K. Healan Gaston. Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy.

Abstract

In his famous 1630 sermon on the Arabella, John Winthrop, invoking Hebrew prophets, envisioned an Augustinian model for his New England “city” and located it squarely in the New Testament with a Pauline emphasis, “A Model of Christian Charity,” a community bound by love. While he would cooperate with some Catholics to the North for defense, his venture would remain Anglo-Protestant. Except for African slaves, the colonies, later the United States, would not be changed by any large migration for about two hundred years with the arrival of German Jews, Catholics, and Protestants and by even more Irish Catholics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The largest wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would radically reshape religious America, as would 1960s immigration law toward the turn of that century and the next. By 1945, American Catholics roughly equaled the number of mainline Protestants combined, K. Healan Gaston notes (47–48).