Backward, Christian soldiers: to end the culture war that divides America, we need to recognize that each side has the same roots: the radical democratic individualism of America's Protestant heritage.

• Author: Baumann, Paul
• Position: The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief - Book review

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief

by George M. Marsden

Basic Books, 264 pp.

For decades our nation has been divided, often bitterly, by the so-called culture wars. During Barack Obama's presidency these unremitting tensions have manifested themselves in clashes over gay marriage, contraception coverage, and state-level abortion restrictions. Culture war loyalties and worldviews have also helped define who is on which side in the battles over debt and deficits, the size and role of government, and issues of economic fairness that have all but paralyzed the federal government and brought it twice to the edge of default.

Why is it so hard for Americans to talk to one another across the ideological divide, let alone understand the anxieties of those on the other side? In his new book, the historian George Marsden offers a perspicacious answer. Professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, Marsden is a distinguished historian of American religion, best known for his biography of the eighteenth-century evangelical firebrand Jonathan Edwards, he of the harrowing treatise "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Marsden has spent years studying the fundamentalist strain in the American outlook, and in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment he succinctly describes our current polarized predicament: "Secular liberals believe their freedoms are threatened by a conservative Christian takeover. Conservative Christians believe that secularists are excluding their Christian views and using big government to expand their own dominion." Each side exaggerates its own vulnerability and the malevolence of its opponents; each claims sole possession of the truth on fundamental questions of individual responsibility and public purpose.

The gnarled roots of this stalemate--American society's inability to accommodate genuine pluralism--reach to the very conception of the nation, which joined the Enlightenment values of the Founders to the pieties of an overwhelmingly Protestant society. Contrary to popular belief, writes Marsden, the United States "does not have well-developed traditions or conceptions of pluralism that can embrace a wide range of both religious and nonreligious viewpoints." True, the nation from the start had no established church, yet it had a powerful de facto Protestant culture, one that pushed dissenting groups to the margins in every debate about American identity and values. The nation's much-celebrated commitment to religious...