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Bar Ran Dun posted:Participation in symbolic acts, shared by a group or community, that we consider to have meaning, that’s very much religion. The thing I find most interesting in this Good series of posts is the implication that people who talk about civil religion "want to undermine [it]," because it gets to the heart of this in a very specific way. Are the "people who are raising this argument" and therefore trying to "undermine the concept of liberal democracy" physically interfering with the machinery of liberal democracy? Are they smashing voting machines, bulldozing the locations where you vote, defacing the iconography of the great fathers, such as the image of George Washington ascending into heaven, which has a prominent place in the capital building? Is this "undermining" a material activity?  Well, no. The way people bringing up the argument are "undermining the concept of liberal democracy" is by spreading doubt. Say what you will about all the other aspects of the argument (which I think Probably Magic and Bar Ran Dun are covering rather interestingly), but trying to defend liberal democracy as not being a civic religion by appealing to the fact that our enemies will cause people to doubt it and disbelieve in it is extremely funny. If anyone is really interested in the issue of defining a civic religion, there's a pretty interesting paper called "The Relevance of the Concept of Civil Religion from a (West) German Perspective." that can be found online in it's totality that goes over the debate using a specific, local context. Some of the more interesting bits: quote:Luhmann sees civil religion as guaranteeing the state and integrating its citizens, as demanded by Böckenförde. For him, civil religion represents a minimum of shared religious elements including the recognition of core values like liberty, democracy, and fairness. In his social systems theory, civil religion relates to the overall system as a mode of communication between the different sub-systems, for example law, politics, or academia (although it works differently in all sub-systems). In fact, to Luhmann, civil religion rules supreme over religion, which, like Talcott Parsons, Bellah’s Ph.D. supervisor, Luhmann identifies as structure-preserving. Ultimately, to Luhmann, civil religion better adapts to the growing generalization in differentiated societies and reduces complexity. Hence, in his theory, civil religion replaces religion. quote:Similarly, political scientists Roland Benedikter and Georg Göschl call for a unifying European (secular) civil religion with a transnationally and transethnically defined set of values such as democracy, freedom, and human rights, all of which the authors historically identify as decidedly “European ideals.” This civil religion should focus on European cultural, political, social, and economic achievements forging a sense of unity and solidarity among European nations (Benedikter and Göschl 2014; see also Hildebrandt 2006; Nix 2012). However, how this civil religion should come into being remains unclear, especially in view of recent populist gains. Already in 2001, the legal scholar Michael Heinig pointed to the failure of a project by the European Commission in the 1990s to create some kind of European civil religion (Heinig 2001). In 2014, Benedikter and Göschl were still hoping for a top-down project by the European Commission (Benedikter and Göschl 2014). Which, I think, illustrates exactly where Probably Magic and Bar Ran Dun are coming from. The entire reason that "liberal democracy" and "religion" can jockey for first place is because they are competing for the same turf - the set of basic values that under-gird our society. And of course, in that case, in can be undermined by doubt - if people stop believing in "liberty, democracy, and fairness" as unifying values that we all agree on, it does, in fact, undermine the whole process. (A careful reader might notice that part of the reason this thread exists is because people have started to doubt the efficacy of the system and the universalism of it's basic values!) (There is, by the way, an interesting part of the paper on that mentions how some political theorists described post-war German churches as "folk churches" who spread the basic values of the post-war German civil religion - in other words, the competition goes both ways!)
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Mar 10, 2024 11:22
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