If, as Verba Says, the State Functions as a Religion, What Are We to Do Then to Save our Souls?

Abstract

Sidney Verba has argued that the state in modern societies may function as a religion. He is certainly not the only one to adopt such a point of view. But his work is especially notable in that he has strengthened the argument by welding together a theoretical perspective that seems to be derived from structural-functional analysis and a good deal of varied and interesting, though not crystal-clear data. Verba's discussion of the functions of the state is most explicit in his article on the Kennedy assassination—in which he seeks to interpret the many studies of public reaction to the President's death. In this article, appropriately titled “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” Verba attempts to go to essentials. He speaks of the deeper levels of political involvement made evident by the psychological crisis of the assassination. Repeatedly he employs the term “primordial” to describe the character of the underlying political commitment to the nation-state and its symbols in modern societies—the foremost of these symbols in America being the President. But let Verba speak for himself since he is explicit about these matters: first, on the nature of public reactions and the larger meaning of those reactions:The Kennedy assassination … illustrates the close meshing of the sacred and the secular in the top institutions of a political system. In a society in which the formal ideology is officially secular … the close linkage of religious institutions to the events of the crisis weekend is particularly striking … a larger proportion of the American population responded to the assassination with prayer or attendance at special church services and religious ceremony and imagery abounded in the events of the weekend.