Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise

Abstract

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg used the phrase “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” to title his biting assessment of religion in America. By the time he did so, this tri-faith image, in circulation for over two decades, had become a widely embraced description and celebration of religious tolerance and pluralism in the democratic United States. Although the sociological accuracy of the phrase has been sharply questioned since Herberg's use of it, the image persists even today. Yet only now, with Kevin M. Schultz's new monograph, do we have a sustained rhetorical genealogy of the phrase along with a groundbreaking analysis of its influence and significance with respect to the changing religious, social, and political landscapes of the nation. Both elements of this important and readable book enhance and even reshape our understanding of the political roles that religion has played in American society. In the genealogy section, Schultz traces the tri-faith image of religion in America beginning with its early use in the 1920s and 1930s by liberal Protestants and Jews to advance religious tolerance in the face of post–World War I nativism. With the restructuring of the U.S. military chaplaincy along Protestant/Catholic/Jewish lines, the tri-faith image was propelled into national use. In the post–World War II period, the image and its attendant notion of a Judeo-Christian heritage became ubiquitous. Bringing abundant instances of tri-faith rhetoric to bear, Schultz argues that this conception of religious pluralism responded directly to the intolerance of fascism and countered generations of hostility and discrimination against Jews and Catholics by advancing a holistic ideal of American democracy in which the descendants of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants, Catholic and Jewish, shared full membership.