King’s most famous speech drew on the language and iconography of what sociologists call the American civil religion.38 Some Americans use quasi-religious language, frameworks, and narratives to speak about the country’s founding documents and founding fathers, and King did, too. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “they were signing a promissory note.”39 King turned the full moral force of the American civil religion toward the goals of the civil rights
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