The most important sentence in recent histories of American religion?
Of all the tediously long sentences published on American religion, this one, in which Tracy Fessenden introduces our nation’s “unmarked Christianity,” is by far the most important for everyone in the field to comprehend. No seriously:
When secularism in the United States is understood merely as the absence of religious faith, or neutrality in relation to religious faith, rather than as a variety of possible relationships to different religious traditions—for example, an avowedly secular United States is broadly accommodating of mainstream and evangelical Protestantism, minimally less so of Catholicism, unevenly so of Judaism, much less so of Islam, perhaps still less so of Native American religious practices that fall outside the bounds of the acceptably decorative or “spiritual”—then religion comes to be defined as “Christian” by default, and an implicit association between “American” and “Christian” is upheld even by those who have, one imagines, very little invested in its maintenance.
The sentence is from Culture and Redemption (p. 3), which of course deserves to be read in it’s entirety.
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