Civil Religion / Democratic Faith

Robert N. Bellah’s work centered on the role of religion in sustaining society, with a keen analytic eye on both the ways religion and parallel phenomena hold society together and the ways religion offers resources for radical critique of society’s failings, and thus for social reform. One strand of that work used the term ‘civil religion’ to mark the role of religion – today what is sometimes termed ‘democratic faith’. “Civil Religion in America” (Daedalus 1967) laid out his original argument and gained widespread attention. Bellah followed that with The Broken Covenant, in which he analyzed the ways the United States has failed to live up to American civil religion’s promises to its Black citizens. A vast literature has built on, extended, and critiqued those works.

Read overview to Bellah’s concept of civil religion by his biographer Matteo Bortolini [PDF]

October 2026 event on civil religion and and democratic faith at Arizona State University

Book cover: American Covenant

Written by Philip Gorski, a student of Bellah and a member of the Bellah Legacy Group. Offers another perspective using Bellah’s concept of civil religion.

Broken Covenant was the book Bellah wrote in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of the founding of United States.

Further Reading

Bellah’s writings

Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Dædalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. Reprinted in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 168-89. Available online here and here.

Bellah, Robert N. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (1975).

Bellah, Robert N. “Is a global civil religion possible?” The Immanent Frame, December 24, 2007, https://tif.ssrc.org/2007/12/24/is-a-global-civil-religion-possible/.

Bellah, Robert N. and Phillip E. Hammond. Varieties of Civil Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

BLG resources

Carlson, John D. “Losing Our Civil Religion.” Religion and Politics. September 26, 2017. Now published as Arc. Available online.

Carlson, John D. “In Trump, we have abandoned our civil religion—and we are no longer the same.” Religion News Service. January 23, 2025. Available online.

Gorski, Philip S. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Tipton, Steven M. “Civil Religion in the Making,” Sociologica 4, no. 3 (2010): 1-22.

Readings beyond BLG

Albanese, Catherine L. Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.

Bortolini, Matteo. “Before Civil Religion: On Robert Bellah’s Forgotten Encounters with America, 1955–1965." Sociologica 4, no. 3 (2010): 1-33

Ebel, Jonathan H. G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

Levinson, Sanford. “Pledging Faith in the Civil Religion; Or, Would You Sign the Constitution?” William & Mary Law Review 29, no. 1 (1987): 113-44.

Richey, Russell E. and Donald G. Jones (eds.). American Civil Religion. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. [Essays by Will Herberg, Charles Long, Martin Marty, Sydney Mead, and others with a response by Robert Bellah.]

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980.