As part of our Creating Space for Conversations series, we share a PDF of an article by Alex M. Aakre, “With Freedom’s Holy Light”: The Four Estates in American Christianity, from an issue of Word and World, Luther Seminary’s journal of theology.

The concept of an American civil religion has been widely identified and widely debated over the last sixty years. Many have come to reject this idea as an attempt to deify the American state and mix the allegiance due to God with that due to the nation. Yet, perhaps, rightly conceived, American civil religion can be useful as a way of understanding a Christian’s relation to the state and to the world. —Alex M. Aakre

Word & World is Luther Seminary’s quarterly journal of theology concerned with Christian ministry in and for the world. They explore how Christian thinking relates to questions posed by contemporary life.