Will Herberg: A Passion For Authenticity

A CLASSIC IS a text you can’t get around Will Herberg’s Protestants- Catholic-Jew, first published in 1955, is a classic. At least, no serious student of religion in American life can get around it. Her— berg wrote in the midst of what came to be called “the religion boom of the Fifties.” The gravamen of Protestants- Catholic-Jew is that religious identity has replaced ethnic identity in this nation of immigrants. Asked the question “What are you?” the typical American replies not Italian, German, English, or Irish, but Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. These are the three “religions of democracy,” or “the threefold religion of America.”

The second part of Herberg’s argument is that this “civic religion” is a debased form of Biblical religion. Religion in America is the “religion of religion”; it is “faith in faith.” Theologically vacuous, lacking any sense of sin or judgment, it is little more than the idolatry of the American Way of Life, built upon the dogmas of inter-group tolerance, peace of mind, free enterprise. and anti-Communism. Thirty years later that may not sound so terrible. In truth, the religiosity excoriated by Herberg in 1955 is what some people think we could do with a little more of today.

RJ

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Richard John Neuhaus

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A CLASSIC IS a text you can’t get around Will Herberg’s Protestants- Catholic-Jew, first published in 1955, is a classic. At least, no serious student of religion in American life can get around it. Her— berg wrote in the midst of what came to be called “the religion boom of the Fifties.” The gravamen of Protestants- Catholic-Jew is that religious identity has replaced ethnic identity in this nation of immigrants. Asked the question “What are you?” the typical American replies not Italian, German, English, or Irish, but Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. These are the three “religions of democracy,” or “the threefold religion of America.”

The second part of Herberg’s argument is that this “civic religion” is a debased form of Biblical religion. Religion in America is the “religion of religion”; it is “faith in faith.” Theologically vacuous, lacking any sense of sin or judgment, it is little more than the idolatry of the American Way of Life, built upon the dogmas of inter-group tolerance, peace of mind, free enterprise. and anti-Communism. Thirty years later that may not sound so terrible. In truth, the religiosity excoriated by Herberg in 1955 is what some people think we could do with a little more of today.