American Protestantism and what it has done

Does Christianity have a future in the United States? David Hollinger poses this question in his important new book. Few people are more qualified to answer it than Hollinger, who over the course of five decades has established himself as one of America’s foremost intellectual historians.

Hollinger has long been preoccupied with how changes in American society, especially growing ethnic and racial diversity, are reflected in American intellectual life. His first book, a biography of Morris Cohen, showed how the Jewish, Russian-born philosopher helped transform an academic discipline dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Later books—and dozens of essays—cataloged, analyzed, and explained what might be called the de-provincialization of the American mind: the (very slowly) growing openness of American intellectuals to ideas and cultures from non-White and non-American communities.

Why was American intellectual life so provincial in the first place? This question is Hollinger’s starting point in Chris­tianity’s American Fate. His answer is simple: Protestantism. The United States may not have been founded as a Christian nation, but the dominance of Protestants in American society shaped (warped, Hollinger strongly implies) the country’s intellectual life for well over a century.