Stephen Prothero explains partly why discourse about religion in the United States is so poor (and charged):
The religious right argues that religious literacy goes away in the early 1960s because of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court bans devotional Bible reading and prayer in public schools in 1962 and 1963, which critics argue essentially exiles God from public schools so that they are now religion-free zones. Now, children grow up not only without a reverence for God, but also without an understanding of the Bible and Christianity. The argument I make about religious literacy is that the story actually begins a century earlier. The villains are not secular people in the Supreme Court but actually religious people. It is caused by the Second Great Awakening and the replacement of Puritanism by Evangelicalism as the dominant religious impulse in the country. Before the Second Great Awakening, there was always this conversation among Christians between the head and the heart, trying to get a religion that was both intellectually sound and emotionally resonant. But with the Second Great Awakening comes this new form of religion that really prioritizes feeling and emphasizes loving Jesus rather than knowing what Jesus had to say. This is when religious literacy starts to go away. It doesn’t really matter much what Christianity teaches, what matters is how it feels to be in a relationship with Jesus. Simultaneously, as you have that shift from knowing the doctrine of your tradition to feeling intensely about God, there is a shift toward morality where the focus of the tradition becomes making the society more Protestant by using voluntary associations to get rid of slavery, to make the schools better, to improve prisons. In order to do that, it is important for people to downplay denominational differences. You don’t really want to bring up the distinctions between Methodists and Lutherans because you want both denominations to work together to get the Bible printed and distributed or to do the work of the American Tract Society. So that also pushed people away from conversations about doctrine. As the theology side of religion starts to go away, our collective memory starts to atrophy. That really happens over the course of the nineteenth century.
And it continues in the twentieth.
Old Life 
This was an awesome interview. Great take on the Culture Wars.
LikeLike
“there is a shift toward morality where the focus of the tradition becomes making the society more Protestant by using voluntary associations to get rid of slavery, to make the schools better, to improve prisons. In order to do that, it is important for people to downplay denominational differences.”
I think this is really a second order effect. It’s possible to co-operate on questions of wider morality as citizens in the earthly kingdom, whilst being very aware of what separates us. The reasoning here seems to similar to that of Catholics who blame all modern ills in the Western World on Vatican 2.
The real impact was the end of education – both of adult and child believers in the wake of the Second Great Awakening. With the end of formal catchesis and ‘Sunday School’ becoming the norm for more than just the children of non-believers.
LikeLike
Chris, I think that the problem was not only one of eduction. The social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not set forth as issues of common morality, natural law, or politics, but rather as gospel issues. Because social causes were seen as equal to, or even more important than, doctrinal differences, cooperation on these issues required doctrinal agreement, or at least suppression of doctrinal differences.
We saw a similar phenomenon recently with the Manhattan Declaration, a document which went beyond the moral issues of abortion and marriage by characterizing its opposition as a gospel ministry. This document is a great example b/c it didn’t just cross denominational lines, but religious ones as its signatories include Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox.
The Manhattan Declaration’s language is strikingly similar to that of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement — and if that isn’t an example of downplaying doctrinal differences then I don’t know what is. Considering the number of educated people involved in the Manhattan Dec and ECT, it doesn’t seem that we can solely blame education (although that is part of the problem). No, the social gospel is alive and well in 2014.
LikeLike
Chris E., but were these American Christians cooperating as merely earthly citizens or as members of a Christian nation?
LikeLike
DGH – they were attempting to do the latter of course. Though they could have done it either way. My point was that there is no inevitability to “In order to do that, it is important for people to downplay denominational differences”, it’s only inevitable if your aim in doing these things is “making the society more Protestant”.
LikeLike
I have noticed you don’t monetize your site, don’t waste your traffic,
you can earn additional bucks every month because you’ve got high
quality content. If you want to know how to make extra money, search for:
Boorfe’s tips best adsense alternative
LikeLike