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This paper is a part of the inquiry into African American novelist Ralph Ellison’s socio-political vistas. This study focuses on Ellison’s “antagonistic cooperation” with the mores of American civil religion in his posthumous novel Juneteenth. Into this political allegory, Ellison does not only try to reconstruct American cultural history of integration, especially by representing white America as the African American jazz musician’s adoptive son, but through the adoptive son’s rejection of his father, he also inscribes the white America’s historical amnesia and betrayal of the American principles. In addition, Ellison’s description of African American christian community led by Rev. Hickman can be interpreted as an antipode to Robert Bellah’s well-known idea of “American civil religion.” While Bellah sought to incorporate American history into a Judeo-Christian hero myth, Ellison presents a racially-inscribed, multi-layered American civil religion. Underlining the historical facts that African Americans settled down on the land where they had been scattered, Ellison represents their claim for the American land and for civil and political rights. Ellison’s appropriation of the American civil religion, thus, resonates with the historical experiences of African Americans and their vernacular culture.