Summary
The Public Square - Cover Story - A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation - Review
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One nation under many Gods.
The idea of "Christian America" meets with determined opposition on many fronts, and for many reasons. Few have pulled together the argumentative strands of opposition with such verve as Diana L. Eck of Harvard University. Her book, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (HarperSanFrancisco, 404 pp., $27), should, in the view of some, permanently retire the idea of Christian America. As the publisher says, Prof. Eck is "an articulate and credentialed Harvard scholar," and her "findings strike at the heart of xenophobia in this country [and are] sure to startle many Americans." To say that Prof. Eck is well credentialed is an understatement. She is Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard, Master of Lowell House (or, as she prefers, co-master), Director of the Pluralism Project, the recipient of major grants from the Ford Foundation, and in 1998 President Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal. Her dustjacket photo, by Bachrach no less, reveals a woman both feisty and thoughtful, and the endorsements of the book by prestigious academics--Harvey Cox, Edwin Gaustad, Wade Clark Roof, Alan Wolfe--far exceed the fulsome praise customary among friends. A New Religious America intends to be, and is, a major statement.
Eck knows something of the history of the Christian America that she insists is now past, and she is not entirely unsympathetic to that history. She quotes Tocqueville's assessment of America in the 1830s: "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth." In the American democracy, said Tocqueville, religion is "the first of political institutions," referring not only to its public influence but to the fact that it is the school in which people learn the habits and responsibilities of democratic associat...See the full content of this document
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