Civil Religion in the Discourse of Frederick Douglass

Abstract

The concept of “civil religion” harks back to the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Emile Durkheim but its significance in United States context has been pointed out by Robert Bellah in his 1967 seminal article “Civil Religion in America”. In his analysis of famous speeches and writings by American politicians and thinkers, Bellah contended that religious language is a major feature of American rhetoric and that civic consciousness in the US is shaped by metaphors and ideas about God and Christian religion in general. The present paper examines the relevance of the concept in the field of African-American literature where it has remained largely unaddressed despite the bulk of African-American political speeches and their religious rhetoric. It seeks to unravel the religious dimension of Frederick Douglass’s discourse in its relation to American civil religion. Through a close reading not only of Douglass’s speeches but also of his autobiographies, notably The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and of his historical novel The Heroic Slave, it purports to highlight how Douglass at once relates to mainstream American civil religion and departs from its dominating white male discourse.