Civil Religion in Political Thought: Its Perennial Questions and Enduring Relevance in North America (review)

The first part of this book studies how philosophers and a theologian from different periods of Western history have understood the nature and function of civil religion. This provides a theoretical background for the last four chapters, which study how civil religion has been understood and the forms it has taken in the United States and Canada. The result is an informative collection of essays about the relationship of religion to civil society and its current state in Canada and the United States.

The first essay by Bradley Lewis examines civil religion as understood in Plato’s Laws, the tension posited there between its normative nature and the critical inquiry of philosophy, and the institutions proposed to accommodate this. Matthias Riedl’s essay examines debates about civil religion between Christians and Roman critics of Christianity in the later Roman Empire. David Bobb examines Augustine’s critique of Roman civil religion, focusing on Augustine’s exaltation of humility and critique of pride. Reinhold Niebuhr, a twentieth-century follower of Augustine, eventually parted company with him by affirming that pride and ambition, depending on what they esteem, can sometimes serve the public good. Bobb does not question Augustine on this. Travis Smith examines Hobbes’s understanding of Christianity and civil religion. David Innes studies how Francis Bacon conceived religion almost as a technology, to be valued for its civil utility and shaped to serve this. Ronald Weed describes how Rousseau understood the necessity of civil religion in relation to the tension between individual freedom and state unity. Douglas Kries studies Tocqueville’s understanding of the role of religion in democracy, with particular attention to his assessment of Roman Catholicism.

In Part 2, Jeffrey Sikkenga looks at the understanding of religion, reason, and the public good behind Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy of the separation of church and state. Thomas Powers traces how this separation in the United States has been transformed since World War II through its interpretation by the Supreme Court and the activism of the religious right. Joseph Knippenberg examines the role George W. Bush’s religion played in his presidency. Unfortunately, Knippenberg restricts himself to a formal analysis of the rhetoric of Bush and his speech writers, without considering the violence abroad and the devastation at home that Bush used his Christian faith to help legitimate. Preston Jones shows how in the later 1800s, the Bible was a cultural artefact in Canadian societies, an accepted authority whose language permeated Canadian civil and political discourse, and how it was selectively appropriated by those invoking it. John von Heyking argues that a myth of progress underlies the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and is being presented as Canada’s new civil religion.

Together these essays form a well-written, informative, thought-provoking, and cohesive book, well suited for university courses on religion and politics or for academics working in this area. They show that political theory down through the ages has tended to adopt a dialectical relationship to religion, recognizing how it provides moral guidance and cohesion to society but also how it has disruptive and violent potential. They also show that the issues that led political theorists in the past to view religion this way continue to be present today.

This collection does not discuss the contemporary work of people such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, or Jeffrey Stout. Also, some essays do not consider important factors at work in what they study. For instance, regarding the last essay, some of those who endorse Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms see this as an expression not of a myth of progress but of their own Christian faith in a pluralistic context. Still this book admirably achieves its goal of showing the relevance of civil religion and questions surrounding it in Canada and the United States.