The importance of the analytical schemes of Jones and Richey and of Marty is their sensing of the pluralistic tendencies inherent in the interaction between religion and culture. Bellah spent a great deal of time and energy, as did other commentators, in explaining the similarities and differences among versions of civil religion. Both Jones and Richey and Marty alert all to the difficulties, both in definition and also in comparison of civil religions, partly arising from different assumptions and functional criteria employed by different scholars.
Similar differences arose when critics explored the normative implications of Bellah’s work. In the original essay, he used the example of the Vietnam War to posit the possibility of transcending a nationalistic civil religion. He asked: Could American civil religion become merely one part of a new civil religion of the world that Americans could accept as a fulfillment of the eschatological hope of American civil religion? Bellah also pointed out the divisive aspects, alongside the functionally integrative qualities, of any civil religion. Others would emphasize that civil religion existed as the vision of the establishment, while minority and marginal views tended not to be incorporated. Still others questioned Bellah’s basic assumption that civil religion had ever become institutionalized to the degree that he assumed, particularly in a society characterized by religious sectarianism and committed to the ideal of the separation of church and state.
One of the best responses to Bellah and a recent evaluation of civil religion has come from Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988). Just as Bellah had allowed that civil religion does have differing relationships to the republican and liberal civil heritages in America, and as Marty distinguished priestly from prophetic civil religion, so Wuthnow notes that two visions of civil religion exist—“one conservative, one liberal, [which] have, by virtue of their very tendency to dispute one another, become less capable of providing the broad, consensual underpinnings of societal legitimation that have usually been associated with the idea of civil religion.”
For most of American life, the conservative, priestly version of civil religion has dominated, especially during episodes seeking American solidarity. But the possibility of interpreting that understanding prophetically, especially for an international community, is a persisting reality. Whether the various visions within civil religion can ever be joined is not likely, but in the meantime, civil religion is a powerful reality offering differing meanings to its adherents.
JAMES A. MATHISEN
Bibliography
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967).
James A. Mathisen, “Twenty Years After Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion?” Sociological Analysis 50 (1989).
Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency.
Russell E. Richey and Donald Jones, eds., American Civil Religion.
John F. Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture.
Cross-Reference: Covenant, God, Popular Religion, Religion, Secularity, Society.
COMEDY
The association of the term “comedy” with theology is, in one sense, a distinctively modern phenomenon. Since the 1960s, the study of the relationships between religion and comedy has become a subfield of religious studies, pioneered by works such as Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools, William Lynch, Christ and Apollo, Dan O. Via, Jr., Kerygma and Comedy in the New Testament, and Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith.
In another sense, however, the connections between comedy and theology have long been recognized; otherwise, the claims now made are the fabrication of a modernity without roots in tradition. In the nineteenth century Søren Kierkegaard drew heavily upon comedy, satire, and irony in criticizing what he saw as the pretensions of Hegelian theology and the State Church of Denmark. In the fourteenth century Dante boldly entitled his religious masterpiece, Commedia, by which he meant that he had couched the drama of salvation in the humble, ordinary language of home, street, and tavern (Italian) rather than the elite, classical language of the day for church, scholarship, and Scripture (Latin). Dante also meant that this work proceeded from Inferno to Paradiso and therefore followed the pattern of many comedies in moving from difficult straits to a light and happy ending. Hell is the least comic place—a point pursued in the mid–twentieth century by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters—for it is the natural conclusion of self-love and thus of pride, greed, jealousy, lust, gluttony, and hatred. Each descending level of hell is smaller than the foregoing one, while heaven is the most comic place, for those who are there are the most open and free. As Dante exclaimed on approaching the eighth level of Paradiso: “I seemed to see the Universe alight with a single smile.” Discussions today also draw upon suggestions made by Paul in characterizing the Gospel as moira—a term whose associations in Greco-Roman culture were with comic characters, clowns, and fools. The preaching of the cross is foolishness, God’s work in the world is foolishness, and the people through whom God works are noted for their foolishness (I Cor. 1:14-31). In making such associations, Paul is seen as offering a summation of themes that are common to biblical theology and ancient comedies. The comic motifs of confounding human wisdom, exposing self-righteousness, thwarting pride, overturning social hierarchies, exposing hypocracies, and coming to the defense of the lowly and oppressed, are common to both comedy and the Bible. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12) is a comedic as well as Christian text.
The fact that the corollary of the word “comedy” is tragedy has suggested further connections for recent discussion. Early in the twentieth century the classicist F. M. Cornford advanced the thesis that the origins of both tragedy and comedy are to be found in the ancient Greek spring rites, with tragic action rooted in the first movement of the rites, upon the death of the king and the old year, and the winter return to chaos and infertility. Comic action was rooted in the second movement of the rites, with the resurrection or replacement of the dead king, a royal marriage, and a wedding feast. In these terms, as Wylie Sypher has proposed, the Christian celebration of the Eucharist and the Jewish Passover from which it was derived share in a movement from the tragic to the comic.
Another important connection has been pointed to by Northrop Frye. Tragedies, from ancient Greek to Shakespearean, concern themselves with the noble deeds of divine and royal families (Oedipus Rex, King Lear), while comedies belong more to ordinary people and everyday affairs (Lysistrata, Much Ado About Nothing). In these terms, a biblical anthropology shares in the largely “proletarian” and “egalitarian” character of comedy, with its suspicion of human might and greatness and its elevation of the weak, the powerless, and the despised.
Frye also noted that, whereas tragedies tend to be exclusive, separating people into opposing factions and sorting people out into hierarchies of importance and worth, comedies tend to be inclusive, embracing the whole of the human spectrum, and aiming toward reconciliation, reunification, and celebration: hence the dictum that tragedies often end in funerals, while comedies end in feasts and weddings. The implications of this pattern have been extended by Conrad Hyers in observation that tragedies espouse heroic deeds and military values—honor, duty, loyalty, pride, courage, unwillingness to compromise—whereas comedies espouse the simple joys of everyday life and the virtues of mediation: humility, flexibility, give-and-take, confession of weakness, playfulness, good humor. As a result, while tragedies are willing to sacrifice any number of persons to principles, comedies are inclined to sacrifice principles to persons. Hungry disciples and human suffering take precedence over sabbath laws; forgiveness and mercy transcend judgment and condemnation.
The related subject of religion and humor also has gained considerable attention in recent decades, sparked by Elton Trueblood’s The Humor of Christ (1964). While humor is an element