What Is Civic Culture?

Definition

American civic culture is the set of norms, values, narratives, habits, and rituals that shape how we live together and govern ourselves in our diverse democratic society.

Norms are the mores and customs that enforce an unlegislated and ever-changing social sense of “what’s OK.” We create norms by interacting with and responding to each other’s behaviors. No law requires courtesy in social spaces or civility in disagreement. These are norms that do or do not exist depending on where we live. Springing from deeply held and action-shaping values such as equality or individual liberty or group loyalty, norms shape and are shaped by our experience in community.

Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: about our past, how we fit in (or do not), how we understand the present and imagine our future, and about who we are not. From John Winthrop’s Puritan image of a shining city on a hill to the idea of America as a nation of immigrants to the tales of the citizen soldiers of the Greatest Generation, mythic narratives have always forged a sense of collective American identity. But group narratives can be cultivated in service of division as much as union. Narratives are part of a perpetual contest in civic and political life to define the “true” spirit of Americanness.

Civic habits are the regular, patterned behaviors of everyday life that reflect commitment to our community and the norms of civic life. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the “habits of the heart” that animate democracy, he meant not only physical acts of service but also emotional acts of forbearance, tolerance, responsibility-taking, and the like. Civic habits are often deeply ingrained in a society’s culture. Participation is one such habit. In America, it includes voting, attending civic meetings, engaging in local politics, volunteering for community organizations, and participating in public forums. Habits begin and end as choices. In between, they are powered by the momentum of routine. This is as true for a habit of apathy as it is for a habit of active participation. Nonparticipation is also a habit.

Rituals provide a rhythm to civic life. They do so by removing us from the everyday. Rituals are heightened group experiences by which people make meaning together and mark progression in time and rootedness in history. Watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance as schoolchildren, or standing in line to cast a ballot are all explicitly civic rituals. But not all American rituals are about our political traditions. Thanksgiving or Super Bowl Sunday can be deeply civic rituals. Ethnic, cultural, or religious celebrations—the Lunar New Year, the Haudenosaunee prayers of thanksgiving,5 the start of Lent and Passover, or the end of Ramadan—can also be experienced as civic rituals in a society that valorizes cross-cultural understanding and religious diversity.
 

Throughlines

Each nation possesses a unique civic culture shaped by its blend of norms, values, narratives, rituals, and habits. In the United States, five distinctive forces have molded our civic culture: markets, creed, place, race, and religion. While these forces have not always had a positive influence, understanding their impact is essential to recognizing how to cultivate a healthy civic culture in our society.
 

Markets
 

The United States has historically had a more dynamic, more pervasive, and less constrained market economy than most other advanced industrial societies. This has created a culture—commercial, civic, popular, and artistic—that is more consumerist, more individualistic, more tolerant of inequality, more restless and risk-tolerant, and more celebratory of “creative destruction.” These deep patterns have persisted—at least in our narratives—even as the levels of regulation or social mobility or innovation have fluctuated.
 

Creed
 

Another distinctive feature of American civic culture is that it is creedal to the core. The United States is a nation founded not only in a “big bang” of revolt against a tyrant but also upon an affirmative set of ideas and core beliefs that resonate across generations: all men are created equal; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; government of the people, by the people, for the people; equal protection under the law; I have a dream. This creed is not about blood, soil, or a deity. The American creed starts with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and has incorporated new texts over the course of American history, including the proverbs of Poor Richard’s Almanac, the poems of Walt Whitman, the parables of Zora Neale Hurston, the Gettysburg Address, and the homilies of George Bailey. Across all these documents, the American creed articulates how we the people uphold American ideals.

America has struggled to continuously include all the people in the we. Moments of expansion of that we represent two fundamental things about our civic creed: it is renewable and has been updated at crucible moments throughout our nation’s history; and it has not yet been realized. This perpetual striving is an essential feature of our civic culture.

The gap between our creed and our deeds creates the constant potential for disharmony in American civic life. This plays out every day in matters local, national, and transnational. But it also gives American civic culture its fundamentally aspirational and reformational spirit.
 

Place
 

Every nation has its regions and villages. Not every nation has an American-level cult of local wisdom, local control, and local legitimacy. This is a result of our revolutionary origins and primordial fear of distant concentrated power, our continental scale, and the decentralizing checks and balances of the Constitution and its state counterparts. This is why Kansas has 106 counties and Washington State has 295 school districts: we mistrust least the government that is most proximate to us.

American localism has had harmful strains, like the “states’ rights” defense of slavery and Jim Crow, both of which were enforced by local civic culture as much as by law. And places themselves are deeply shaped by exclusion, segregation, and separation on the basis of race. But pride of place and locally rooted relationships are key to a healthy civic culture. At its best, localism creates a relational sense of responsibility. It makes creedal concepts like “equality” human in scale. It creates a seedbed for the “habits of the heart”—solidarity, common purpose—at the center of democratic self-government. And the places within our places—the coffeehouses, parks, houses of worship, arts institutions, soccer leagues, and Friday night football games—are where the relationships vital to democracy are cultivated.

Nurturing a civic sense of place is critically important today. Contemporary politics have become less connected from place as a result of two forces: nationalized and polarized politics, and the growing importance of online life. Nationalization and polarization reinforce each other and create perverse incentives for Americans to lean into fearmongering and dehumanization of their neighbors. Meanwhile, as we spend increasing amounts of time in virtual spaces that profoundly distort our perception of place and relationship, creating a sense of togetherness becomes more challenging, in bad times and good. That fragmentation has serious civic consequences.
 

Race
 

The healthy and unhealthy aspects of our country’s civic culture cannot be explored without naming the role that race has played from the beginning in defining the creedal ideas of freedom, equality, justice, and Americanness itself.

This means reckoning with two truths, each of which can discomfit different people. The first is that, for large parts of this country’s history, civic culture was made by, for, and of people defined as white. That is undeniable in a nation that emerged from the dispossession and death of large Native populations, that derived much of its foundational wealth from chattel slavery of Africans, that banned from its territory Chinese and other Asian immigrants, and that legalized segregation and the curtailment of basic civil rights until 1954 and 1964, respectively.

The second truth is that, for the entirety of this country’s history, civic culture was also made by, for, and of the people who challenged this regime. The same constitutional, legal, political, and cultural tools that were used to build a regime based on white supremacy have been used to dismantle it and to renovate our democracy. Some Americans are obsessed with American failings. Others focus only on American successes. We too easily forget that both are part of our story—and that the promise of the American creed has been realized most saliently by the civic faith and strivings of the excluded, disfavored, and subjugated.
 

Religion
 

Religious language—specifically, Protestant Christian language—has shaped some of our most enduring national myths and narratives: “city on a hill,” “beloved community,” “chosen people.” The first generations of this country’s existence were forged in revivalist Great Awakenings. The Social Gospel fueled Progressive Era reformers. Abolition and the civil rights movement were fired by a sense of biblical purpose, as was Prohibition a century ago, as is the religious right today.

But American religiosity—notable to foreign visitors from the beginning—has not made this a monolithic society. Our political commitment to both freedom of religion and separation of church and state has made the United States the most religiously diverse country in history and the most devout nation in the Western Hemisphere.6

The practice of religion—all kinds of faiths—has contributed significantly to the nation’s social capital and inspires many of our most vital civic institutions. At the same time, it has fed hateful campaigns of exclusion, past and present, as well as movements to welcome the disfavored. Today, a fast-growing proportion of Americans do not consider themselves religious at all. For all of us, the challenge is to find in American civic religion—the creedal ideas encoded in our founding and in key moments of “refounding”—a commitment to the Constitution and to one another that can be fortified by the best that communities of worship can offer.
 

Civic and Political Culture

We end this section with a note to distinguish two closely related ideas. Civic culture is a capacious concept, but it is important to note what it is not. In particular, civic culture is distinct from political culture, which is more specific to the processes and institutions of self-government. The look and feel of American political campaigns (most of which are run through political parties and an industry of political professionals), the ways legislators negotiate and represent their constituents, and the operations of government agencies all constitute important components of our political culture. But civic culture is bigger than politics and government. It extends to all the facets of how we live together as citizens, behave in public, deal with common problems, relate to our neighbors, and identify with one another and our communities and nation. Political culture may influence civic culture and vice versa, but the two are not one and the same.

Every place has a civic culture. It can take healthy or unhealthy forms and be adaptive or maladaptive for that society’s development. In autocratic Russia and China, both law and civic culture discourage speaking one’s mind about power, punish dissent, and foster norms of conformity. In contrast, the civic culture of democratic Germany, South Korea, or the Netherlands is far more oriented toward freedom and at the same time more communitarian than that of the United States. The same comparisons can be made of regions within countries.

In an age when electoral politics dominates so much of our attention, it is important to notice the deep layers of civic culture in the towns and neighborhoods where we live. Where the civic culture is unhealthy—where the norms are self-centered, the values nihilistic, the narratives zero-sum, the habits apathetic, and the rituals cynical—democracy wilts and withers. This—why a healthy civic culture matters—is the topic of our next section.

Endnotes

• 5

  For the Haudenosaunee (or Ohenten Kariwatekwen) Thanksgiving Address, see “Words Spoken before All Others,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 22, 2018.

• 6

  Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).