The civil religion of James Harrington

Abstract

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Tertullian The idea of a civil religion is not one which students of political theory pay much attention to today. In so far as it resonates at all, it suggests a dark and aberrant episode in the career of the modern state. In the 1940s and 1950s scholars were understandably concerned to discover the roots of totalitarian state worship. In constructing its intellectual ancestry, paternity seemed to lie with Hegel, Rousseau and Machiavelli. Hegel, it was held, had sanctified the Prussian state by embodying God in the unfolding of national history. Rousseau, in his chapter on ‘Civil religion’ in The Social Contract, had apparently married a religion of patriotism to his theory of an invincible democratic sovereignty. And Machiavelli, in the Discourses, had found the Christian religion inadequate in comparison with ancient Rome's ability to harness piety for the glory of the patria. Unavoidably, therefore, ‘civil religion’ came to connote a Faustian and totalitarian device to secure blind obedience to the state by the exploitation of human aspirations to spiritual fulfilment. For some commentators its aberrance lay in its violation of Augustine's Christian scepticism about temporal rule and earthly perfectibility. For others it lay in its violation of what seemed the pre-eminent achievement of modern political sensibility, the secular separation of politics and religion. It was, either way, ‘a radical departure from Western tradition’.