What is civil religion? It is a government endorsement of a particular religion that defines how a nation presents itself to the world. It consists of a set of rituals expressing support for certain religious tenets. Belief in or adherence to them is not required, but participation in the rituals is.
Writing in the first century BCE, Marcus Varro wrote that civil religion was an excellent tool for establishing order and control over a population. He considered it one of the virtues of what he called civil theology. Emperors and kings have, over the centuries, set aside any claim to virtue but used civil religion as a cudgel to enforce order and control. It also proved useful as the pretext for engaging in war. Fighting in a god’s name against a god’s enemy can elicit public support when it would not otherwise be given.
The United States has never had that kind of civil religion, partly because it is prohibited by the Constitution. It has had a few hundred years of a de facto national religion in the form of generic Protestant Christianity. It was a religion five miles wide and one inch deep with more variations than one could count. Though not formally a government-endorsed civil religion, it had some of the same effects, including the intolerance of others not Protestant and white.
The era of a de facto national religion ended in the years following the time of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements. They raised questions about whether organized religion could be trusted as a legitimate voice of moral authority. It is one reason why church attendance has been declining and those claiming no religious affiliation have been increasing ever since. I am not as unhappy about that as others are. It has stripped away the veil of a well-intended but shallow form of the Christian faith. It has created an opportunity for a deeper, more profound voice of the good news of God in Christ Jesus to be heard.
Authentic Christianity will always challenge civil authority and social norms to be more kind, generous, and just in the way of loving God, loving self, and loving the other no matter who the other is. It gives its singular allegiance to the Lord God Almighty, whom it knows as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to no other. It is commanded by God to be a tireless agent of healing, reconciliation, and godly justice, with an emphasis on the needs of the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, and the marginalized. It is commanded to speak boldly against every form of injustice and evil. Therefore, it will always be in an uneasy relationship with civil authority.
Saint Augustine helped explain how that works when he made the distinction between the visible and the invisible church. The visible church is the institutional church and its members. The institutional church exists within the framework of civil society and its laws. It is never a comfortable relationship, and the institutional church has sometimes stumbled to subordinate itself to governmental demands at odds with God’s way of love, peace, and justice. The invisible church consists of the people within the institution who remain honorably faithful to Christ Jesus in the best way they can. They are not perfect. They frequently fail. Nevertheless, their ultimate allegiance is to God only.
Civil religion intentionally uses the visible church to suppress the voice of the invisible church. It is wrong. There can be no justification for it. The current movement to make the United States a Christian nation characterized by a generic form of Protestantism subordinate to the social and political values of persons in power is an affront to everything Jesus did and said and died for. It is condemned by his resurrection to glory that revealed him fully as the Word of God made flesh. For Christians, there is no higher authority, and every power on earth must be measured by what he commanded.
note: Dianna has a bad cold so I asked Sam to edit this. I hope he did a decent job. Wine guy typing