Why We Remain Blacks - Part 1

Black Americans and the Ordeal of Civility

America is peculiar in that it is a secular country premised upon a civil religion, which gives Americans a sense that their existence reflects a divine order, or at least an order with some sort of guiding metaphysical principle like moral progress. The American civil religion does this by centering history and historical-theological documents composed by Americans and those who influenced them. Americans draw upon these texts for inspiration and a sense of meaning when confronting the minutiae of everyday life and the public crises of the day.

One facet of our civil religion that distinguishes it from other religions is that it is widely regarded as an incomplete, living body of texts that sometimes requires, and at any rate is always open to, reinterpretation. In practice this means that it is nonetheless exactly like other religions in that its scriptures regularly undergo revision, reinterpretation, and redaction.

Unique for Americans is that these texts and the methods by which they are interpreted traverse the spectrum of secular and theological disciplines, resulting in a religious existence that is defined by every discipline ranging from theology to science. Theological changes to the civil religion can therefore appear through the discovery of new historical evidence as well as by moral reappraisals of existing evidence.

Recently, the scribes of our civil religion published an astonishing new entry in our civil religion canon calling for factual and moral reappraisals of the core “text” of our civil religion: history itself.

That entry’s name? Buck Breaking.