ABSTRACT
The contemporary "civil religion debate" in America was inaugurated by a famous article by Robert Bellah in 1967. Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the last genuine articulator of the American civil religion. Then, conversely, at the time when the unity of the Western Christian world was being shattered by dogmatic schisms and dynastic politics, it was briefly possible—as in Greece—to enroot civil religions within the walls or environs of small territorial enclaves like Geneva or Zurich. There is another problem: the linkage of civil religion with Bellah's rather constant emphasis on "the laws of the self's own existence". In brief, democracy was to become a genuine civil religion, a sacralized political way of life, apt not only for America but extensive to the globe. The concept of civil religion as Bellah developed it, and as it took hold in intellectual debate and discussion, was heavily freighted with the problem of how people create unity and share values through symbolic communication.
