One myth that Americans live by is the separation of church and state. Some like the idea; others hate it; but the irony is that church and state were not separated at the founding of the United States and are not separate now. In fact, they were united in the sense that the state is a church — the Church of America — and you can’t separate a thing from itself. The religion this church administers is not Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, or anything else that comes to mind when most people think the word religion. It’s Americanism, a species of nationalism. Nationalism and religion are cut from the same cloth. ~ Sheldon Richman

The American civil religion has been defined as “the shared reverence for sacred symbols drawn from a nation’s history” or “certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share that are expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals.”

Here are some of the sacraments of the American civil religion:

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