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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2024

Michael Snape
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

TEN years after the end of World War II, the Jewish theologian and sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant–Catholic–Jew, a seminal study of religion in contemporary America. As Herberg saw it, and although there had been no federal census of religious bodies since 1936, there was every indication that organised religion was booming by the mid-1950s. ‘That there has in recent years been an upswing of religion in the United States can hardly be doubted’, he wrote, ‘the evidence is diverse, converging, and unequivocal beyond all possibilities of error.’ With Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism now functioning as ‘equi-legitimate’ expressions of American religion, a prime indicator of national religious vitality was the pervasiveness of religious self-identification. When requested to state a religious preference, ‘95 per cent of the American people’ chose to identify themselves as Protestants, Catholics or Jews; in other words, so Herberg explained, ‘virtually the entire body of the American people, in every part of the country and in every section of society, regard themselves as belonging to some religious community’. Nor did the irreligious – or simply reticent – pose any kind of threat to this strong religious consensus, for the dominant trend of religious belonging had ‘led to the virtual disappearance of anti-religious prejudice’; as Herberg put it: ‘The old-time “village atheist” is a thing of the past, a folk curiosity like the town crier.’

However, the key indicator of what Herberg billed as ‘The Contemporary Upswing in Religion’ was the growing number of Americans who were now deemed to be church members. By 1953, they amounted to 59.5 per cent of the population, ‘marking an all-time high in the nation's history’. However, even this landmark statistic failed to do justice to the true vitality of American religiosity for, as Herberg stressed, ‘considerably more Americans regard themselves as church members than the statistics of church affiliation would indicate’.

Type
Chapter
Information
God and Uncle Sam
Religion and America's Armed Forces in World War II
, pp. 591 - 600
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

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  • Conclusion
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.009
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  • Conclusion
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.009
Available formats
×