摘要：A borrowed beginning: “The business of America may be business as Calvin Coolidge once said, but it is at least as accurate and as important to assert that the religion of America is America.” That comes from Jaroslav Pelikan’s review in 1971 of Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. So, the title of this paper is also borrowed. I will return to it shortly, after first offering a hopefully less derivative indication of what this paper tries to do. Initially, it engages with the sense in which it can be said that “the religion of America is America.” More pointedly, it engages with the notion of “American civil religion,” to adopt the standard term. American civil religion is advanced by its proponents as a religion that infuses political life in the United States, and one distinct from religious denominations and sects, yet a religion that is still a religious religion (if the pleonasm can be tolerated). As such, it can be contrasted to what could be called European civil religion, a religion discerned in supposedly secular attachments to modern nation and modern empire. My preliminary argument, then, will be that American civil religion is less the religious religion claimed by its proponents and more akin to a secular religion of the European variety.
