“No one can think, and escape Nietzsche.”8 The power of the philosopher’s ideas was everywhere apparent, and religious commentators agreed that if any institution could put an end to what another religious observer called the “Nietzsche madness,” it was the church.9 But in their effort to call a halt to the Nietzsche epidemic that they believed had taken hold of nonreligious and antireligious Americans, religious commentators became unwitting carriers of the disease. Indeed, Nietzsche’s ideas found entry into the American moral imagination through the most unlikely of promoters: men of the
...more
