2008) 'Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity

What do people use religion for in public?Many sociological works focus on the use of religion to rationalize opinions or actions. This focus characterizes the classic argument that modern Americans have privatized religion and no longer use it to legitimate public action (Berger 1967; Luckmann 1967), as well as more recent findings that Americans continue to use religious reasons to justify political and civic engagement (e.g., Casanova 1994; Regnerus and Smith 1998). The same focus on rationales is common to scholars who say Americans use polarizing religious discourse to fight “culture wars ” over social issues (Hunter 1991, 1994), and those who counter that religion rarely polar-izes Americans ’ reasoning on most social issues (DiMaggio 2003; DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996). Even when they disagree on what kinds of rationales people draw from religious frame-works, scholars very frequently assume that religion’s capacity to provide reasons is what makes religion sociologically interesting. People, however, also use religion to define collective identities. Public groups, for instance, commonly use religious language to understand who they are, and how they relate to insiders and outsiders, apart from justifying opinions on spe-cific issues or group goals. For ease of reference