The Protestant Presence in Twentieth-Century America

Religion and Political Culture

By Phillip E. Hammond

Subjects: Christianity
Series: SUNY series in Religion, Culture, and Society
Paperback : 9780791411223, 199 pages, October 1992
Hardcover : 9780791411216, 199 pages, November 1992
Out of print (Hardcover)

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Table of contents

Introduction

Preface: Religious Pluralism and Social Order

PART ONE: THEMES FROM THE PAST

1. In Search of a Protestant Twentieth Century: American Religion and Power Since 1990

2. The Moral Majority and All That: The Curious Path of Conservative Protestantism

3. Cults and the Civil Religion: A Tale of Two Centuries (co-authored by Robert Gordon-McCutchan)

PART TWO: EVANGELICALISM AND POLITICS

4. An Approach to the Political Meaning of Evangelicalism in Present-Day America

5. Political Evangelicalism: The Anglo-American Comparison

PART THREE: RELIGION AND LAW

6. The Courts and Secular Humanism: How to Misinterpret Church-State Issues

7. The Shifting Meaning of a Wall of Separation: Some Notes on Church, State, and Conscience

8. Constitutional Faith, Legitimating Myth, and Civil Religion

PART FOUR: THE TRAJECTORY OF RELIGION AND POLITICAL CULTURE

9. Religion and the Persistence of Identity

10. Up and Down with the National Faith

11. The Fate of Liberal Protestantism in America

Notes

References

Index

Description

Protestantism has undergone a shift in its relationship with American culture and politics. This book analyzes and evaluates that shift. The author shows how Protestantism began in America as a vibrant civil religion and how it developed so that, by the 1970s, its relationship with American culture and politics had changed radically. He shows how Evangelical Protestantism came into being and remains resilient.

Hammond also discusses religious culture as it dealt with the courts—the separation of church and state, and the changing meaning of this doctrine.

Phillip E. Hammond is Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is co-editor of The Future of New Religious Movements and editor of The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, among other titles.

Reviews

"It brings together some of the important work on the Protestant Church in modern America. Hammond is a well-known scholar in this area, and his historical view is an especially strong feature of the book. " — Ruth Wallace, George Washington University