Herberg as Sociologist

In the course of his passage from Communism in the 1920s to theology in the 1950s, Will Herberg became, for a time, a sociologist. Not that I believe he ever called himself a sociologist, but he wrote a book of classic quality on American ethnicity and religion, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday, 1955). The book received encomia on its appearance, which is true of many books that are seen with the passage of time not to be worthy of them. But Protestant-Catholic-Jew stands as the most substantial and stimulating large-canvas effort to deal with religion in America in the 1950s.

Herberg, coming to religion from a radical past, was able to approach it from a unique perspective. On the basis of his experience in radical movements and the Jewish labor movement, he was able to see that behind the religious revival were the workings and workingsout of the most distinctive element of American society, its ethnic diversity; from the religious perspective to which he had moved, he was also able to see how distantly related to the true ends of religion was the American religious revival of the 1950s. It is rare that this double perspective is available to the sociologist of religion, and it is even rarer to find it in someone with Her-

In the course of his passage from Communism in the 1920s to theology in the 1950s, Will Herberg became, for a time, a sociologist. Not that I believe he ever called himself a sociologist, but he wrote a book of classic quality on American ethnicity and religion, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday, 1955). The book received encomia on its appearance, which is true of many books that are seen with the passage of time not to be worthy of them. But Protestant-Catholic-Jew stands as the most substantial and stimulating large-canvas effort to deal with religion in America in the 1950s.

Herberg, coming to religion from a radical past, was able to approach it from a unique perspective. On the basis of his experience in radical movements and the Jewish labor movement, he was able to see that behind the religious revival were the workings and workingsout of the most distinctive element of American society, its ethnic diversity; from the religious perspective to which he had moved, he was also able to see how distantly related to the true ends of religion was the American religious revival of the 1950s. It is rare that this double perspective is available to the sociologist of religion, and it is even rarer to find it in someone with Her-