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This chapter examines the role of religion in American civic life from the time Alexis de Tocqueville visited the early United States until September 11, 2001. It focuses on an array of historical images for how Americans in their diversity can—and should—come together in public life. Tocqueville called religion the first of America’s political institutions, due to the religious nature of many voluntary associations, but he was limited in assuming Christianity was the common denominator. Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen offered opposing images — the melting pot and cultural pluralism, respectively — but they each also spoke of an American symphony. Will Herberg introduced the “triple melting pot” of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, and Lyndon Johnson gave the most vivid picture of America as the home of immigrants from every corner of the world. None of these images can fix the current challenges, but they do help show some imaginative, alternative visions.

The massive outpouring of public piety that characterized the postwar years accompanied a vigorous campaign against secularism, both at home and abroad. Dwight D. Eisenhower came to see the limits of Judeo-Christian terminology by the mid-1950s, perhaps with the help of his Catholic speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes. But other public figures (and many ordinary citizens) embraced that language, along with the dominant, Judeo-Christian exceptionalist understanding of democracy. Conflicts over religion and education continued, and theorists such as John Courtney Murray, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Will Herberg honed their arguments for religion’s political centrality, even as Niebuhr began decrying religious nationalism and anti-secularism. At the same time, some Jewish thinkers challenged Judeo-Christian terminology itself. The Catholic writer John Cogley also expressed doubts about anticommunism’s prominence in American Catholic thought. On the pluralist side, the liberal Protestant theologian Edwin E. Aubrey and the Jewish philosopher Horace M. Kallen offered positive renderings of secularism in the early 1950s, as part of their groups’ continued effort to identify open-ended tolerance as the central democratic ideal. Yet anticommunism and the accompanying critiques of secularism continued to dominate American public life through the McCarthy era.

This chapter covers the writings and interchanges of various Jewish theologians who wrote in America in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, who included existentialists, and Reform Jewish theologians. These writers include Emil Fackenheim, Will Herberg, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Eugene Borowitz, Bernhard Heller, Jakob Petuchowski, Arthur Cohen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Soloveitchik, Lou Silberman, Bernard Martin, Eliezer Berkovits, Richard Rubinstein, and many others. The chapter also covers the debates in various journals as well as ideas put forward in more substantial publications (essays, books, etc.).

Judeo-Christian exceptionalism took firm hold after World War II. The Supreme Court’s Everson (1947) and McCollum (1948) decisions raised the church-state barrier and convinced leading Catholics, many Protestants, and some Jews that secularism had become the nation’s quasi-official faith. The replacement of fascism with “godless communism” as the country’s enemy also heightened fears of secularization and unbelief. Lay Catholics took up both Judeo-Christian language and Judeo-Christian exceptionalism after the war. Will Herberg also sought a cross-confessional campaign against secularism, as many Protestants—especially Reinhold Niebuhr’s followers—warmed to that prospect. Education became a key battleground, as these figures decried the secularization of public schooling, and sometimes also the denial of public funds to parochial schools. Clarifying their views on the First Amendment, they rejected strict separationism and the journalist Paul Blanshard’s sensational attacks on Catholic political influence. These Protestants favored accommodationism: the view that the federal government cannot establish any particular faith but can—and must—promote all religious groups equally over and against secularism. Through private and public channels, they worked with liberal Catholics such as John Courtney Murray and Jewish advocates of Judeo-Christian exceptionalism to counter what they considered the growing dominance of secularism in American public culture.

Part 2, “Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy,” begins with a chapter exploring the distinctive challenges that Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers faced as Judeo-Christian formulations of democracy multiplied. It explains that many wartime commentators employed a “tri-faith” portrait of the American nation—one that deemed Protestants, Catholics, and Jews equally American—without using Judeo-Christian terminology, let alone theorizing democracy’s cultural foundations. Even liberal rabbis steered clear of Judeo-Christian rhetoric after 1941, as attacks on secularism spread and Christian personalism shaped the ascendant language of individual rights. In terms of individual groups, mainstream Protestants increasingly joined Reinhold Niebuhr in fearing secularism more than Catholicism. Liberal Catholics such as Carlton J. H. Hayes and John Courtney Murray reached out to these Protestants, seeking a cross-confessional or tri-faith alliance against secularism. Although a few Jews, led by the erstwhile Marxist Will Herberg, shared this vision, most joined nonbelievers and religious humanists in continuing to identify open-ended tolerance as democracy’s keynote—and portraying Judeo-Christian exceptionalism as implicitly totalitarian. Bitter conflicts over the nature of democracy and rights played out in scholarly gatherings and media outlets alike, as Americans clashed over the proper contours of the postwar global order.

With the notable exception of the Russian mission in Alaska, for the most part the Orthodox Church did not come to America as mission but followed its people’s departure from the homeland, often under extremities of war, social upheaval, or natural disaster. There was no preparation for coming here. They left behind historical Orthodox cultures and were immersed immediately into a society that the Orthodox faith had no role in shaping, a secular society that bafflingly was also religious, though not in any familiar way. Through conversation with theologians and public intellectuals like Schmemann, Parsons, Herberg, Berger, and Berry, this essay first traces the lineage of secularism back to Christianity. The unmooring of virtue from the transcendent, more specifically from the salvific sacrifice of Christ, has yielded secularism as a “step-child” of Christianity. In response, many Orthodox Americans turn to ethnic identity as a means of imbuing daily life with the faith. This, however, is more a sign of a dying church than a means of sustaining its life. The challenge is to renew a sense of the sacred, a liturgical worldview, within the pluralism of American society.

This chapter explores in greater detail the interfaith reading and spiritual cosmopolitanism of the war and postwar years. The reading campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews called Americans to read across the boundaries of tradition, but it was the advancement of psychology and mysticism during the war years that made interfaith spirituality successful at the popular level. In particular, military service acculturated tens of millions of Americans to scientific psychology. The works and lives of three bestselling authors of the 1940s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Joshua Loth Liebman, and Thomas Merton, illustrate the role of psychology and mysticism in facilitating interfaith reading and spiritual cosmopolitanism. The bestsellers of these authors, a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew, stand in contrast to the generic religiosity famously decried by the critic Will Herberg and exemplified by laissez-faire liberal Norman Vincent Peale. These authors instead remained rooted in their specific traditions, even as their works were read widely by members of other traditions. Letter from readers, both civilians and those in the military, demonstrate these developments, and give voice to the rising religious liberalism of the postwar period.

This introductory chapter describes how racial minorities have emerged and constitute the largest share of Americans under 18 and of the children of immigrants—the new second generation. American cultural discourse has shifted from the religious triple melting pot to one that celebrates ethnic, religious, and racial identities. The members of this new and emerging diverse population are situated to combine their backgrounds in ways that their parents and earlier generations were not permitted to, lest they risk marginalization from mainstream public life. Also, despite its continuous role in American public life, the significance of institutionalized religion to the new second generation's private life has declined. American scholar Will Herberg calls this process the “secularization of religion,” in which members of the new second generation value an individualistic, therapeutic spirituality that mistrusts religious authority and instead embraces authenticity in being and relationships.

When George Gallup’s experiments as a high school student in Iowa led to his successful deployment of a national poll predicting the outcome of the 1936 presidential election, nobody could have imagined that polls would also play a more significant role in Americans’ understanding of religion. But religious affiliation had already been included in the Literary Digestsurveys that Gallup replaced. And by the early 1950s Gallup was being hired by religious organizations to find out what Americans really thought and believed.

After World War II universities often added religious programs. But these seldom touched the heart of the enterprise. Mainstream American Protestants typically saw religion as an add-on, in contrast to John Henry Newman’s Catholic Idea of a University with theology and philosophy at the center. Nathan Pusey’s efforts to strengthen religion at Harvard illustrate the problem. Will Herberg and John Courtney Murray each pointed out the limits of generalized American religion. Religion departments acted as a palliative. But especially in the 1960s legitimate concerns for pluralism and diversity undermined specifically Protestant teachings in favor of a generalized ethic, as illustrated by Harvey Cox in The Secular City. Mainline Protestant campus ministries declined rapidly in the later 1960s. By the 1970s and 1980s ideals of inclusiveness displaced any specifically Protestant heritage. Some see a “cultural triumph of liberal Protestantism,” but the laudable inclusive ideals by themselves also bring cultural fragmentation.

The political and cultural landscape of the years after World War II are explored in relation to the deradicalization of one-time revolutionary intellectuals. The transformation of Stalinism into a kind of “Red Fascism” is one aspect, along with the activities of the intellectuals in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and in relation to McCarthyism. The problem of apostasy is addressed by looking at intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Will Herberg, Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort, and many more. On the other hand, the sectarianism associated with orthodoxy is treated in regard to the evolution of the Socialist Workers Party and the conflict with Bert Cochran as well as the career of George Novack.