Belloc on our Civil Religion

Hilarie Belloc (1870-1953) understood what Rousseau was trying to say about civil religion in the Social Contract. This quote from his essay "The Modern Man" explains it very well.

You may deny any one of the old doctrines and few will be shocked, but you may not ridicule the flag or the Crown, not interrupt the two minutes' silence on Armistice Day....

Rousseau argued that rather than have any transcendental religion, such as Christianity, we must find unity, or uniformity, in our religion of state, or civil religion. The elements of this civil religion are flags and national holidays. Imagine how right Belloc is when you think of the fourth of July versus the feast of Ascension or some other religious festival. Despite lapel pin campaigns to remember that "Jesus is the reason for the Season," we have excised much of the Christian aspects of Christmas from any and all public displays of the celebration. Now imagine that instead of Armistice Day, a day I never heard of celebrating until recently (apparently we don't think much of World War 1 in America), we ignored or interrupted 9/11 celebrations. Which would get you in more trouble politically or socially?

We have a civil religion in our country and it doesn't reflect much of a Christian character. God help us train the next generation to pay more attention to the transcendental and eternal things than just be flag wavers and public holiday devotees.

Rousseau, Baseball, and Apple Pie

In book four of the Social Contract, Rousseau caps his entire discussion on government with a necessary chapter on religion. Aside from some serious theological errors (Christ did not institute a merely spiritual kingdom), Rousseau posits a distinction between personal religion and civil religion. Personal religion is the religion that each individual has between their own two ears. It is the religion of the mind, of the individual. So long as it stays in between your ears, it is not going to bother anybody, least of all Rousseau.
But the state needs a religion that will enforce the kind of devotion and ritual necessary for the promulgation of the state. Here Rousseau mentions the civil religion. Civil religion "joins divine worship to a love of the law" (Social Contract, 4.8). The law it creates a love for must be the civil law, not a theological law (assuming the two are distinct, which Rousseau would insist upon). Civil religion creates its own "dogmas, its rituals, its external forms of worship" (ibid.). Civil religion is what separates a citizen of one nation from another nation. It works well with modern thinking about nationalism. This can lead to some problems, especially if one nation gets a superiority complex and has delusions of exclusivity. This can lead to some crusade-like activity.
The idea of a civil religion like Rousseau explains isn't so far fetched as it may sound. After all, modern Americans have rituals that define us as a nation. We have apple pie, right (as American as apple pie)? We have the national pass time (don't dare go and not order up a hot dog or roasted peanuts). We even have less pronounced forms of this. We have little colored ribbons that declare how much we support our troops. We have flags flying from houses, windows, and other places. We have patriotism! In our postmodern, post-nationalism world, patriotism has replaced Rousseau's civil religion. If you choose not to engage in any of the practices listed above (and a whole host of others) you run a very significant risk of being labeled un-American. In our civil religion, to not practice the rituals, to not engage in the modern forms of worship, is heretical at best.
The saddest part of this is that many of the people that have fallen for this civil religion are evangelical Christians.

The importance of the French Revolution

I often wondered why Wil Durant's great Story of Civilization series ended where it did. I understand that Durant died in 1981, a mere six years after the Age of Napoleon was published, but I always figured there was more to the story than that. As I begin teaching Rousseau's Social Contract for the third time in my teaching career, I think I've figured a little bit of that out. To Durant, the French Revolution and the imperial reign of Napoleon was a much more important event than it is to most modern minds. The French Revolution has been eclipsed, to a degree, by the twentieth century. In essence, Marx stole Rousseau's fifteen minutes of fame.
I have often heard Rousseau called the architect of the French Revolution. I don't doubt this one bit. It is pretty sad for him that he died eleven years before the Revolution took place. Nonetheless, it would be hard to have had a Marx if Rousseau had not laid some serious intellectual groundwork. Rousseau codified, to a great extent, what George Grant calls "the revolutionary faith."
The bottom line, I guess, is that one event is inevitably eclipsed by another. The French Revolution was eclipsed by the World Wars of the twentieth century. The Social Contract was eclipsed by the Communist Manifesto. I wonder what is the dominant statement of our day and what will (has) eclipse it?