ABSTRACT

In this chapter, Nathan C. Walker details how scholars of religion have a unique role in interpreting public acts of grief in light of the tectonic demographic shifts in the United States. Walker points to 2012, to demonstrate that Protestants, for the first time in U.S. history, became a minority. This was the moment when America became the first nation in the world, the first in recorded history, to have the burden and opportunity of governing a nation of religious minorities. Walker’s essay explains that the first sociological development of a nation of religious minorities is for leaders and the general public to engage in public acts of grief. These laments of longing for a time long past (e.g., “Make America Great Again”), coupled with the laments of broken promises of equality and civility and liberty for people of all religions and none may help explain the vitriolic and polarizing political dynamics of a self-dividing nation. These dynamics are best healed, Walker claims, when residents, through the help of scholars of religion and law, cultivate two fundamental civic competencies: religious literacy and religious liberty.