A sacralização do dever político: um estudo sobre o conceito de religião civil

Abstract

In the present work we analyse the concept of civil religion in the formularization that Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave to it and, also in the contemporary reading effected by the american sociologist Robert Bellah, where we look for to verify the influence of Rousseau´s original conception in the adaptation of the concept to the american reality carried through by the sociologist. In the article Civil Religion in America Bellah defends the idea that has in the United States a religious dimension that developed itself in the political sphere, printing a sacred character to this domain of the public life and consisting in fact as a ethical-politician speech. We verify, in such a way, the construction of a species of “commitment ethics” with public good – and we suggest that this idea was already present in the formularization of Rousseau – as well as its permanence in the american context until the end of the 1960's. We also search to point the inherent contradictions to the concept of civil religion and analyse some hypotheses related to its loss of effectiveness as an unifying element of the public speech in the american context.