America’s Religious Divide. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 2, 2013.
Mead:
These
days, the deep fissures in America don’t so much run between Catholics and
Protestants as within each community. Conservative evangelical Southern
Baptists feel they have more in common with conservative Catholics than they do
with liberal Protestants — and many conservative Catholics feel the same way.
What
draws conservative Protestants and Catholics together is a concern that
liberals and secularists would like to drive religion out of the public square;
as AI blogger Peter Berger puts it, to make religion something that consenting
adults do together in private. Former religious enemies are drawing closely
together at least partly out of fear of what they see as a common foe. The
great divide in American religion today is no longer between Protestant and
Catholic or even between Christian and Jew; it is between the liberal and the
conservative versions of these great historic faiths.
