Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal
*Starred Review* Many Americans took it as a bizarre joke when in 1980 folk singer Pete Seeger celebrated "old time religion" with the prayers of Zarathustra and Druids. Harvard historian Hutchison sees something more. For him, Seeger's outre hymn was but one more straw in the wind blowing away centuries of Protestant hegemony and blowing in an unpredictable world of religious pluralism. In a chronicle rich in insight, alive with anecdote, Hutchison illuminates the cultural transformations that enabled twentieth-century Americans to embrace belatedly the religious diversity that emerged in the nineteenth-century influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants and in the rise of new American-born faiths such as Mormonism and Transcendentalism. These transformations have turned a country that once congratulated itself on merely tolerating non-Protestant Christians into a country that guarantees the rights of full participation to a wide range of religions, including those of Buddhist immigrants and New Age devotees. Though he acknowledges the concerns of critics worried about the moral balkanization of a society lacking shared religious premises, Hutchison hails America's new religious pluralism as a great achievement. A balanced and informative narrative.Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.