From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics by Marcela Cristi (review)

humanities 325 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Butler contra Bernard Mandeville and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Next, in discussing a few of the usual suspects from the Scottish Enlightenment, Andrew makes the telling point that >[f]or leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience was Hobbesian Erastianism.= Reference to the first volume of Isabel Rivers=s magisterial Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study in the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660B1780 (1991) would have enriched Andrew=s analysis of British ethical thought during that period. Andrew in his penultimate chapter looks at conscience in >the radical politics of Paine, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Blake.= Blake is the cynosure: >England may not have had an Enlightenment but she had its greatest critic.= Andrew=s historical judgment about England rests on an apparent misinterpretation of the work of J.G.A. Pocock and the late Roy Porter. They reject efforts to construct a unitary notion of the Enlightenment (or >the Enlightenment project=) from the mid-eighteenth-century radical French experience, but they both maintain that England had an Enlightenment, on Pocock=s showing likely several enlightenments. Porter lived to tell the tale in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000). After a chapter persuasively arguing for >the implicitly Protestant character of [John Stuart] Mill=s doctrine of conscience and its rights to freedom,= Andrew concludes with some stimulating theoretical and practical reflections on conscience conceived of as >an egalitarian protest against capitalist inequality and a moral protest against enlightened reason as bourgeois calculation.= What began in metaphysics ends in politics. (ROBERT E. SULLIVAN) Marcela Cristi. From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 294. $32.95 Marcela Cristi in From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics performs a critique of the academic discourse surrounding civil religion. The critique is motivated in a large part by what she perceives as the inadequacy of this discourse in explaining the operation of civil religions in contexts other than the United States. She grounds the critical thrust of the book by establishing the one-sided nature of the predominate view of civil religion, which she persuasively maintains is shaped primarily on Robert N. Bellah=s 1967 article, >Civil Religion in America.= Through analysis of Bellah=s article she shows that it is based on an understanding of civil religion informed by Emile Durkheim=s view of religion and its role in communities. For Durkheim, religion developed out of a pre-existing sense of moral community and social cohesion: it did not produce social integration, but organically emerged 326 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 from it. Views of civil religion derived from Durkheim=s perspective ignore the possibility that civil religion could be imposed by ideologically motivated elites. Therefore, according to Cristi, understandings of civil religion and how it functions based solely on the Durkheimian model are inadequate . She argues that the concept of civil religion as developed by Rousseau is also essential to understanding civil religion in all contexts. Civil religion is, according to Rousseau, an essential tool in generating social cohesion and ensuring the legitimacy of the social order. Therefore, the sovereign is fully justified in using coercion to enforce compliance with the tenets of the politically derived civil religion. The hypertrophy of the Durkheimian view, which perceives the civil religion as the fruit of an organic, spontaneous welling up of religious feeling, perpetuated by the preponderance of perspectives such as Bellah=s, has obscured the political and ideological elements of civil religion that Rousseau brought to the fore. Rousseau=s articulation of the political/ideological role of civil religion, Cristi argues, is crucial for understanding the phenomena. By failing to include Rousseau=s perspective, according to Cristi, the theoretical understanding of civil religion is significantly impoverished, and the political role of civil religion hidden. A key element of the critique is the claim that by understanding the civil religion as a means by which the national government is legitimated through reference to transcendent values and norms that emerge spontaneously...