Some 71.7 million Americans, more than half the population, said they belonged to religious groups in 1945, roughly 43 million of them in Protestant denominations, 23 million Catholic, and nearly 5 million identifying themselves as Jewish.15 These people inhabited an increasingly secular world in which theological dictates carried less weight than in earlier generations but in which church membership was nonetheless increasing, from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 55 percent in 1950 (and to an all-time high of 69 percent by 1959).16 Whether church-going much affected personal behavior
...more
