The influence of secularism in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States is another important subject for Jacoby. She believes that accepting the importance of secularism in the civil rights movement does not deny the role religion played in it, and while she has admitted that "the driving force in the early civil rights movement were the black churches of the South", she has also pointed out that the movement was not intrinsically religious, and that in fact, the white churches of the South were strongly opposed to it.