Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy  

"Machiavelli asks this: How can one replicate the kind of unqualified commitment that Christianity manages to elicit from its adherents, and redirect this commitment toward the political sphere? It would require in this sense a civil religion to displace Christianity and render it irrelevant to the same extent that Christianity displaced Judaism and paganism and rendered them irrelevant. (Is Islam a civil religion in this sense, and is that why Islam looks so attractive to later Machiavelli-inspired theorists such as Rousseau and Nietzsche?)" --Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner, 2010