A New Religious America - Philip Jenkins
A New Religious America - Philip Jenkins A New Religious America Philip Jenkins Philip Jenkins writes about demographic shifts in America's religions. In recent years, the decade of the 1960s has become a popular subject for courses in university history departments. Since humanities professors tilt well to the left, it is scarcely surprising that they generally focus on a familiar range of iconic events and individuals associated with progressive social reform--the stories of civil rights, the antiwar movement, feminism, and so on. As we gain greater distance from the era, though, the events of the 1960s that have the most enduring consequences are rather to be located on the other end of the political and cultural spectrum. Arguably, the most important single piece of legislation of these years involved neither civil rights nor women's rights, but was rather the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which opened the country to a massive wave of newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. And however little anyone recognized this fact at the time, the 1965 Act also prepared the way for a far-reaching restructuring of American religious life, in directions that were distinctly conservative and traditionalist. The notion that immigration is transforming American religion may not sound too startling, since the media have of late been trumpeting the country's new religious diversity, its hospitality to Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and adherents of other faiths. Last year, religious studies scholar Diana Eck published an influential book entitled A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation.
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