ABSTRACT
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment and Calvinist revolutionaries made strategic alliances with each other in opposition to British rule. But these political associations were always strained and provisional. In the post-World War II period, and especially around the mid-1960s, one sees a dramatic transformation of American public culture—an unmistakable trend of tolerance among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews became evident. Most scholarly research conducted on interreligious and cultural conflict in the World War II period focused on anti-Semitism. The cultural divide is a sense of ultimate reality that rejects the possibility of fixed standards outside of human experience, privileging instead what we can apprehend through our senses in our personal experience. Though normative conflict in the United States is rooted in competing cultural systems and worldviews, these cultural systems and worldviews are not free-floating in the social world. The cultural capital that has long sustained democratic institutions and practices is evaporating, that much is certain.
