Civil Religion

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CIVIL RELIGION

CIVIL RELIGION . The word religion is derived from two Latin terms, religio and religare. The first term designates a quality of prudence, regard, and seriousness as an attitude toward ancestral founders. The second term means to bind, to tie—as a mode that gives a specificity, concreteness, and cohesion—an identity to a human community. The binding is always related to a myth that reveals the nature and meaning of ancestors who were involved in the founding of the city.

This meaning of religion can be seen in ancient foundings of cities and towns. In his book The Ancient City (1873) Fustel de Coulanges described religions associated with founding Greek and Roman city-states. This sense of founding took into account the ancestors and gods that existed prior to the organization of the city. Joseph Rykwert's The Idea of a Town (1976) provides a similar discussion of sacred symbols, rituals, and meanings that were essential to the foundation of Greek and Roman communities.

The term civil religion was first introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book The Social Contract (1762). Rousseau used the term in the context of the European Enlightenment and the revolutionary movement toward democratic statehood. The concept applied to the ordering and organization of modern democracies preceeding the French Revolution and the overthrowing of religious and political hierarchies as the ordering principles of the state. Rousseau, as did many founders of modern democracy, nevertheless thought that a shared sense of essential moral and religious beliefs must still serve to provide cohesion for the general citizenry of the French nation. Such beliefs were girded in Enlightenment Christianity and consisted of "essential" prescriptive values:

the idea of a benevolent deity,
the existence of an afterlife,
the faith in justice and divine retribution,
sacred correspondence of the social contract with the state's laws.

Rousseau was writing before the French Revolution and was attempting to locate a basis for the integrative principle of society that would replace the monarchy and the church. But even after their revolutions democratic European states still possessed the residue of ancient traditions embedded in their histories and institutions. In other words, they were already "a people" prior to the foundation of democratic institutions. The difference between European and American identities was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville when he toured the United States in the 1830s. "Up to the present," he noted, "I don't see a trace of what we generally consider faiths, such as customs, ancient traditions, and the power of memories" (Pierson, 1938, p. 153).

None of these cultural forms of customs, ancient traditions, or the power of memories was present in the American nation; thus the basis for a civil society was always rather tenuous. What was present was a historical style of Protestantism, which was embraced by the majority population. Although the U.S. Constitution denies the meaning of any positive religion as the "religion of the Republic" and all specific religions are entitled to have the right of full expression and freedom, it was assumed by the "majority" of Americans that the proper lens of interpretation for important national issues was through a Protestant point of view.

Introduction of "Civil Religion" in the American Academy

Will Herberg's 1960 work Protestant, Catholic, Jew was an attempt to break through this Protestant sense of America by offering an alternative and plural understanding of the nature of American religiosity. The title of his book is taken from one of the popular identifiers on identification tags of American soldiers in World War II. Along with the soldier's serial number and blood type was one of these religious identifiers. An apocryphal story is told that if a soldier declared himself or herself an atheist, then his or her tag was stamped "p" for Protestant. This story goes to the heart of the matter, for the designation was only a sign of religion and carried with it no serious meaning or commitment. The designation expressed a sentimentality associated with religious rhetoric rather than any efficacious religious meaning.

Robert Bellah's article "Civil Religion in America," published in Daedalus in 1967, brought to the surface the problematical nature of the foundational principles of American society. Bellah made clear that his article grew out of a concern occasioned by the public debate that had grown out of the candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy for president of the United States. Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, and therefore the issue of both his adherence to a hierarchical religious church whose administrative center lay outside of the United States as well as the fact that he was not a member of the Protestant majority raised questions about the de facto meaning of what constitutes an American.

As a sociologist, Bellah focused his meaning of American civil religion in the symbols and rituals that provided a sense of cohesion and continuity for Americans. He drew attention to the founding documents and the rhetoric of the American Republic in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which he argued made possible the existence of a civil society in the United States. He pointed to Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and Gettysburg Address as examples of civil religion. In particular the first few presidents had set the tenor in their words and deeds. Bellah argued that American civil religion, although derived from Christianity, is not to be equated with a positive religion. The "God of the Republic" can be characterized as having more of a concern for "order, law, and right, than to salvation and love" (Demerath and Hammond, p. 172). This God is active in history and shows a "special concern for America." (Demerath and Hammond, p. 172). A higher law and a transcendent force exist by which to judge the political processes of the American people (Demerath and Hammond, p. 172).

In a subsequent discussion, "American Civil Religion in the 1970's," published in the Anglican Theological Review, Bellah asserted that he had invented the notion of "civil religion" as a social science category of interpretation, stating, "In a sense, and not in a trivial sense, civil religion in America existed from the moment the winter 1967 issue of Daedalus was printed" (Bellah, 1973, p. 8). He admitted that there had been other interpretations on the topic prior to the publication of his article, but he took credit for the specific contextualization of this notion. Prominent in these prior interpretations of an American religion was the American church historian Sidney E. Mead, who referred to the United States as a "nation with the soul of a church," a phrase he took from G. K. Chesterton (Mead, 1975). Mead showed that while there was nothing like a "church" in the Constitution of the first pluralistic and "secular" democracy, there was a strong tradition of voluntary association imbibed through the Puritan Dissenters in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century that was not to be seen as entirely at odds with the beliefs in popular sovereignty later propounded by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

In The Nation with the Soul of a Church (1975) Mead argues that a principle of religious freedom began with the Lutheran Reformation and continued through a variety of Calvinist sects. The American sects emphasized covenant theology, which resembled social contracts and reflected the idea that voluntary consent of the governed was the basis of all good government. The Puritans were able to wed this democratic formulation to a sense of chosenness, with their Calvinist notions of "election" or sainthood as the condition of the governing bodies or theocracy. Thus voluntary consent to the laws of the Puritan state coalesced with consent to divine laws and "destiny" for a "peculiar people." Mead's formulation is based upon the history of American religion from the Puritans through American denominationalism into the mid–twentieth century. He discerns that through this history Americans have been able at various times to appeal to a meaning of their destiny as it is revealed beyond the empirical historical situations. They have been within these spaces at various moments able to discern unique and qualitative meanings of freedom as they relate to the very constitution of an American self.

Historical Background and Manifestations of American Civil Religion

Catherine Albanese (1999), following closely upon Mead, has delineated several modes civil religion has taken during American history. She has shown that the Enlightenment and Puritan traditions combined to shape the rhetoric, symbols, and structure of American civil religion. The Puritans laid the groundwork for a national symbology that could be drawn upon by subsequent revolutionaries and later generations of Americans in times of war and crises.

John Winthrop imagined the 1630 Puritan crossing of the Atlantic in terms of a biblical typology—the crossing was a reenactment of the Exodus story of Israelites from Egyptian captivity and the crossing of the Red Sea. He compared the colony to the "chosen" people and a "city set upon a hill"; their duty was to be a light unto Europe so all could follow their example. The American people may inherit what Albanese calls a "melodramatic" edge from the Puritans along with a strong sense of suffering and guilt (Albanese, 1999, p. 439). Perhaps the guilt was occasioned by their departure from Britain; perhaps their sense of failure stemmed from the imminent British Reformation, which as Perry Miller claimed in his famous book Errand into the Wilderness, may have left uncertainty as to whether their "errand" was not more similar to that of an errand boy (Miller, 1956, p. 3). In any case, the Puritans developed their chosenness with gravity, guilt, and a sense of the imminence of their own failure and depravity, the latter of which was also grounded in the Calvinist focus on predestination and original sin.

Although the Puritan focus on innate depravity would seem to be at odds with the language of the Declaration of Independence, during the eighteenth century the situation of Puritans had changed. As can be witnessed in the sermons of the Northampton clergyman Jonathan Edwards, the experience of conversion or chosenness gained closer proximity to a language of the senses and nature. According to many critics, the First Great Awakening (1730–1740) that Edwards initiated can be seen as a forerunner to the American Revolution. To be sure, for many itinerant preachers and the general populace involved in mass revivalist democracy, the focus on a sensuous experience of conversion often converged with Puritan millennialism and a sense of imminent natural redemption of the American land as the "Promised Land" and the place in which the new millennium would begin. While Jonathan Edwards maintained a balance between millennialist rhetoric and the ordering of the township space of Northampton into a space for cultural expressions of religious concern, in the hands of those less concerned with local communities the typologies could be adapted to the Enlightenment belief in individual and national rationality, prosperity, and progress.

Benjamin Franklin may be one such figure who recognized the utility of revivalism for the creation of moral and "civil" citizens. Natural law seemed to coincide with God's law. And God, for the Enlightenment founders, was understood within the register of deism as a benevolent and "great governor." Freemasonry, a semisecret society, flourished as a method for the spread of deism and "fifty-two of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons" (Albanese, 1999, p. 440). During the Revolutionary War, the Puritan rhetoric of chosenness converged with natural law, and drawing on Puritan symbols, many revolutionaries depicted themselves as involved in a millennial battle with Great Britain. This adaptation of Puritan rhetoric and typologies to "America," or what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "Nature's Nation," increased during the nineteenth century after the Louisiana Purchase and the expansion of the continent. As Giles Gunn pointed out, Sidney Mead claimed that with the Second Great Awakening came a "reactionary evangelical enthusiasm" that "sever[ed] religious life in America from intellectual life" (Gunn, 1992, p. 225). Indeed the varieties of denominations and sects that developed during this period seemed to turn inward and focus on individual purity. Nonetheless in the nineteenth century expansion gave impetus to the continuation of Enlightenment notions of progress adapted to millennialism.

American civil religion finds its most intense expression during periods of crises and wars. The "War of 1812, like the Revolution, was a holy war" (Albanese, 1999, p. 450). Moreover in 1845 John L. O'Sullivan coined the term "manifest destiny" to justify American expansion and the annexation of Texas. The Civil War furthered the attachment of millennial rhetoric associated with New England Puritans to the Civil War between the North and the South. Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was sung with its martial rhythms and its casting of the South as the anti-Christ over which the righteous North would prevail (Albanese, 1999, p. 451). During this time there was also a construction of the sacredness of the "founding fathers." Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was, however, one attempt to interrogate the meaning of the American Revolution in terms of the promises for civil religion that attended to the ordering of the nation. In the twentieth century many critics argued that there was a decline in the efficacy of American civil religion. Through ceremonies like Memorial Day, an attempt was made to connect Americans to their foundations, but "as veterans began to die, a bond with the past was broken" (Albanese, 1999, p. 455). Although civil religion may have emerged in times of "trial" through successive generations, and especially during the Vietnam War, Albanese claims that the "many" of the United States were losing faith in the "oneness" that civil religion symbolized.

E Pluribus Unum: Founding a "Novus Ordo Seclorum"

At this juncture where the story of American civil religion seems to end, the notion of the many and the one needs to be revisited. In addition to her delineation of the various historical forms of civil religion in the United States, Albanese paid attention to the "religion" and rituals of the founding. She noted the conscious imitation of Rome and Roman rituals in the festivals and early celebrations of the founding of the nation. A mingling of Puritan and Roman elements served in the symbolism and rituals surrounding George Washington. He was both a Moses figure and a Roman hero, who like "Cincinnatus, the Roman general, … left his plough to fight for the country and then, when the task was done, had dropped the sword to return to his farm" (Albanese, 1999, p. 443). In Albanese's opinion the Roman allusions, such as the motto e pluribus unum, were an attempt to capture the spirit of a republic that would attend to the plurality of creeds and nations united by the oneness of a state.

In another vein Hannah Arendt also analyzed the meaning of the founding of the American Republic. She noted that the language of the founding works almost in a formulaic manner as it determines a structure of meaning and constitution. Arendt undertook a philosophical analysis of the language of the founding as a basis for the civil religion in the United States. Arendt's analysis shows that though the American Republic was the first of the modern democracies, its founding could not totally shed the problem of founding, as Rykwert and de Coulanges set forth in ancient cultures. For in the founding of a modern state the revolutionaries underwent a unique experience of novelty and the issue of beginning anew. "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (a new secular order) is the title of a chapter in Arendt's On Revolution (1963); it is the Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States and on the American dollar bill. Arendt clarified that if the founders' attitude was "religious," that sense of religion was closer to religare, which consists of binding "back to a beginning." For the Romans that beginning entailed a binding "to the beginning of Roman history, and the foundation of the eternal city" (Arendt, 1963, p. 198). The modern revolutionaries faced the problem of a free act, which, in their case, did not consist of binding oneself to a "distant past" (as in Rome). Rather, they faced the problem of manifesting the specific novelty of the "American" situation. Their beginning needed to account for the plurality and the aboriginal ordering of the land that immediately surrounded them. This means that if they were to legitimate a foundation premised on revolution, they would have to provide spaces for the voluntary association and public debate to continue.

While the founders did provide a "constitution," they were not as successful in providing spaces for the spirit of revolution and freedom to continue. According to Arendt, even the founders immediately worried that their foundation would encourage apathy. While the ritual of "voting" might serve to activate some of the population in the spirit of political freedom, it was too infrequent an occurrence to maintain the revolutionary spirit of the Republic. Many critics have pointed out that this failure to provide spaces for novelty to continue to appear coincides with the retention of slavery in the founding of the Republic. While slavery was one of the main topics of discussion during the Constitutional Convention, it was not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, and the mention of it in the Constitution was the basis for the famous three-fifths compromise. This compromise at the founding of the Republic on the meaning of freedom was repeated throughout American history. Thus one might return to the critical debate on the decline in the commitment to American civil religion in the twentieth century, most aptly characterized by Bellah's title of his 1975 book The Broken Covenant. From this perspective, that sense of betrayal of not only the authenticity of the words but also the acts of founding a revolutionary democracy has been present for much longer.

Critical Understandings of American Civil Religion

In his essay in the Anglican Theological Review, Bellah in response to his critics made it clear that it had not been his intent to define civil religion as a good thing. He said, "Like all things human, civil religion is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but in any case, it seems likely to be with us for a very long time" (Bellah, 1973, p. 10). Almost every notion of civil religion or one of its predecessors or derivatives has been established with a positive quality while allowing for ambiguities that move toward a negativity. Arendt has pointed to the fact that this quality of civil religion was present in the founding itself. Mead noted that this negative quality might be found in the emphasis Americans have given to space over time. Given such an emphasis, Americans seem to have had little patience with memories—with the meaning of the actual events that took place in the land. While Herberg's formulation of Protestant-Catholic-Jew attempted to show that an Americanness could be expressed in any of these forms, the formula was always in danger of turning into an innocuous triviality because any of these designations or all of them together might be understood as a kind of religion in general (see Demerath and Hammond, 1969, p. 172).

Ambiguity around the notion of American civil religion persists, and the attempt to connect it to normative or positive religious expressions has been unsatisfactory. The reason for this might be located in the problematic of founding a revolutionary democracy. Arendt argued in subsequent reflections on the American Revolution in her book Willing (1978) that the revolution itself created a "hiatus" or a radical break with the past; the hiatus is the revolutionary time of possibility and freedom, a space in between the "no more" of the old order and the "not yet" of the new (Arendt, 1978, p. 204). The problem of the constitution of a civil religion based on a revolutionary spirit that had detached itself from the meaning of ancestors or sacred space may be viewed next to the problems of constituting a religion of the Republic that would also take into account the presence of aboriginal people, Native Americans, and African Americans. In terms of revolutionary beginnings and civil religion, a long and hopeful, while often prophetic and judgmental, tradition has existed with African Americans.

And yet these traditions have for the most part been left out of most formal discussion of American civil religion. Charles H. Long noted this exclusion in his essay "Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion" (1974). This essay is included in the collection American Civil Religion edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones in 1974 with the approaching bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Bellah, Mead, and Herberg contributed as well. Here Long noted that the issue of "American" civil religion brought to the fore questions of what it means to be American and in particular what it means to be invisible in the telling of the national story, which has gained a well-nigh "cosmogonic language, a language of beginnings; it structures the American myth of beginnings, and has continued to express the synchronic dimensions of American cultural life since that time" (Long, 1974, p. 214). From this perspective, the issue of American civil religion is one of contestation, "concealment," and exclusion in the telling of a myth of origins.

Myth, as Long notes, is a "true story," and African American versions of American civil religion often used the language of religio-political symbols while defining another space for freedom of expression through music, art, and the cultural redefining of a transnational "America" to emerge. This tradition begins at least as early as the black music of the spirituals and the oral traditions of speaking and preaching, later finding written expression as Walker's Appeal in Four Articles (1829), in which David Walker challenged the Jeffersonian natural hierarchies and "Nature's God."

A sense of importance is also brought to Africa in the creation of the United States, while European Christians were challenged on their hypocritical understandings of an "equality" before God. Slave revolts, such as those led by Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey and especially the 1831 revolt led by Nat Turner, often relied on biblical typologies of the Israelites in Egypt, and the leaders became Moses figures for their people. While an eschatological and often violent protest tradition emerged to challenge the white Protestant civil religious tradition in the United States, Frederick Douglass and other black abolitionists seemed to share more closely the Enlightenment values of natural equality and the Protestant work ethic. One might also cite W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his later Black Reconstruction (1935) as major documents of American civil religion. In the former Du Bois addressed both the issue of ordering American society and the telling of its myth of beginnings. "Your country?" he asked and then inserted a black presence into the sacred story by reminding Americans that "before the Pilgrims landed [Africans] were here" (Du Bois, 1903, p. 275). The stories, music, spirit, and folk traditions of both Africans and aboriginal tribes were present, Du Bois claimed, and were "gifts," added and intermingled in blood, sweat, and wars in the formation of the "Promised Land." Finally, one must mention the last great documents of this tradition as the speeches, events, and works of Martin Luther King Jr.

The African American tradition is a reminder that whatever form civil religion takes, its more hopeful organization includes that enunciated by Edwards in his "awakening" of active and free persons who are provided with a place for public debate over the issues of the day. While it may seem clear that "American civil religion" in its more positive Christian orientations and its faith in national heroes has declined in the twentieth century, the problematic of the nation's religio-political identity and the meaning of its revolutionary founding remains central as the nation further reflects on its powerful status in international affairs and the increasing diversity within its borders.

Bibliography

The ideological and intellectual foundations of the new Western democratic states stem from the Reformation and Enlightenment critiques of hierarchical and sacredotal authority as the ordering principle for society and in the drive for a form of freedom defined for and located in the individual person. New democratic governments were brought into being to establish and maintain the rights of the individual. Democratic states, for the most part, did institute new human rights for the individual but this left open the meaning of a binding that would hold together a group of individuals into an abiding bond of unity. The United States of America is a case in point.

In addressing this issue, many revolutionaries had recourse to models from ancient societies, such as those in Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, N.Y., 1956; originally published 1873); and Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Princeton, N.J., 1976), which show how religious rituals and beliefs created the "common bond" that held societies together. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Baltimore, 1968; originally published 1762), notes that revolutionary democratic societies, like ancient societies, needed some form of religion to guarantee the integration and cohesion of modern democratic societies. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Karen Fields (New York, 1995), in his description of Australian Aboriginal religion, alludes to a similar notion about the social integrative meaning of religion. Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers (Philadelphia, 1976), discusses the imitation of Roman rituals in the ceremonies connected with the inauguration of George Washington as the first president.

The Puritan dimensions of American cultural and religious institutions have been ably set forth in Perry Miller's essays, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), a good introduction to the range of his scholarship on the Puritans. Discussions of the rhetoric of chosenness and New England Covenant theology commonly begin with analyses of John Winthrop's lay sermon preached aboard the Arabella in 1630, "A Modell of Christian Charity." Winthrop Papers: Volume II, 1623–1630. New York, 1968, 282–295. Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), indicates the radical and intense fragmentation within the religious and secular parts of society prior to the Revolutionary War. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York, 1963), discusses the "shape of Protestantism" in relation to the expansion in geographical space of the American Republic. Jonathan Edwards is often cited as setting the precedent for an enduring form of Puritanism as the basis for a "secular" religious polity, as seen in his writings on revivalism, especially The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening, edited by Perry Miller (New Haven, Conn., 1972), in which C. C. Goen provides an introduction that addresses Edwards's often disputed "post-millennialism," pp. 1–94. An analysis of this transition is in Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). Along with Miller, Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York, 1932), offers an examination of the more "progressive" use of Edwards's theology by his New Divinity followers. Alexis De Tocqueville commented on the importance of the Puritan townships and municipalities to the formation of a democratic spirit in the United States in his two volume work, Democracy in America (New York, 1990; Volume I originally published 1835; Volume II originally published 1840). George W. Pierson alludes to De Tocqueville's comments on the disregard of ancient traditions and cultures in the United States in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938).

Broader interpretive works that deal with the history of religion in America include Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire (New York, 1970); and Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn., 1972). Albanese's textbook, America: Religion and Religions (Belmont, Calif., 1999), gives prominence to the various expressions of civil religion in American cultural history. The sociologists N. J. Demerath III and Phillip E. Hammond survey the religious situation in America in Religion in Social Context (New York, 1969).

H. Richard Niebuhr puts forth theologically critical positions regarding the plurality of religious institutions in the United States in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1957). Given the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state and the fact that American culture was a Protestant culture in terms of style and history, the many immigrants from other parts of the world, the progeny of the Africans enslaved within the country, and the aboriginal populations, one looked for a meaning of America that could provide the serious binding that is necessary for a functional society. Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York, 1975), explains the meaning that could provide the serious binding necessary for a functional society within the structures of a form of secular Protestantism. Will Herberg attempts to extend a meaning of America in terms of a pluralistic religious meaning in Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.J., 1960).

Within this context one must understand Robert N. Bellah's programmatic "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Bellah responds to some of his critics in "American Civil Religion in the 1970's," Anglican Theological Review, supp. ser., 1 (July 1973): 8–20, and continues his exposition of civil religion in The Broken Covenant (New York, 1975) and with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton in Habits of the Heart (New York, 1986). Trenchant critiques of American civil religion are in John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York, 1974) and No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York, 1978). Another critical examination of Bellah's position is in John F. Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia, 1979). Giles B. Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain, chap. 9, pp. 212–236 (Chicago, 1992), is an interrogation of the concept from a literary perspective informed by the tradition of American pragmatism. Hannah Arendt examines the philosophical meaning of the founding documents and rituals of the United States in On Revolution (New York, 1963) and in Willing (New York, 1978), the latter published posthumously.

Hardly any discussion of civil religion in the United States has emphasized the issue of slavery as an institution or the existence of enslaved Africans in the country at the time of its founding. Though this is a perennial issue of the country, having been one of the major causes of one the greatest wars in human history, it is seldom mentioned in relationship to either a religious or civil ordering of the country. Slavery was discussed almost every day in the constitutional convention and provisions were made to count the number of slaves for representation, but the founding made no change in their status. For the institution of slavery and the enslaved in the Constitutional Convention, see Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981). Charles H. Long, "Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People, Invisible Religion," pp. 211–221, in American Civil Religion, edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York, 1974), contributes to this discussion. There is, however, a long tradition of African American thought concerning the civil ordering of the country, including David Walker, Walker's Appeal in Four Articles (1829), which has been reprinted as David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, edited by Peter P. Hinks (University Park, Pa., 2000); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903) and Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935); and Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (New York, 1963), Where Do We Go From Here? (New York, 1967), and Why We Can't Wait (New York, 1964). In addition a great deal of the contemporary Black Theology movement can be seen as contributing to the meaning of a civil religion. See especially James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York, 1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia, 1970). Gayraud S. Wilmore's interpretive discussion of African American Christianity, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1998) also makes a major contribution to this discussion.