The New American Civil Religion: Lesson for Italy

I. WHY CIVIL RELIGION? Alessandro Ferrari nicely delineates the predicament of civil religion in Italy: centered around a Catholicism that is no longer universal enough to be a basis for national identity.1 The problems he describes are not peculiar to Italy. Much of what he complains of has analogues that are familiar to me as a U.S. lawyer who studies the law of religion in the United States. The United States has a civil religion of its own, with its own gaps, incoherencies, and exclusions. Most pertinently here, American civil religion has been changing, responding to increasing religious plurality by becoming more abstract. Perhaps Italy has, in this respect, an American future. Why is there civil religion at all? What is the point of these bland, watered-down rituals? The idea of a civil religion is commonly traced to Rousseau,2 with a prominent recent updating by Robert Bellah,3 but the fundamental idea was offered much earlier by Augustine, who wrote: "A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by common agreement on the objects of their love."4 Augustine was transforming an earlier definition by Cicero of a community as an "association of men united by a common sense of right and a community of interest."5 A people's character, Augustine thought, was determined by the objects of its love: "the better the objects of agreement, the better the people."6 Augustine did not think that a people united around genuinely attractive objects, even a common sense of justice, could exist in this world: in any earthly republic, good people would be forced to coexist with evil ones. A regime was more like a band of thieves, cohesive out of necessity.7 It took more recent developments to produce a politics that sought to realize Augustine's ideal in this world-not in the sense of a commonwealth ruled by God, but in the sense of an association united by common agreement on the (worthy!) object of their love. Why has an Augustinian ideal become practically important today? Charles Taylor argues that cohesion has become more important because of the needs of modern representative democracy: Traditional despotisms could ask of people only that they remain passive and obey the laws. A democracy . . . has to ask more. It requires that its members be motivated to make the necessary contributions: of treasure (in taxes), sometimes blood (in war), and always of some degree of participation in the process of governance.8 This is why states try to inculcate a sense of patriotism. This imperative toward a common identity, Taylor observes, pushes the state in two different directions. State builders have reached toward secularism, an ethic independent of confessional differences, "as a potential common point of allegiance for citizens, above and beyond their other differences."9 But at the same time, the imperative to bond citizens together can create "an allbut- irresistible pull to build the common identity around the things that strongly unite people, and these are frequently ethnic or religious identities."10 In the limiting case, "the logic of democracy can become that of ethnic cleansing."11 Thus, democracy does not necessarily entail liberalism. "Rather it ups the ante: either the civilized coexistence of diverse groups, or new forms of savagery."12 The aim, then, is a middle way between a civic identity so deracinated that it has no roots in the specific history of the people it seeks to bind together, and one so specific that it excludes recent immigrants. Constructing and maintaining this identity is a delicate operation, and its demands shift over time as the pertinent population shifts. Even when civil religion succeeds in performing its unifying function, it can still generate pathologies. Civil religion in the United States is an example. It does produce a culture in which many people feel that their religious beliefs are somehow associated with patriotism. …