CIVIL RELIGION

Civil Religion

Civil Religion

Answer 1

The Lynds began studying "Middletown" (their code name for Muncie, Indiana) in the 1920s to find out about its religious activities, but the study soon expanded to include all the major institutions in the city. They participated fully in community life and utilized a wide range of records and questionnaires. Into the equilibrium of habits which constitutes for each individual some integration in living has come this new habit, upsetting old adjustments, and blasting its way through such accustomed and unquestioned dicta as "Rain or shine, I never miss a Sunday morning at church"; "A high school boy does not need much spending money"; "I don't need exercise, walking to the office keeps me fit"; "I wouldn't think of moving out of town and being so far from my friends"; "Parents ought always to know where their children are." The newcomer is most quickly and amicably incorporated into those regions of behavior in which men are engaged in doing impersonal, matter-of-fact things; much more contested is its advent where emotionally charged sanctions and taboos are concerned. No one questions the use of the auto for transporting groceries, getting to one's place of work or to the golf course, or in place of the porch for "cooling off after supper" on a hot summer evening; however much the activities concerned with getting a living may be altered by the fact that a factory can draw from workmen within a radius of forty-five miles, These numbers have undoubtedly increased greatly since the count was made. As a matter of fact, by far the greater part of the wide diffusion of the automobile culture one observes today in Middletown has taken place within the last ten or fifteen years. There were less than 500,000 passenger automobiles registered in the entire United States in 1910 and only 5,500,000 in 1918, as over against 15,500,000 in 1924 or however much old labor union men resent the intrusion of this new alternate way of spending an evening, these things are hardly major issues. But when auto riding tends to replace the traditional call in the family parlor as a way of approach between the unmarried, "the home is endangered," and all-day Sunday motor trips are a "threat against the church"; it is in the activities concerned with the home and religion that the automobile occasions the greatest emotional conflicts.

Answer 2

There is a sense in which the American Revolution and the American civil religion are the same thing. When I use the term "civil religion" I am pointing to that revolution in the minds of men that John Adams argued was the real Revolution in America. That was the revolution that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, even though the Revolutionary War had scarcely begun. In taking the term "civil religion" from Rousseau's Social Contract it was also bringing in a much more general concept, common in America in the eighteenth century but by no means specifically ...