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In a hundred small churches’ Sunday school classrooms, on any given Sunday in a year, you’ll hear the senior citizens singing the same song: America has gone downhill since they were kids. Almost always the tale told is elegiac, and often the lament for a world lost goes along with a story of war, the culture war that Pat Buchanan proclaimed in 1992 and that a dozen ex-evangelical blogs will say they’re tired of. But what kind of war do we actually see when we turn on the evening news? And what kind of culture? Stephen Prothero’s recent book Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars traces the roots of American culture wars to strong responses to the French Revolution not long after the start of the republic and to deep contradictions to Americans’ relationships with religion, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.
[…] Introduction, Mansfield tells a story of two histories in America, narratives that reminded me of my conversation with Stephen Prothero on Christian Humanist Profiles: on one hand, the men who showed up for the Constitutional Convention were republicans, and they […]