The Political Uses of the Dead as Symbols in Contemporary Civil Religions

Abstract

Although modernization has supposedly segregated the dead from the affairs of the living, modern political systems continue the practice of maintaining the memories and citizenship rights of its deceased members. This paper explicates such activities and synthesizes ideas from political sociology, the sociologies of religion and death, as well as from existential and psychoanalytic thought. It is shown how the state has inherited the traditional religious task of maintaining the ideologies of death fears and transcendence as mechanisms of social control. Further, beyond the more apparent functions of the dead in legitimating regimes, they symbolize the capacity of nation-states to address the modern anxieties of meaningless premature deaths and personal extinction.