Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century

by Charles H. Lippy

This acclaimed work surveys the varied course of religious life in modern America. Beginning with the close of the Victorian Age, it moves through the shifting power of Protestantism and American Catholicism and into the intense period of immigration and pluralism that has characterized our nation's religious experience.

262 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2000

Reviews

[Susie Meister]

This book considers how "immigration, urbanization, and industrialization of the later nineteenth century changes in domestic culture that accompanied them, and the emergence of countless new religions around the turn of the previous century significantly transformed religious pluralism in the twentieth century" (4). Lippy argues the diversity of American life from colonial times onward created a pluralistic environment and he sees this both within and among traditions. Lippy builds upon Herberg's Jew-Catholic-Protestant model by arguing that in addition to these three many other traditions (Native American, African-American, and others) enriched the religious landscape. He begins by describing the shift within Protestantism to Baptists and Methodists (as described by Finke and Stark) when he says the "other became the norm." He notes the intangible shift within Catholicism where attendance changed slightly, but opinion changed greatly due to Vatican II and immigration. Lippy emphasizes how slave Christianity was bastardized by whites to facilitate their own goals and the Civil Rights movement revitalized African-American religion. Within each tradition he describes the pluralism that he says defines American religion.