Is a Civil Religion Really Civil? (Sumblog 10)

This is a good depiction of the opposite, so the idea that Religion and Governing need to be completely separate. There is no intersecting the two. This is very similar to the Political Philosophy Version in its ideals that religion does not have the impact on government that government could potentially have on religion. 

An interesting idea we talked about this past week in class was the difference between the Political Philosophy version and Sociology of Religion version of how civil religions can affect a society. I thought it was interesting seeing the connection between the two, because really, at least for American history, drawing the line between the two is very difficult to do. I think that for American history the political philosophy and the sociological philosophy of how religion made an impact are very connected. Many times, religion was used to create a reason to have religion and also a reason why not to have a religion. Interestingly enough, we have embedded religious beliefs as a whole so strongly into our society, our politics and our governmental structure. Separating these ideas is difficult to do because we really do have to look at how religious belief impact that society, but not from a lens of how we currently view things, but how they viewed everything back then. For example, we can’t look at a governmental structure that had a single religious belief back in the 1600’s and we can’t look at it from the lens of our current national government system because they aren’t even comparable. We need to look at the religiosity, government, and political system through the lends of that time period to see if they have any intersections and how those intersections affect each aspect of those different systems.

What I think is interesting is trying to separate these different aspects from each other. I don’t think that America has ever been a pure political ideology like how the Political Philosophy Version portrays civil religion. On the flip side, you can’t look purely at how religions affect a society because there are  a bunch of different intersections of that society that get impacted by religion, however that also impact religion. These impacts could be the difference, for example, between religious beliefs being integrated so strongly into a governmental structure that the government needs to seek solace and advice from religious leaders before making decisions. Some countries have this, others don’t. For those countries that don’t, they all have variations in which that countries constituencies have been decided to integrate their voice or the diversity of their voice, by now declaring the whole country run by religion in various degrees of activity.

This photo shows an interesting intersection of how
people view religion and Politics .