influence over religious opinion without a state instrument of indoctrination, or that the very fact that the American regime eschews religious indoctrination influences religious opinion willy-nilly (perhaps more nilly than willy) in a way that supports the regime.

Cristi claims that American civil religion not only involves a degree of conscious political manipulation but also, perhaps for that very reason, fails to provide a consensus among the American people. Instead it (like all modern civil religions) necessarily excludes “religious or ethnic minorities” as “a result of the structural characteristics of civil religion itself, and of the pluralist nature of modern nationstates” (p. 216). This is a crucial part of the author's thesis, but it is not well developed. The radical challenge of religious pluralism to American civil religion is not explained in light of Bellah's contention that, as Cristi puts it, the American “common civic faith [was] born, in large measure, of the need to sustain a pluralistic culture by transcending its divergent and particularistic religious perspectives” (p. 168). She claims that in the United States “the idea of a broad universal consensus seems to be an ideal without a reality. Individualism, liberalism, and utilitarianism have, to a certain extent, diminished if not destroyed the basis of a common life and consensus” (p. 128). Yet she had earlier stated that “utilitarian individualism … [has] been a part of the American heritage since the dawn of the nation” (p. 53); and she later identifies “liberty, equality, individualism, democracy and the rule of law” as “the main political values of the American creed,” or civil religion (p. 205).

In Chapters 4 and 5, Cristi views civil religion from a “comparative perspective,” Chapter 5 describing Chile under Augusto Pinochet's rule as “a specific illustration of civil religion in its Rousseauean (politicoideological) form” (p. 167) (thus revealing how little weight she gives to Rousseau's doctrine of the general will in interpreting his teaching on civil religion). She might be thought to retreat from her main thesis when she later refers to Pinochet's political use of religion as a “deformation and distortion” of civil religion (p. 185), thereby implying that civil religion proper is closer to Durkheim's and Bellah's conception after all.

The example of Pinochet's Chile marks a decidedly normative turn in the argument and leads Cristi to a broader consideration in Chapter 6 of the link between civil religion of whatever sort and nationalism (which she seems to identify with patriotism). She is clearly wary of what she calls “the religion of nationalism” (p. 209), which is “the unavoidable manifestation of civil religion itself ” (p. 213). The difficulty she raises is “how to instill in citizens a healthy love of their country … or a national pride … and to avoid the dark side of nationalism and its excesses” (p. 198). But she gives no suggestion of what a healthy patriotism (nationalism?) would look like. She mentions, without contradicting, the belief of both Durkheim and Rousseau that some sort of civil religion is necessary for political society. But she is more impressed by the dangers of civil religion than with the reasons for its necessity. Yet the question of the necessity of civil religion is extremely important and deserves a clear examination.

Besides its intrinsic importance for understanding of the necessities of politics, this question might have proved useful for providing a more adequate articulation of the special puzzle of civil religion in the United States, a country one of whose basic principles is the separation of church and state. What is the significance of the thesis, which Cristi tacitly accepts, that civil religion is necessary for every political society in light of the aspirations of the Enlightenment? John Adams claimed that “the United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; it will never be pretended that any persons employed in framing the United States’ governments had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven” (John Adams, “A Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America,” in The Political Writings of John Adams 1954, p. 118). Is Adams wrong that an essentially natural (rational) politics is possible? Does the necessity of “sacralization” mean that serious citizens must be duped by a fiction into a stronger attachment than political society can naturally claim? If so, how could any civil religion provide the “healthy love” of country Cristi seeks? Or are there by nature difficulties in political life that would require a supernatural solution?