ABSTRACT
Nowhere perhaps is the religious acceptance of diversity so important as in relation to the public order of the United States. This has been an acknowledged truth since the beginning of the constitutional republic. The ideas of the Constitution's framers were strongly affected by the diversity of American religion. A solution to the dilemma of diversity was to place religious responsibility on the individual. It was assumed that if religions were left to themselves, they would contribute to civil society by stabilizing the social order and reminding individuals of their religious duties. There have been many articulations of this civil religion; accordingly, the term must be used flexibly, and people are under no spell of dictionary determinism. Civil religion was initially not the religion of the republic, but an organic tradition that represented the constitution of values and ideas originally developed through the presence of Christianity in early American history.
