As One Tolerant Member of This Plural Culture

In America pluralism has been resolved less and less by appeal to order that yields unity and more and more by tolerance that diminishes the ultimacy implicit in any cause’s demand for loyalty. Save for nationalism in time of putative military danger, the religious city alone states its claims over modern Americans in ultimate terms of absolute allegiance. But these claims ring hollow; American religion increasingly finds ways to express indoctrine its new-world experience and therefore also its distance from European Christendom. Although lacking explicity testimony to its own relativity as one cause among many, as one tolerant member of this plural culture, religion tacityly concedes by its internally pluralistic form that tit is not the overarching cause which collects all other loyalties.

W. A. Clebsch, From Sacred to Profane America

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