How Did Rousseau Contribute To The Nature Of Civil Religion?

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Actually, Bellah borrowed this term from Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s phrase, a French Enlightenment thinker, who originated the term of civil religion in his book The Social Contract, Rousseau believed that the religious opinions are of interest to the state insofar as they concern the common good of the community, and he named the state’s formulation of those areas ‘Civil Religion’ (Rousseau). Besides, Bellah set out, in his first essay on civil religion, to depict the special nature of American Civil Religion. This religion reality differentiated from the churches and the more traditional religious and is well-institutionalized in its own right. He argued that: “As a religious form, it is something genuinely American and genuinely new. It is a