A Primer on Civil Society, Civil Religion, and Civility

Setting the stage

The stereotypical Gypsy I sketched in the previous paid post stands opposed to what I call civil society, by which I do not mean some technical formulation like Hegel’s, but rather the individualistic American public life and culture that is informed by the same Civil Religion to which both Greenwald and the Fox News audience appeal in their appraisals of Gypsy immigration. The summary below is heavily indebted to the work of John Murray Cuddihy.[i]

Civil Religion is more difficult to define. Broadly speaking, for my purposes, it is the set of customs, mores, and values undergirding public life, governing day-to-day social interactions, and filling in the “penumbras” (to borrow a metaphor from constitutional jurisprudence) of the more formal laws and regulations which govern us in America. If we think of our representative democracy as a formal system of rules and processes governing the operation of the state and the mediation of political disputes, then by analogy, Civil Religion is an informal system of norms and processes governing social intercourse and other aspects of public life not specifically regulated by law.