Robert Bellah’s Concept of Civil Religion in America and the Idea of New Religion in Czech Thinking of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

At the end of the 1960s sociologist Robert Bellah formulated his concept of American civil religion, a concept which has since then provoked considerable reaction among scholars and intellectuals. It identified specific religious features in American public life and traditions, rejected by some, enthusiastically accepted by others. Bellah claims that since the seventeenth century the idea of the promised land, of a new age and a new nation with a mission in the world closely connected with Biblical symbolism has been emphasized by, among others, the Puritans. Since that time this first American Republic was gradually abandoned during the twentieth century, America having according to Bellah betrayed its original ideals. In this paper, features of Bellah are The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (1975, 1992) are paralleled with similar tendencies in Czech culture in connection with the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The first Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk as well as other intellectuals of the time propagated the idea of a new religion, one for a new era. Certain parallels can be drawn between an American civil religion and the Czech idea of the new religion, despite the fact that unlike the American puritans, the Czech interwar situation was formed by the spirit of Enlightenment, romanticism, and anti-clericalism. Both versions of civil religion embrace the principle that the stability of a democratic, republican nation state and its politics requires more than just external norms and rules. The idea of a non-ecclesiastical, secularly understood religiosity in democratic society can therefore be seen as their shared vision.