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Why Is There So Much Christianity in the United States? A Reply to Sommerville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

David A. Hollinger
David A. Hollinger
Affiliation:
Preston Hotchkiss Professor of American History at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Extract

If we are going to explain the slow pace of de-Christianization for the United States relative to other industrialized societies in the North Atlantic West, we might well begin with the church-state relationship. The absence of an established church in the United States has enabled religious affiliation to function, like other voluntary organizations in “civil society,” as mediators between the individual and the nation. I conimented on this rather old idea in a book C. John Sommerville is kind enough to cite in another connection, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, but since he does not take up this point, I will develop it a bit further here, before reacting to Sommerville's other concerns as expressed in his refreshingly fair-minded rejoinder to my essay in the March 2001 issue of Church History.

Type
Perspectives
Information
Church History , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 858 - 864
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

1. Hollinger, David A., Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 35.Google Scholar

2. These thoughts on religion and American society owe much to Moore, R. Laurence, whose Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) remains an insufficiently appreciated contribution to the history of Christianity in the United States.Google Scholar

3. Sommerville, C. John, “Post-Secularism Marginalizes the University: A Rejoinder to Hollinger,” Church History, 71: 4, 848.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Philip, Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

5. I have detailed my concerns in terms rather different from Sommerville's, in my “Money and Academic Freedom Fifty Years After McCarthyism: Universities Amid the Force Fields of Capital,” in Hollingsworth, P. C., ed., Unfettered Expression (Arm Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 161–84.Google Scholar

6. Sommerville, , 854.Google Scholar

7. I have addressed secular initiatives that are taste intensive as well as those that are logic intensive in two papers, “The Canon and Its Keepers: Modernism and Mid-Twentieth Century Intellectuals,” in my In the American Province (Bloomington, Ind.: University Press, 1985, 74–91Google Scholar, and “The Knower and the Artificer,” in Dorothy, Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 26–53.Google Scholar

8. Sommerville, , 856.Google Scholar

9. These quotations are taken from the transcript of the 1972 conversation as reported by the Associated Press in a story of March 2, 2002. Accessed at http://www.cnn.com/2002/ US/03/02/nixon.graham.ap/index.html.