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Focusing on a distinction between two modes of ancient Mediterranean religion, the religion of everyday social exchange, in which the main focus was on plant and animal offerings, and the religion of literate cultural producers, which relies upon the former but re-defines practice as a product of the mind, Stanley Stowers argues that ancient cultural producers textualized sacrificial practice, turning sacrifice into a matter of truths and meanings and overlooking the function of sacrifice as a strategic, practical system of reciprocity between gods and human beings. Modern studies of sacrifice too often depend upon these ancient textual performances, privileging theologies of sacrifice over the underlying and un-theorized practical system of sacrificial exchange in their own attempts to extract meaning. Stowers encourages a renewed focus on sacrifice as a strategy of daily living that avoids the obfuscating fascination with beliefs and discursive rationales common to ancient and modern discourses alike.

This chapter explores Cicero's religious warfare with Clodius in three orations he delivered after his return from exile: the de Domo sua, the de Haruspicum Responso, and the pro Milone. All three speeches are deeply imbued with the axioms and the ideology of Rome's civic religion; at the same time, Cicero also brings into play ideas derived from Greek philosophy and tragedy, in particular to assert a theodicy, tightly linked to a civic ethics. After looking at each of the speeches in turn, the chapter casts a concluding look at the de Legibus, which contains a clear and coherent account of the theological schemes on which he relies more or less obliquely in the orations.

This chapter explores how Cicero configured the supernatural sphere in the light of his experiences with the tyrannies of Sulla and Caesar. After a look at a passage from the pro Sexto Roscio, in which Cicero turned from the protocols of Rome's civic religion to figures of thought derived from philosophical theology, the discussion focuses on his speeches before Caesar, especially the pro Marcello: it shows how the traditional gods, after imposing political apocalypse on Rome, themselves dwindle into mere shadows of their former selves, displaced by the quasi‐divine dictator. If the gods of Rome's civic religion all but died with the republic, they experienced a resurrection after the death of the dictator: the chapter concludes by exploring the idiosyncratic and incoherent fashion in which Cicero configures the divine in the Philippics.

This chapter examines Pericles' personal relations with the city gods and how his career as a stratēgos illuminates the Athenians' collective relationship to all that was divine. As a reelected stratēgos and a persuasive orator, Pericles was the spokesman of a civic religion that was undergoing a mutation. He was engaged in various religious activities at a time when the city was introducing profound changes into its religious account of its origins—that is, autochthony—within a context of strained diplomatic relations. The chapter first considers Pericles' role in religion and politics in the context of Athenian democracy, with particular emphasis on the religious festivals supposedly instituted by him, before discussing Pericles' privileged links with several deities in the pantheon. It also explores the increase in the number of impiety trials in Pericles' time.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about masculinity, disability, and race in the American Civil War delivered by the author at the 2007 Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American History held at the British Academy. It discusses the centrality of the Civil War to America's national history, and also highlights the role of the dead in the construction both of Northern/Union nationalism and the Southern civic religion.

In tackling the relationship between state and religion, chapter 5 examines state secularization, which, in Korea, championed religious pluralism as the overarching principle. This chapter argues that state secularization was complicated by the comprehensive influence of Confucianism in the Joseon dynastic state as both a statecraft and a religion. The modernizing state sloughed off Confucianism into the newly conceived sphere of religion, which came under increasing regulatory control through the erection of a firm wall between the realms of the state and religion. The secularizing, civilizing state granted recognition, through classification, to certain religious entities, which gave the appearance of pluralism, while proclaiming less institutionalized religious expressions as socially destabilizing “pseudo-religions.” This state rationalization was eventually overwhelmed by the demands of intensive assimilation during wartime, as the state became increasingly theocratic.

This chapter argues that Tocqueville was a moralist in the same sense that he was a political thinker: he imagines not only an adversary whom he must defeat but also an interlocutor whom he must convince. The paradox is that his methods as a moralist were the opposite of his methods as a sociologist. Tocqueville the moralist wanted schools to teach the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, which gave a surprising tinge to his “liberalism.” Like Rousseau, but also like Robespierre, he believed that a civic religion was necessary and that those who refused to accept it were enemies. By adopting the position of the public moralist, Tocqueville was able to strike a compromise between his negative emotions (horror of mediocrity, chronic depression and anxiety) and his reasons for hope (democracy was accomplishing miracles and would accomplish more in the future).

This chapter analyzes Russian cultural values and practices of service, with particular emphasis on the role of religiously inspired service in support of state goals of equality and justice. Over the past several centuries, Russia’s religiously affiliated assistance groups have consistently focused on redressing inequalities, whether those are social, cultural, economic, or political. Working both in cooperation with official projects and governmental bodies and in opposition to regional and federal policies, religious communities have addressed issues and operated in arenas that have in turn complicated and expanded what counts as worship, service, action, and even the intended beneficiaries of their work. As the examples documented here show, through activities of civic service and engagement, religious communities and their followers have challenged distinctions between religious and secular and cultivated new ethics of voluntarism and political activism.

This chapter examines Turkish nationalism and Kemalism. The elimination of Islam as an ideological pillar of the main Ottoman successor state created a legitimacy vacuum at the center of the regime. Furthermore, the abolition of the sultanate and the dissolution of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had given rise to a second void necessitating the creation of substitute foci for popular allegiance—both personal and institutional. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk sought to fill this lacuna with a new civic religion buttressed by a number of cults. The new ideology, unsurprisingly, was a modified, scientifically sanctioned version of Turkish nationalism. In the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal's followers and party pulled together various strands of several associated cults to create Kemalism, an all-encompassing state ideology based on his sayings and writings.

This chapter shows how the end of blood sacrifices represented one of the most significant transformations of religion in late antiquity. Four main aspects of this multiform transformation are identified and discussed: the new attitude to the self; the new centrality of the book in religious life (for which Max Muller coins the phrase “religions of the book”); the progressive, but eventually radical end to blood sacrifices (until then a central aspect of ritual in quite different religious systems, both polytheistic and monotheistic); and finally the crystallization of religious communities, which led to the disappearance of civic religion, a staple of religious life in the ancient world.

The controversy over the altar of Victory shows how pagans and Christians expressed competing ideas on the public role of religion in an increasingly Christian empire. In 382, Gratian revoked funding from the Roman state priesthoods and removed the altar from the Senate house. Following Gratian’s death in 383, the Senate appealed to his brother, Valentinian II, through the urban prefect, Symmachus, whose communiqué was successfully countered by Ambrose of Milan. Recent scholarship has favoured Symmachus’ account, which it sees as an appeal for religious tolerance, and argued that the affair was decided by the power politics of a child emperor’s unstable court. In response, this chapter argues that Symmachus was actually trying to exclude the emperor’s Christianity from public decision-making. All religions may, for Symmachus, lead to God, but the old cults are Rome’s divinely appointed defence, as well as the bond between Senate and emperors. Ambrose put Valentinian’s duty to God at the heart of his appeal. Ambrose’s Senate contained many Christians, and Ambrose was bound to resist an emperor who endorsed pagan sacrifices (the closest either work comes to explicit political gamesmanship). Together, their works show how malleable Rome’s public religion still was, more than seventy years after Constantine embraced Christianity.