ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two books and their authors. Both books deal with the contemporary setting of religion in American life, in the context of the dissolution of the pervasive but informal bonds between Protestant Christianity and America's civic culture. The authors of these books are representative of the extremes of response to the decline of the American religion: Alan Wolfe, the liberal academic, in approval; and Richard John Neuhaus, the neoconservative priest, reacting in dismay. Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. The dominance of a diffuse-but-effective secular philosophy in American society, Neuhaus takes as a given, and he is deeply concerned that its proponents are forcing religion out of the public square. A noxious effect of the secularization of the public square has been the substitution of political for religious categories of public morality.
