Talk:American civil religion

United States civil religion

This article should be moved to United States civil religion as America covers a much greater region than the US and this article does not, SqueakBox 22:12, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Welcome squeak, and thanks for your suggestion. The term American civil religion was coined by Robert Bellah in 1967, not United States civil religion. I understand that in most cases this would be the correct move, because I am sensitive to Americans calling the United States America when it is the whole continent too. But:

1. But since Robert Bellah coined American civil religion, I think this is correct.

1. In addition, the English language has no substitute for American, and Robert Bellah is discussing American's individual and collective views, not the American states views.

I look forward to your edits in this article. It is rather new, and I hope to get more people editing this article.22:23, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Okay, dont know how confident I feel to edit this as I know almost nothing about US society, unfortunately there is no real translation for the word American, as wikipedia has abundantly shown me, SqueakBox 23:56, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

First sentence

The first sentence does not quite make sense in its present form because of the word essays:

American civil religion is a term coined by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, since becoming one of the most debated and controversial essays in United States sociology.

Basically the sentence says the term became one of the most debated and controversial essays. I don't know anything about this topic, but from a grammatical poit of view, I would suggest soemthing like:

American civil religion is a term coined by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967. It sparked one of the most debated and controversial debates in United States sociology.

or

American civil religion is a term coined by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967 in the essay titled XXX, which since became one of the most debated and controversial essays in United States sociology.

Someone who knows about this topic please fix this first sentence! Thanks JenLouise 06:40, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the great suggestion. Travb (talk) 01:27, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Nom for deletion

This is basically a non-article. There's not much information, and what's there is almost incomprehensible. It's also not quite notable enough to have its own article. Therefore, I've nominated it for deletion. Graymornings 08:06, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I will rewrite the information. Thanks for the critique.

There is a huge number of sociologists who disagree with you that this term is notable. See the referene section. 08:25, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I just read over the information. What is not comprehensible? Travb (talk) 08:27, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

The "three periods" section is poorly-written and has a couple of sentences that don't go anywhere, such as:

When "the spiritual glue that had bound the nation together in previous years had simply collapsed".

It's not exactly a sentence and the punctuation is a bit off. I don't really know how to fix the section, though, as I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean. At the very least it's an unsourced quote. Graymornings 02:28, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I fixed the sentence. I really appreciate your criticisms Graymornings but in my opinion the way you went about expressing those criticisms: putting a deletion tag on this page is appalling and troubling. In my opinion this is yet another case of the deletion tags being abused. I am sure you will disagree but I won't argue. Any other criticisms you have please express them here, and I will try my hardest to fix them, or, if possible, WP:BB and attempt to fix them yourself.

99.9% of the time all of my contributions are sourced. This section is no different with two sources (see paragraph). Travb (talk) 04:35, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it's "appaling" [sic] to recommend the article for deletion. However, I'm not going to put it back on if you don't feel it's necessary. Still, I question your ability to edit this page effectively if you can't use basic spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The sentence I mentioned was not the only typo on the page -- still isn't, by the way, though I doubt you know where the rest are. You seem to have taken "ownership" of the article, which Wikipedia does not recommend. To put it bluntly, you're taking criticism of the article too personally. It's not about you; it's about the content. At the very least, I'm putting a cleanup tag on it. I don't know enough about the subject to do an in-depth edit (not to mention a proofread), but an objective person with basic English skills needs to edit the article. Graymornings 05:23, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Is the pargraph better written now?

Again, I appreciate your constructive criticims of the article.

Piety personal attacks I can do without. Travb (talk) 06:47, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

POV

You have an entire section with evidence supporting Bellah but nothing about controversy or criticisms - I'm sitting here in religious studies class and my teacher is talking about how his stuff has come under criticism lately, but I get here and all I see are an explanation of the ideas and then support for them. How can you have support and not criticism? Kuronue | Talk 16:14, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

WP:BB add the criticism section with sourced and cited information. I am not aware of the criticism section, I look forward to you adding it and learning from you. Travb (talk) 23:56, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

"Merge" idea without proposal

United States Constitution as a civic religion is a newly created spin-off from U.S. Constitution. Similarly to the experience here, the "concept" was immediately attacked as "contrived". I made a defense there. Can the spin-off be merged with this article as a section?

I'm not sure how this works at WP. I'm an oldie-newbie. Help. circle the wagons! Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, etc., etc., the book burners are upon us. I was introduced to the "concept" of civil religion by Herberg in assigned reading of "Protestant, Catholic, Jew" in a sociology class, later wrote a paper in philosophy using him to explicate Rousseau's "civic religion" in the Social Contract.

I get it that one was descriptive and one prescriptive. But, can't we just all get along? Any port in a storm, etc., etc. Can "United States Constitution as a civil religion" be merged into American civil religion as a section?

Or do editors here see the two as stand-alone articles? TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 12:56, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

My sense is somebody worked hard to create the United States Constitution as a civic religion piece and that we should keep it, and my sense is that merging the article with this one -- American civil religion -- seems sensible as a way to keep material. What do you think?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 16:48, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

The section added is a chunk from the unwieldy United States Constitution article which had grown to 250K and was incredibly slow to load. At present due to the pioneering work of Jim Henderson the USC article is under 200K, and the effort to spin off this subsection is designed to trim it further. So I copied this article from the US Const article -- subsection entitled "Civic Religion", and I only added one line -- the first one -- but I have not edited it.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 02:09, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Correct about slow loading - if you have a slow connection. (Technology and faster modems, etc. will solve that problem.) But does the title of this article comply with WP:UCN? I think not. --S. Rich (talk) 03:41, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Agree -- title needs fixing. Any ideas?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:07, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

How about this -- merging this article with American civil religion? What do you think?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:30, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Same thing happened five years ago when a wise split of the overlarge Bicycle article led to the unwise creation of Bicycle uses which was soon merged into an older but hitherto neglected article. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:44, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Copied the above here to this page now. --Tomwsulcer (talk) 02:33, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. The "slow loading" issue has to take priority in every discussion of article length to reach the goal of expanding southern hemisphere readership and authorship. Which is not to say I do not have pride of authorship . . . all I want for Christmas is for everyone to read the WP article on Rousseau's The Social Contract, which fyi I have not contributed to. Thanks again. More to do. TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 12:38, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Minor technical point, this is a circumstance in which WP:MERGE provides better guidance than WP:PROD. The same editor who created the article agreed the next day that it shouldn't exist. The article being new was unlikely to have attractd much attention outside the small circle of us dealing with the US Constitution article, thus there was little danger of dissent but a Discussion page was generated. Quicker action and better result in such cases if the article, despite the brevity of its independent existence, is reduced to a redirect with the discussion page preserved, rather than go through the deletion process which takes time and seeks opinions from other editors who have other things to do. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:55, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Expand rationale, continued.

- "American civil religion" can be expanded to address a larger scope. The concept is broadly understood and widely used in philosophy, history, political science, sociology and religion. Note that WP style already renders "civic religion" to "civil religion". A search redirects to "civil religion". So, it is found at Civil religion and American civil religion.

- The descriptive concept as developed in sociology is found in Bellah and Herberg. The prescriptive "Civic religion" is from the ancient Roman republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract. See the general concepts of tolerance, republicanism, civic virtue, democracy and equality. Additional writers include Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant.

- Attacked elsewhere as "contrived", the concept is that there can be group identity and several levels of social cohesion and concerted action in a large aggregate of population where there is a common ethos. Of course, all sense of human connectedness and commonality is "contrived" in the meaning developed by Sartre and the existentialists. On the other hand, it seems that nation-states may be with us for now, and the U.S. is among them. If people act like a "nation", there is such a thing as a "nation" and they are one. A rose by any other name, etc., etc. "Civic religion", likewise. Can the article here be usefully expanded for encyclopedic purposes, including merging "US Constitution as civic religion" into it as a section or as a sub-section of the prescriptive part? TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 13:13, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Section being chopped

Just a note to say that the section being dropped was contributed by another user and took time to write, and decisions to move it here were based on a long length of United States Constitution as part of a project to slim the main article back down. If the chopped section does not belong in this article, maybe it should have its own article or be included elsewhere? Or else it could be edited or trimmed in a way so that it fits in with this article? My concern is that Wikipedia needs to keep good contributors like the person or persons who wrote this section, and that chopping an entire section risks alienating them.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 16:40, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

this article is and always has been about American Civil Religion. Other topics don't belong here--especially if they were written for an entirely different purpose and spliced in here. I moved the section on the physical document back to the History article where it belongs.Rjensen (talk) 17:16, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Take a look at the very short Charters of Freedom. I've just now C&Pd the chopped material. That article now needs expansion to cover the other Charter documents. --S. Rich (talk) 17:48, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Good thinking. I put the Charters of Freedom article on my oversee list and will take a look at it in the future. Thanks.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 20:22, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

"Constitutionalized" article

Savidan edits without discussion to suppress an item in "further reading". Since this article is not entirely "constitutionalized", no wiki-reader should have link access from this page to an article on the United States Constitution.

I hope that I have misunderstood. There is a view among some sociologists that there is no objective reality to be found by inspecting anything concrete, such as the Constitution, for instance. The only scope of discussion is that impression of the Constitution held by surveyed subjects chosen in rigorously defined stratified random samples taken from a scholarly, conventional and peer-reviewed universe, aggregated and illustrated with appropriate normative bell curves and footnoted with significance tables of t-test statistics expressing their application to the hypotheses certainties and/or uncertainties for publication in professional journals. Serious scholars undertake profound investigations in rigorous fields of study. There is nothing "soft" about these social sciences. Some of my best friends hold PhDs. I get it.

On the other hand, in an article for a general readership encyclopedia, there could be an editorial policy to include multi-disciplinary sources and resources relating to the human condition. This topic in particular should admit contributions from multiple fields of study, history and political science, sociology and religion, social psychology and psychology. All of these fields of study have scholarly aspects which bear on "American civil religion". If nothing else, it is useful to refer to the document as written and adjudicated, practiced and understood, to see how the four diverge among different jurisdictions, populations and over time. Some readers may want to pursue just such a comparative line of thinking. further reading should enable multidisciplinary inquiry.

Editors should read text. Some Wiki-editors write that the Tenth Amendment says that powers not expressly given to the U.S. belong to the states. But on inspection, the text says powers not given to the U.S. nor prohibited by it to the States, belong to the States or to the people. These same editors frequently refer to the "sovereign states" to the exclusion of the "sovereign people", and notably use editor names relating to the American South. Some further reading into the text brings larger understanding of the topic, regardless of earlier editorial contributions.

The "further reading" item "United States Constitution" should be restored. TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 12:56, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Maybe start over?

According to the first sentence, "American civil religion is a sociological theory that there exists a nonsectarian religious faith in the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history." So far, so good. But throughout the article I'm overwhelmed by the many references to the simple mixing of religious and political activity-- basically either politicians making references to God, or religious leaders making references to events in American history. If these examples elucidate American civil religion, someone should explain how. Otherwise, someone should remove them. As I understand it, the pledge of allegiance (especially *without* the "under God" clause) seems like one of the best examples of American civil religion. 208.68.128.90 (talk) 20:03, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

the article covers the examples used by the scholars and specialists on the topic. The very heavy emphasis on nondenominational religious themes is quite distinctively American. Rjensen (talk) 20:16, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

At last I found Lincoln here.

I thought because of this Abraham Lincoln cultural depictions is somewhat of Cult of personality. The weirdest example is even as a Vampire Hunter. I found him here, so need for further additions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.168.42.20 (talk) 12:57, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Native American view

It would be nice to have a Native American viewpoint, though I can't supply one. Allmedia (talk) 22:33, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

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Heretics

Seventh Day Adventists are not the most notable "heretics" when it comes to American civil religion. They may tend toward pacifism but they do believe in patriotism and salute the flag (see http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-11-23/news/9411231052_1_seventh-day-adventist-church-adventist-christian-salute-the-flag). The clearest "heretics" would be Jehovah's Witnesses. They do not serve in the military or government, salute the flag, or take official oaths. Jehovah's Kingdom supersedes all else to them. I think this paragraph should be edited to reflect this.

I restored a much earlier version of this article intro

I restored a much earlier version of this article intro. Over the years, So much unnecessary scientific jargon was added to a fairly straightforward and easy to understand concept. Infinitepeace (talk) 05:06, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Trump as a priest/prophet (or antichrist) of the American Civil Religion

I haven't seen anything written about this so it's not possible to put it into the wiki page. But my sense of Trump is that one of the things he managed to do is take some of the American civil religion around himself and putting himself in it as a figure trying to protect that religion. In some ways others would thusly view him as an antichrist of the religion which would inspire virulent hatred against him or passionate following for him him depending on their viewpoint. Ergzay (talk) 06:15, 11 September 2022 (UTC)