Religious leaders consistently come to the fore in Lebanon when political change or instability looms. In a country synonymous with sectarian politics, how do religious actors in different sects relate to the state? This paper will identify a national clerical elite made up of official “heads of sects” with a common vision of the nation-state. This case will be made with particular reference to the 1975-1990 civil war, fought substantially between Christians and Muslims over reform of the political system. The confessional state recognises a senior cleric in each community as its official head and representative with special privileges. These include the (Sunni) Mufti of the Republic, the President of the Higher Shi‘i Council, the Druze Sheikh al-‘Aql, and the Maronite Patriarch, as well as a number of others from smaller sects. Many of these offices pre-existed the modern state in some form, and each is therefore constituted differently, but all have legislative sovereignty and considerable independence of action. Although not constrained by the state, each of these official religious leaderships has bought into a vision of nationhood and statehood based on the “Lebanese formula” of inter-religious coexistence and power-sharing. This common vision finds expression when the state, or the political and social order it represents, comes under threat. The civil war, as a prolonged period of threat to this order, provides particularly clear evidence of this, as the official religious leaders pursued consistently statist politics throughout. This they did despite the prevailing sectarian logics in their respective camps, and in the face of considerable danger from within their own communities. Rather than seeing religious actors in a divided society like Lebanon simply as products of their religious differences, this paper exposes cross-cutting structural cleavages in the religious sector. The national clerical elite are differentiated from other clerics, whether competing unofficial religious leaders or lower-level employees in the official religious hierarchies. During the war, this manifested in stark opposition within each community between the statist line of the official religious leaders and other clerics who gave material and moral support to the militias. Using the scholarship on militia hegemony, this paper advocates an alternative reading of the war as centred not on military front-lines but on a nationwide struggle between civil and uncivil politics. Whereas religious actors are often marginal to military confrontation, they were central to this ideological confrontation.