A learned academic study whose appeal will be limited to fellow scholars.
How the diversity of religion in America has furthered democratic ideals throughout the past century.
Wuthnow, former director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton, offers a detailed look at religion’s role in American democracy, particularly from the New Deal era onward. The author asserts that, despite many challenges, the varied contours of the American religious landscape have been beneficial overall to democracy. He structures his argument around a handful of wide-ranging historical issues and corresponding movements. First is the New Deal and the long-running Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Wuthnow explores the level of resistance many religious leaders and communities raised against Roosevelt’s social policy, balanced by the support of urban faith leaders who influenced policy and politics in significant ways. Wuthnow then examines issues of conscience, with a focus on World War II–era pacifism, expressed by a vocal minority of American faith communities and leadership. Then he moves on to freedom of assembly, describing how the conformist religious and social organizations of the 1950s set the groundwork for the organized activism of the following decade. Finally, the author explores human dignity, welfare, and wealth distribution, demonstrating the politicization of religious communities in recent decades and the widening rift between right and left. Wuthnow praises the role of diversity in allowing voices of dissent to find outlets amid transformative social and cultural issues. He warns, however, that “while diversity is present, it is overshadowed by polarization,” which “hasn’t been healthy either for religion or democracy.” The text is dense with evident scholarship and plenty of historical examples, but Wuthnow’s thesis is strained. In declaring diversity in religion good for democracy, the author seems mainly to argue that dissent in religion is good for democracy. The book is largely a history of dissent, and Wuthnow champions those religious traditions that spurn convention and the status quo.
A learned academic study whose appeal will be limited to fellow scholars.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-22263-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
