Civil Religion, Church and State (Modern American Protestantism and Its World)

Scholars for decades have spoken of a "civil religion" generated by Protestants: some have called it, as Benjamin Franklin did, a "public religion". This is a complex of sacred symbols which surrounds the churches and synagogues, undergirds much of national life, and sometimes competes with organized religion. American civil or pbulic religion was not of an anti-Christian sort, as so much of the European Enlightenment called European forms to be. If it was "post-" anything, it was not post-Buddhist or post-Catholic, but post-Protestant. That is, it took themes from Protestantism and fused them with Enlightenment motifs. The articles in this volume show how involved with civil religion the Protestant churches have been. For contrast in this volume as in several others, there is some notice of the Canadian scene. And since "separation of church and state" frames the civil religion debates, this is the place where scholarly writings on that subject appear. They show how unresolved and perhaps irresolvable these issues are and will remain - a factor that adds some measure of urgency to the act of studying such articles.