Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2018
The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.
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4 Ibid., 4–5 (first quotation), 10 (fourth and fifth quotations), 170 (second quotation), 221 (third quotation).
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6 Ibid., 28.
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12 Hollinger, “Jewish Intellectuals,” 18 (first quotation); David A. Hollinger, “Two NYUs and ‘The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order’ in the Great Depression,” in Hollinger Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, 60–79, at 69 (second quotation).
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16 Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 298. Hollinger theorizes this focus on knowledge in “Christianity and Its American Fate,” 296–98.
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45 Cantwell v. Connecticut 310 U.S. 296 (1940) at 310.
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