Civic Totalism

Michael Bird has some interesting thoughts on civic totalism. This struggle could get a nasty.

"Key to civic totalism is the view that public institutions are supreme and civil society is reduced to a legal fiction where liberties are granted, modified, and revoked by the will of the state. In addition, the distinctions between public and private increasingly shrink. As a result, private life is treated as an artificial construct and it is no longer regarded as an impenetrable frontier with special privileges. "

"Consequently religion too, within civic totalism, is regarded as dangerous since religion ascribes notions of ultimacy to something other than the state and the state’s vision of the public good. Religion creates a competing social vision and an alternative morality, which divides the loyalty of citizens away from the state’s objectives for human conduct, rendering certain forms of religion as hostile to the state’s ambitions. "