Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America at Religion Dispatches

Paul Harvey

Kevin Schultz's new book Tri-Faith America has received extensive attention here before, including a review by Chris Beneke. Over at Religion Dispatches, Ed Blum has just posted a lengthy and excellent discussion of Kevin's book, beginning with the immortal lines: "I was David Barton once." I was tempted to say, "yes, and I was Wilt Chamberlain once," but read the rest of his intro and you'll see what he means. Here's another little excerpt, and then follow the rest at the break:

Kevin Schultz’s new book, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, explains my story and so much more. This tremendous study examines how the belief that Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism defined the United States and defeated the nativist vision of America as a “Christian nation,” how the concept of “Judeo-Christian values” were created to express the tri-faith belief, how tri-faith became standard operating procedure during World War II as the nation battled European totalitarianism and Nazi genocide, how it created new struggles in America’s suburbs, fraternal organizations, schools, and courts, and how it created a rhetoric for both the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the new religious right. Through it all, Schultz brilliantly shows that between the labor-capital divide of the 1930s and the racial divide of the 1960s was an ideological contest over the religious composition of the nation.

Continue reading here . . .