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Private and Public /
Religions / BY JOS CASANOVA
Binary distinctions are an analytic proce-
dure, but their usefulness does not guaran-
tee that existence divides like that. We
3 Cf. Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of
the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Lee Miller,
The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1985); Georg
Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion
Press, 1979).
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18 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 19
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20 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 21
7 Jeff Weintraub, "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," paper
presented at the 1990 APS A Meeting in San Francisco, p. 4. My present analysis, as
well as my most recent formulation of the "deprivatization" of modern religion, is
heavily indebted to Weintraub's paper as well as to several conversations in which he
rightly pointed out the way in which my earlier formulations tended to collapse the
distinctions public/private, political/nonpolitical, and communal/individual.
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22 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 23
private, see S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, eds., Public and Private in Social Life (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1983).
11 Weintraub, "Theory and Politics," p. 2.
12 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), and On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963); Jrgen Habermas, Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), and "The Public
Sphere," New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1960); Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and
Public Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Alasdair Maclntyre, After
Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Robert N. Bellah et
al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
13 Cf. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), and "Moral Woman and Immoral Man: A Consideration of
the Public-Private Split and Its Political Ramifications," Politics and Society 4 (1974);
Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in Benn and
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24 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Gaus, Public and Private, pp. 291-303; Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds.,
Feminism as a Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 25
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26 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 27
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28 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Enlightenment rationalism, is
sions. "Sheilaism" is the name wh
the contemporary "low culture"
persons they interviewed actually
herself. In describing "my own
in God. I'm not a religious fana
time I went to church. My faith
Sheilaism. Just my own little v
"This suggests the logical pos
American religions, one for each
modern polytheism is not idola
this particular sense, the cult o
indeed, as foreseen by Durkheim,
While sensing that individual my
the future, Troeltsch could not
form. "Since it arose out of the failure of the real ecclesiastical
spirit," Troeltsch writes, "it finds it difficult to establish
satisfactory relations with the churches, and with the condi-
tions of a stable and permanent organization."22 In America,
however, individual mysticism found a fertile soil. Evangelical
pietism, "the religion of the heart," was the vehicle which
served to spread individual mysticism, democratizing and
popularizing it, as it were, throughout American Protestant-
ism; while denominationalism, the great American religious
invention, became its organizational form. Indeed, pietism
occupies in the modern transformation of religion the same
place which Maclntyre attributes to emotivism in the trans-
formation-that is, dissolution- of traditional moral philoso-
phy.23 The doctrinal basis of denominationalism already
emerged with the First Great Awakening. But, as in Europe,
the institutional structure of established churches and sectarian
dissent, even though already highly pluralistic, did not permit
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 29
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30 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 31
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32 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 33
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34 SOCIAL RESEARCH
30 Ehlstain, "Moral Woman and Immortal Man"; Rosemary Radford Ruether, "The
Cult of True Womanhood," Commonweal, Nov. 9, 1973. Paradoxically revealing is
moreover the fact that, as pointed out also by feminist critics, the public male/private
female split runs also internally through most religious institutions. Ministry and
ecclesiastical office are reserved predominantly, in some denominations still
exclusively, for males; while the laity and churchgoers tend to be disproportionately
female. Actually, it is this most female of spheres which reveals as perhaps no other
sphere the signs of patriarchal domination. Cf. Mary Daly, The Church and the Second
Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a
Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).
31 Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967). In the
following presentation I have drawn freely, at times literally, upon my own earlier and
more elaborate presentation of Luckmann's thesis. See Jose Casanova, "The Politics of
the Religious Revival," Telos 59 (Spring 1984): 9-12.
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 35
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36 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 37
Religious Revivals
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38 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 39
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40 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 41
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42 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 43
Religious Differentiation
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44 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 45
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46 SOCIAL RESEARCH
47 W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (New York: Macmillan,
1927), p. 29, 55.
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 47
48 Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), and On the Roads to Modernity (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981).
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48 SOCIAL RESEARCH
49 In this form, which basically implied that the church had to adapt to an
already-existing political structure which exercised control over it, the Byzantine
church survived in the Second Rome, and was continued in Muscovy, the Third Rome.
This is the classical case of caesaro-papism.
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 49
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50 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 51
Know that you can have three sorts of relations with prin
governors, and oppressors. The first and worst is that you vi
them, the second and the better is that they visit you, and th
third and surest that you stay far from them, so that neither
see them nor they see you.
1970); Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (London: Hollis & Carter, 1954); Harvey
Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
53 Cf. Mortimer, Faith and Power; Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); James Piscatori, Islam in the World of
Nation-States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
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52 SOCIAL RESEARCH
54 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1953); Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); and Mary
Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966).
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 53
55 Peter Brown, "Late Antiquity," in Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., A
History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1987), pp. 51, 60.
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54 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 55
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56 SOCIAL RESEARCH
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PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 57
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