Download or read book Christianity and American Democracy written by Hugh Heclo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the tension at the heart of America’s culture wars, this is “a very fine book on a very important subject” (Mark A. Noll, author of The Civil War as a Theological Crisis). Christianity, not religion in general, has been important for American democracy. With this bold thesis, Hugh Heclo offers a panoramic view of how Christianity and democracy have shaped each other. Heclo shows that amid deeply felt religious differences, a Protestant colonial society gradually convinced itself of the truly Christian reasons for, as well as the enlightened political advantages of, religious liberty. By the mid-twentieth century, American democracy and Christianity appeared locked in a mutual embrace. But it was a problematic union vulnerable to fundamental challenge in the Sixties. Despite the subsequent rise of the religious right and glib talk of a conservative Republican theocracy, Heclo sees a longer-term, reciprocal estrangement between Christianity and American democracy. Responding to his challenging argument, Mary Jo Bane, Michael Kazin, and Alan Wolfe criticize, qualify, and amend it. Heclo’s rejoinder suggests why both secularists and Christians should worry about a coming rupture between the Christian and democratic faiths. The result is a lively debate about a momentous tension in American public life.
Download or read book Christianity Democracy and the American Ideal written by Jacques Maritain and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some Americans claim we should exclude Christian values from the public square. On the contrary, argues philosopher Jacques Maritain, good Christians make good citizens. They live by gospel values: honesty, integrity, and compassion. They obey the law. They resist the selfishness that unbelief and materialism breed. And they subordinate their own interests to the common good. No wonder, says Maritain, that American democracy -- which arose from a Christian people -- has served so well and lasted so long. Here Maritain shows that in a society unleavened by religious ideals, an enduring democracy can never take root. And once a religious people abandons its faith, even the greatest democracy must wither and die. Untethered from transcendent values, democracy becomes little more than a struggle to be won by the most powerful and the ruthless. The hour is late. Too long have we stood by while politicians promise never to let their religious beliefs infl
Download or read book The Democratization of American Christianity written by Nathan O. Hatch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-23 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.
Download or read book Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy written by Robert Wuthnow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the actions and advocacy of diverse religious communities in the United States have supported democracy’s development during the past century Does religion benefit democracy? Robert Wuthnow says yes. In Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, Wuthnow makes his case by moving beyond the focus on unifying values or narratives about culture wars and elections. Rather, he demonstrates that the beneficial contributions of religion are best understood through the lens of religious diversity. The religious composition of the United States comprises many groups, organizations, and individuals that vigorously, and sometimes aggressively, contend for what they believe to be good and true. Unwelcome as this contention can be, it is rarely extremist, violent, or autocratic. Instead, it brings alternative and innovative perspectives to the table, forcing debates about what it means to be a democracy. Wuthnow shows how American religious diversity works by closely investigating religious advocacy spanning the past century: during the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, the debates about welfare reform, the recent struggles for immigrant rights and economic equality, and responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The engagement of religious groups in advocacy and counteradvocacy has sharpened arguments about authoritarianism, liberty of conscience, freedom of assembly, human dignity, citizens’ rights, equality, and public health. Wuthnow hones in on key principles of democratic governance and provides a hopeful yet realistic appraisal of what religion can and cannot achieve. At a time when many observers believe American democracy to be in dire need of revitalization, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy illustrates how religious groups have contributed to this end and how they might continue to do so despite the many challenges faced by the nation.
Download or read book Christianity and American Democracy written by Hugh Heclo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugh Heclo proposes that Christianity, not religion in general, has been important for American democracy. Responding to his challenging argument, Mary Jo Bane, Michael Kazin, and Alan Wolfe criticize, qualify, and amend it. The result is a lively debate about a momentous tension in American public life.
Download or read book Tocqueville s Civil Religion written by Sanford Kessler and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-07-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanford Kessler offers a provocative and timely analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's views on the relationship between Christianity and American democracy. These views are central to Tocqueville's discussions of the moral requirements of freedom and the tasks of democratic statesmanship. Tocqueville's thinking about American religion is highly relevant to contemporary debates regarding America's origins, the current strength of American Christianity, and the proper role of religion in American public life. Kessler skillfully demonstrates how Tocqueville incorporates his ideas into an analysis of the American character, a factor in American politics that he considered more important than the Constitution. This book will challenge the thinking of all Americans concerned with religious-political issues and with the prospects for freedom.
Download or read book Is This God s Country written by Robert Audi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is This God's Country? presents an exploration by noted philosopher Robert Audi on the tensions between church and state in the democratic United States. He investigates how and why America separates church and state, and whether this separation benefits both religious and secular citizens. Audi then proposes standards for discussing and resolving church-state issues in education, business, and medicine, using a multitude of examples. He addresses the question whether America can be Christian--or religious at all--in a way that still integrates religious liberty with democratic law-making, and expands the common ground we would need in order to overcome the cultural fragmentation that besets America.
Download or read book Imagining Judeo Christian America written by K. Healan Gaston and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.
Download or read book What is Christian Democracy written by Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.
Download or read book Religious Freedom written by Tisa Wenger and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
Download or read book The Religion of Democracy written by Amy Kittelstrom and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first people in the world to call themselves 'liberals' were New England Christians in the early republic, for whom being liberal meant being receptive to a range of beliefs and values. The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when the first Boston liberals brought the Enlightenment into Reformation Christianity, tying equality and liberty to the human soul at the same moment these root concepts were being tied to democracy. The nineteenth century saw the development of a robust liberal intellectual culture in America, built on open-minded pursuit of truth and acceptance of human diversity. By the twentieth century, what had begun in Boston as a narrow, patrician democracy transformed into a religion of democracy in which the new liberals of modern America believed that where different viewpoints overlap, common truth is revealed. The core American principles of liberty and equality were never free from religion but full of religion.
Download or read book Christian Faith and Modern Democracy written by Robert P. Kraynak and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work challenges the commonly accepted view that Christianity is inherently compatible with modern democratic society. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that there is no necessary connection between Christianity and any form of government.
Download or read book The Common Good written by Thomas Patrick Neill and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A marine-turned-private investigator struggling from the recent death of his wife races against time to track down a shattered young soldier who has escaped from a mental institution and who possesses a dangerous secret.
Download or read book The American Idea written by Eugene Taylor Adams and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Democracy and Tradition written by Jeffrey Stout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do religious arguments have a public role in the post-9/11 world? Can we hold democracy together despite fractures over moral issues? Are there moral limits on the struggle against terror? Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard. Drawing inspiration from Whitman, Dewey, and Ellison, Jeffrey Stout sketches the proper role of religious discourse in a democracy. He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard. Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.
Download or read book The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right written by Jon A. Shields and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Christian Right is frequently accused of threatening democratic values. But in The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, Jon Shields argues that religious conservatives have in fact dramatically increased and improved democratic participation and that they are far more civil and reasonable than is commonly believed. Shields interviewed leaders of more than thirty Christian Right organizations, observed movement activists in six American cities, and analyzed a wide variety of survey data and movement media. His conclusions are surprising: the Christian Right has reinvigorated American politics and fulfilled New Left ideals by mobilizing a previously alienated group and by refocusing politics on the contentious ideological and moral questions that motivate citizens. Shields also finds that, largely for pragmatic reasons, the vast majority of Christian Right leaders encourage their followers to embrace deliberative norms in the public square, including civility and secular reasoning. At the same time, Shields highlights a tension between participatory and deliberative ideals since Christian Right leaders also nurture moral passions, prejudices, and dogmas to propel their movement. Nonetheless, the Christian Right's other democratic virtues help contain civic extremism, sharpen the thinking of activists, and raise the level and tenor of political debate for all Americans.
Download or read book The Religion of Democracy written by Amy Kittelstrom and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of religion’s role in the American liberal tradition through the eyes of seven transformative thinkers Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation’s founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far more nuanced and complex than today’s debates would suggest and closer to the heart of American intellectual life than is commonly understood. American democracy was intended by its creators to be more than just a political system, and in The Religion of Democracy, historian Amy Kittelstrom shows how religion and democracy have worked together as universal ideals in American culture—and as guides to moral action and the social practice of treating one another as equals who deserve to be free. The first people in the world to call themselves “liberals” were New England Christians in the early republic, for whom being liberal meant being receptive to a range of beliefs and values. The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when the first Boston liberals brought the Enlightenment into Reformation Christianity, tying equality and liberty to the human soul at the same moment these root concepts were being tied to democracy. The nineteenth century saw the development of a robust liberal intellectual culture in America, built on open-minded pursuit of truth and acceptance of human diversity. By the twentieth century, what had begun in Boston as a narrow, patrician democracy transformed into a religion of democracy in which the new liberals of modern America believed that where different viewpoints overlap, common truth is revealed. The core American principles of liberty and equality were never free from religion but full of religion. The Religion of Democracy re-creates the liberal conversation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth by tracing the lived connections among seven thinkers through whom they knew, what they read and wrote, where they went, and how they expressed their opinions—from John Adams to William James to Jane Addams; from Boston to Chicago to Berkeley. Sweeping and ambitious, The Religion of Democracy is a lively narrative of quintessentially American ideas as they were forged, debated, and remade across our history.
