Shrine Shinto is distinguished from Sect Shinto, the organised founder-led movements, and it embraces the great majority of ordinary Shinto practice, the local shrines with their festivals (matsuri), the great national shrines, and the rites that accompany birth, growth, and the turning of the year. Its focus on place, purification, and communal festival rather than on doctrine or founder reflects Shinto's character as a tradition of practice and reverence for the kami rooted in the land and its communities.
The formal privatisation of shrine Shinto after 1945 has not ended debate over its civic role: the Association of Shinto Shrines has been closely associated with the conservative advocacy organisation Nippon Kaigi, which lobbies for a more prominent public role for Shinto tradition and the imperial institution, and periodic visits by sitting prime ministers to shrines such as Yasukuni continue to raise constitutional questions in Japan about the separation of religion and state. Critics see such visits and advocacy as pressure to restore Shinto's prewar civic centrality by other means, while shrine Shinto's defenders describe the same activities as ordinary cultural and ancestral commemoration protected under Japan's postwar constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.