Between Public Justification and Civil Religion: Shared Values in a Divided Time

Abstract

Civil religion as formulated in Robert Bellah’s seminal 1967 article, recalling Rousseau’s Social Contract, has recently been proposed to build shared values and bridge deep partisan divides. A competing approach to shared values, based on public reason, relies on overlapping consensus in the works of John Rawls. In this paper, we present an in-between strategy that recognizes the insuperable empirical and normative problems of civil religion while using university civic engagement programs to bring about a public square in which religious reasons are found alongside neutral ones, ultimately for the sake of public justification. Having documented recent polarization trends, we consider the last major attempt to defend civil religion from the perspective of democratic solidarity, Phil Gorski’s American Covenant, but believe it falls short: based on sociological work and Augustinian insights, we show the risk of domination that Gorski’s strategy still entails, not least because of the definitional indeterminacy of civil religion and its overlap with religious nationalism. Paradoxically, a late Rawlsian approach that allows for the initial use of religious reasons, with a generosity proviso of necessary translation into public reason at some point, can lead to a public square with more religious arguments than one theorized explicitly from the perspective of civil religion. This is especially important because, given the discussed polarization trends, universities have taken on an increasingly important civic engagement role even as some still rely on a civil religion approach. We insist on public justification in university civic engagement, and for the sake of doing so take as a starting point Ben Berger’s work in favoring civil engagement, which we define as combining moral, political, and social rather than exclusively political commitments. In proposing a novel university shared values mechanism, intended to expose learners to a maximum diversity of opinions and lived experiences, we offer a fresh approach to building trust in cohorts that increases the likelihood of true dialogue across difference.

Incentivizing Civic Engagement at Public and Private Universities: Tax Exemptions, Laws, and Critical Dialogues

“…Strikingly, the literature on university civic engagement makes little mention of the fact that it potentially involves controversial speech in an ongoing protest (Ekman and Amna 2012;Rudolph and Horibe 2016;Kaskie et al 2008;Prentice 2007;Ostrander 2004;Stanton 2008). In this educational context, a recent analysis in Religions by Morrow et al (2023) provided a typology of different uses of the term, "civic engagement". At the college or university level, many civic engagement programs in the US and around the world promote activism, deemphasizing traditional learning in the classroom.…”

“…Others, aligned with conservative frameworks, focus on the sheer amount of knowledge retained (the latter approach would represent the view that, without specific information about the contents of the US and/or other constitutions, for example, it is impossible for a student to effectively navigate the political environment). Morrow et al emphasized that other possibilities exist, with Tarleton State University's framework a good example of an "in-between" (Morrow et al 2023) form of civic engagement. But none of the major ways of understanding this term (ibid.)…”