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Imitation, Ambiguity, and Drama in Political Life: Civil Religion and the Dilemmas of Public Morality

THE ANALYSIS OF Civil religion illuminates one of the central dilemmas of politics. This is the problem of maintaining public morality without engaging the "darker" side of politics. The "darker" side of politics refers to the violence, oppression, and corruption that can be unleashed when the symbols of a civil religion are used in one of two undesirable ways. First, sacred public symbols can facilitate civic corruption if they are manipulated disingenuously by political actors to conceal immoral actions with moralistic rhetoric. Second, the symbols of a civil religion can contribute to the political nightmares that occur when a threatened or self-righteous people seek moral definitions for acts of aggression and violence. Even though these objectionable political forms involve perversions of the civil religion, their frequency in modern political life and their apparent connection with the high symbols of government have drawn criticism to the civil religion. Indeed, an increasingly common prescription for curing political ills involves dismantling the sacred trappings of the state. However, this solution is much too simple. It begs