Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Lippy suggests that the increasing diversity of religious culture is the key to American religion in the 20th century. The groundwork for religious pluralism, he argues, was laid during the Victorian era, when Catholic and Jewish immigrants from all over Europe moved to American cities in record numbers; by 1955, sociologist Will Herberg could assert that most Americans accorded equal respect to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. But Lippy never ventures far beyond Herberg's assessment. His cursory treatment of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists is squeezed into a chapter that's not even 20 pages long, and much of the book is derivative. Lippy doesn't have anything new to say about African-American religion, Native American syncretism, Vatican II, the lynching of Leo Frank or the culture of therapy. He gestures in the direction of originality when he touches on the Chicken Soup series, the What Would Jesus Do? craze and Generation X spirituality, but the few paragraphs we get on those subjects are too brief to amount to much. It is not just the recycling of familiar material that makes the book seem outdated--the focus on pluralism itself seems pass . Herberg's book, though half a century old, is a more invigorating read. (July)