The “Secularization” Question and the United States in the Twentieth Century

Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture

Volumn 70, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 132-143

  Hollinger, David A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85007960975     PISSN: 00096407     EISSN: 17552613     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3654413     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. For example, see Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
2. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: The Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans, by Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). For a helpful discussion of this work, first published in Germany in 1966, see Martin Jay, Fin-de-Siede Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1988), 149-64.
4. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
5. Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Brian Wilson's comments about “lamenters” are found in his contribution to this volume.
6. This truth about many of the people most engaged by the “secularization question” was brought home to me repeatedly in meetings of the Lilly Foundation's Seminar on Religion and American Higher Education. This project brought together thirty academics-all but four of whom were identified with Christian commitment-for three years of intensive discussion, 1996-1999. Although no one explicitly endorsed going back to the status quo of 1930 or of 1880, it was abundantly clear throughout the seminar that the very topic “Religion and Higher Education” carried for most participants the implication that Christianity had been devalued in American academia and that something should be done to fix this problem. For my own comments on the Lilly Seminar, see my “Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity,” in Religion, Scholarship and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models and Future Prospects, ed. Andrea Sterk (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming, 2001).
7. For these events at Yale, see Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of jews and Yale (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).
8. Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).
9. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967).
10. Warren Nord, Religion & American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1995), 286, 377.
11. Nord, Religion & American Education, 378.