Abstract
Catholics, Protestants and Jews constitute the reigning religious triumvirate in America, and so perceive themselves; and while all three groups have black constituencies of varying degrees of significance, the collective significance of Blacks as Catholics, Protestants and Jews is considered insufficient to be a meaningful factor in assessing the position of the religious mainstream in America. Hence, any serious discussion of religion in America almost inevitably becomes a discussion about “religion” and “black religion.” Civil religion is not excluded, for in talking about civil religion, we are in a larger sense talking about the peculiar establishment of a religious pluralism as an epiphenomenon behind an official posture of sectarianism and the alleged separation of church and state. It was once believed that civil religion could never be a factor of consequence in the United States, for that possibility had been anticipated and forever precluded by a provision of the First Amendment, to wit: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or preventing the free exercise thereof.”