ABSTRACT
Max Lerner points out in America as a Civilization that there is more than one American tradition. The symbolic power of the Anglo-American civil religion was flickering down. The civil rights turmoil that Gunnar Myrdal had predicted in 1941, as a necessary and inevitable expression of "the American Creed", began to unfold more rapidly in 1961. Whatever the ultimate judgment of history, the administration of John Kennedy was important for revealing dramatic limits in the civil religion. As a civilization, America has never experienced total and irretrievable failure nor occupation under a foreign army nor a sharp and embittering break in its history. Thus, Max Lerner writes, "America as a civilization has been far removed from the great type-enactment of the Christian story, or the disasters of Jewish history or of the Asiatic empires; it has not suffered, died, been reborn".
