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Conclusion In 1967 Robert Bellah published an article which firmly established the concept of "civil religion" in the minds of scholars. Following classical sociological theory, Bellah saw religion not as individual piety but as a symbol system which binds together a community. Embodied in presidential inaugural addresses, Memorial Day celebrations, and the sense of national "election" was a religious system which existed alongside traditional American denominations. By using a language unique to civil religion, public figures evoked a common set of national symbols which both reflected the sentiments of the people and cemented a particular notion of America. Bellah provided an American example of Durkheim's conviction that "the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize." Whether civil religion served as a legitimating ideology and ritual system or as a means of providing a transcendent judge for American society was of secondary interest to Bellah's insistance that public symbols define what is sacred in this country.1 Modifications of this Durkheimian perspective on religion took into account the tendency of modern Western society to push religion into the private, domestic sphere. Both Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy and Thomas Luckmann in The Invisible Religion assumed that the pressures of modern society forced individuals to retreat to the private sphere where they cultivated autonomy, self-expression, and selfrealization . Although admitting that "the segregation of religion within the private sphere is quite 'functional' " for the maintenance of modern society, they express dismay that the private sphere seized functions which are properly performed by the public sphere. Sexuality and its extension in the family are basically "innocuous from the point of view of a social order that is based, essentially, upon the functionally rational norms of the primary public institutions." For Berger and Luckman the family's role as a source of ultimate significance for its members was obvious, but regrettable.2 150 Conclusion Although historians documented how the modern Western family lost many of its economic functions and became primarily a center for socialization and affection, this change was seen as unfortunate. Ann Douglas, in her The Feminization of American Culture, has been justly criticized for labeling domestic culture as sentimental and thus undesirable . Supporters of popular Victorian culture such as Barbara Welter and Nina Baym approved of domestic novels because they were "vehicles of protest" which commented on "temperance, women's rights, prolabor and antilabor, slavery and abolition." In other words, only when the private sphere (dominated by women) attempted to control the public sphere (dominated by men) was the private sphere worth noting.3 By taking seriously the Victorian concern for domestic matters we can see how a particular social and spiritual ideology developed within the private sphere. Domestic religion for Protestants and Catholics served to both uphold the traditions of the larger church and to provide an alternative to that church. We cannot generalize and say that domestic religion is merely minature church-religion or a unique, personal response to the divine. What should be clear is that domestic religion has its own intrinsic logic, leadership patterns, and symbols which provide a sense of the sacred. Studying the role of religion within the home and the sacralizing impact of domestic symbols and activities emphasizes the importance of the family as an institution, an institution which stands between the community and the individual, possessing characteristics of each. I would modify Robert Bellah's argument for an American civil religion by insisting that running alongside of denominational religion in America is a domestic religion, as well as a civil religion. This domestic religion shares both the symbols of individual traditionsProtestantism , Catholicism, Judaism-and the symbols of American domesticity. By combining traditional religious symbols with a set of middle-class domestic values the Victorians rooted their home virtues in the eternal and allowed the more abstract traditional symbols to assume a real presence in everyday life. Domestic religion, in its uniquely religious and generally cultural forms, bound together what was truly meaningful in Victorian society. It also allowed the Victorians to separate and divide themselves from what they considered destructive to proper domestic sentiments. To understand the Christianity of this period we must look not only at public symbols of civil religion, or particular theologies, but at the sacramental character of the home. Domestic Christianity provided Protestants and Catholics with a [3...

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