RELIGION AND REPUBLIC: The American Circumstance

by Martin E. Marty ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1987

A piecemeal yet sound exploration of American religious pluralism from a leading historian of religion. Marty (Pilgrims in Their Own Land; A Nation of Behavers) has here pasted together 17 years' worth of essays touching upon the diversity of religious experience in American history. He calls this work a ""celebration"" of pluralism: an acceptable cachet for these 15 pieces, each of which illuminates a particular aspect of religious pluralism but the sum of which equals no discernible, penetrative thesis, other than that religious pluralism is the form of American religious life, and that it works. Marry orders his collection sensibly, from the general to the specific. He begins with an essay highlighting the surprising abundance of religious practices in a country that legally separates church and state, follows with a piece defining the five ""continuities"" distinguishing the American religious tradition--pluralism, experimentalism, scripturalism, enlightenment, and voluntarism--and then in separate essays examines these continuities as well as the concepts of ""public religion,"" ""civil religion,"" and, in an incisive essay on Reinhold Niebuhr, ""public theology."" After this theoretical groundwork, Marry turns his attention to rather esoteric particulars of pluralism, including the positive influence on pluralism of the migration of the American populace from countryside to city; the societal isolation--""ghetto existence""--of major US religious groups; and the mechanics of the absorption into the American mainstream of three sects once considered peripheral: southern evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Mormons. A rhetorical reaffirmation of pluralism concludes the book. Insightful, but dense and abstruse; for academics only.

Pub Date: April 1, 1987

ISBN: 0807012076

Page Count: -

Publisher: Beacon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION