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If, as Verba Says, the State Functions as a Religion, What Are We to Do Then to Save our Souls?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Lewis Lipsitz
Lewis Lipsitz*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Sidney Verba has argued that the state in modern societies may function as a religion. He is certainly not the only one to adopt such a point of view. But his work is especially notable in that he has strengthened the argument by welding together a theoretical perspective that seems to be derived from structural-functional analysis and a good deal of varied and interesting, though not crystal-clear data. Verba's discussion of the functions of the state is most explicit in his article on the Kennedy assassination—in which he seeks to interpret the many studies of public reaction to the President's death. In this article, appropriately titled “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” Verba attempts to go to essentials. He speaks of the deeper levels of political involvement made evident by the psychological crisis of the assassination. Repeatedly he employs the term “primordial” to describe the character of the underlying political commitment to the nation-state and its symbols in modern societies—the foremost of these symbols in America being the President. But let Verba speak for himself since he is explicit about these matters: first, on the nature of public reactions and the larger meaning of those reactions:

The Kennedy assassination … illustrates the close meshing of the sacred and the secular in the top institutions of a political system. In a society in which the formal ideology is officially secular … the close linkage of religious institutions to the events of the crisis weekend is particularly striking … a larger proportion of the American population responded to the assassination with prayer or attendance at special church services and religious ceremony and imagery abounded in the events of the weekend.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 527 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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Footnotes

*

So many people have criticized this article that I can only mention a few who have made life particularly hard: Herbert Reid, Donald Searing, Robert Alford and Kenneth Ring. Without their comradely impatience I would have made even more mistakes.

References

1 In Greenberg, Bradley S. & Parker, Edwin B. (eds.), The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 348–360.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 352.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., p. 353. Robert Bellah has recently put forward an argument for the existence of what he calls a “civil religion” in the United States. He sees the notion of an “American Israel” playing a “constitutive role” in the thought of early American leaders, and he perceives considerable continuity in the civil religion, employing as a clear contemporary example of its appearance, President Kennedy's inaugural address, Bellah states: “… this religion—or perhaps better, this religious dimension—has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.” Bellah, Robert N., “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter, 1967).Google Scholar

5 There is a good deal of controvery over the problem of defining religion. Some writers regard the crucial distinction to be that between the “sacred” and the “secular.” Caillois, Roger, for example, in Man and the Sacred (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar, identifies religion with the realm of the sacred, arguing that in this realm men feel a deep-seated dependence and show a lack of critical inquiry. His argument here follows Durkheim's position that sacredness is a matter of social definition and can be applied to a good many things. Melford Spiro, on the other hand sees religion as inextricably connected with supernatural beings, though he notes that the worship of other “sacreds” may serve many of the same functions as religious beliefs. Spiro, Melford E., “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation,” in Banton, Michael (ed), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1966), pp. 85–126.Google Scholar Clifford Geertz and Phillip Rieff provide discussions of religion in terms of its psychological functions and this focus provides a bridge between the alternative definitions noted above. Geertz defines religion as a system of symbols that establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic: Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Banton, op. cit., pp. 1–46. For Rieff, religion performs two functions: the therapeutic control of everyday life, and relief from that control by covertly providing opportunities for instincts to express themselves. Rieff, Phillip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York Harper & Row, 1966).Google Scholar Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger have discussed religious roots in the formation of the self and the construction of symbolic universe. They see religion referring to a realm that transcends everyday life, giving it ultimate meaning. Their analysis of the process of legitimation is particularly suggestive: Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday 1966).Google Scholar Luckmann, Thomas, The Invisible Religion (N. Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1967).Google Scholar

6 Meyer, Alfred G., Communism (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 4–8.Google Scholar And Meyer says that he is certainly not the first to note the similarities.

7 Shils, Edward and Young, Michael, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Sociological Review, 1 (12, 1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The quote is from Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Norman Birnbaum has a thoughtful critique of Shils, and Young, , “Monarehs and Sociologists,” Sociological Review, V. 3 (07, 1955) pp. 5–23.Google Scholar

8 Apter, op. cit., p. 272.

9 Verba, Sidney, “Comparative Political Culture,” in Verba, (ed.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

10 Easton, David and Hess, Robert D., “The Child's Political World,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, V. 6 (08, 1962), pp. 238–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).Google Scholar

12 Lane, Robert E., Political Ideology (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962).Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 198–199.

14 Greenstein, Fred I., “Popular Images of the President,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 122 (11, 1965), 523–529.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

15 Lipset, S. M., “The Sources of the Radical Right—1955,” in Bell, Daniel (ed.), The Radical Right, (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1963), p. 264.Google Scholar See also Robert Dahl's characterization of America as a “… somewhat deviant case: most other stable democracies have not imposed as severe a set of legal and social obstacles to political dissent as exist in the United States.” Dahl, R. A., “Epilogue,” in Dahl, R. A. (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 391.Google Scholar

16 “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau's Writings, Vol. IV, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1906), p. 358.

17 Ibid., pp. 358–359.

18 “A Plea …”, ibid., P. 419.

19 Fromm, Erich, The Sane Society (New York; Holt, Rinehart & Winston).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 The critique of Thoreau's politics by Eulau, Heinz—“Wayside Challenger,” Antioch Review (12, 1949), 509–522 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that to follow Thoreau's injunctions and make the individual conscience the ultimate political decision-maker would bring on anarchy, and make democracy impossible. Eulau's position, though it has some important sense to it, fails to penetrate to the real problem Thoreau sought to deal with. Eulau's argument is equally absolutist, ignoring the problems that would flow from too great a reverence for existing laws. Generally, Eulau forgets that at any one moment, democratic values, and other important values as well, may conflict with legalities.

21 There are a great many empirical specifics as well.

22 As one example, see Herbert McClosky, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” this Review, 58 (June, 1964), 361–382.

23 Louis Harris survey reported in the Washington Post, April 18, 1966. Under $5,000, 60% oppose the right to demonstrate; over $10,000, 19% oppose it.

24 There are a good many other serious failings in this point of view. On this matter, see my letter criticizing McClosky's argument in this Review (December, 1966), 1000–1001. A thorough treatment is Bachrach, Peter, The Theory of Democratic Elitism. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967).Google Scholar

25 Sidney Verba, et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam” this Review, (June, 1967) 317–333. A curious Gallup poll of February, 1967, shows that 40% of those with incomes under $3,000 a year favored a bombing halt, while only 14% of those with incomes over $10,000 a year did so.

26 From “Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.”

27 There are many recent discussions of this matter: Christian Bay, “Politics and Pseudopolitics,” this Review, 59 (March, 1965), 39–52; Taylor, Charles, “Neutrality in Political Science,” in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G., Philosophy, Politics and Society. Third Series, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), pp. 25–57.Google Scholar Moskos, Charles C. Jr. and Bell, Wendell, “Emerging Nations and Ideologies of American Social Scientists,” The American Sociologist, (05, 1967), 67–72 Google Scholar, for three particularly relevant pieces.

28 On this point, Michael Walzer has put the matter eloquently: “The increasing size of the state, the growing power of administration, the decline of political life: all these turn politics from a concrete activity into what Marx once called the fantasy of everyday life. The state becomes an arena in which men do not act, but watch the actions, and, like other audiences, are acted upon. Patriotic communion is always a fraud when it is nothing more than the communion of an audience with its favorite actors, of passive subjects and heroes of the state. Our emotions are merely tricked by parades and pageants, the rise and fall of political gladiators, the deaths of beloved chiefs, the somber or startling rites of a debased religion. It could be done to anyone, whereas patriotism ought to be the pride of a particular man, the enjoyment of particular activities”: “Politics in the Welfare State,” Dissent (January-February, 1968) p. 36.

29 Bellah, op. cit., p. 14.

30 Ibid.