Editorial: Law, Morals, and Civil Religion in America

Abstract

The existence of a civil religion in America is now widely accepted. While its specific content is still debated, most agree that civil religion is essentially about those public rituals and myths that express for most Americans the nexus of the political order to the divine Ac cording to Robert Bellah, who stimulated much of the discussion about civil religion with his seminal essay in 1967, civil religion in America is an understanding of the American experience in the fight of ultimate and universal reality. Much of the literature of recent decades that has explored civil reli gion has centered on the definitional problem. By 1974, there were so many characterizations of civil religion that Russell Richey and Donald Jones were prompted to offer a useful five-category schema for the organization of civil religion literature. These categories were folk reli gion, transcendent religion of the nation, religious nationalism, demo cratic faith, and Protestant civic piety. Richey and Jones felt that all of the various descriptions of civil religion offered by scholars would read ily fall under these five categories. Yet even this schema proved prob lematic at times because so many descriptions of civil religion contained overlapping elements of the Richey and Jones categories. For example, each of their categories usually drew upon civil events such as the 4th of July, Memorial Day, and presidential inaugurations, documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Con stitution, personages such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Lin coln, and common religious beliefs such as the belief in God and the chosen nation status of the United States. Moreover, it became in