In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States experienced a tremendous amount of economic, demographic, and cultural change that became reflected in a number of new religious movements and trends. Prof. David Mislin, assistant professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University, discusses how this era gave rise to new conceptualizations of religious pluralism on the part of mainline Protestants and how this, in turn, shaped the way we think about religious diversity in our contemporary era. All of this is based upon his new book Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age.
We begin with a little ex post facto revelation on the part of Prof. Mislin. When asked about how he came to study American religious history, he recounts his childhood years growing up as the son of a Congregationalist preacher, his mom. While avoiding the typical life of a preacher’s kid (being dragged to every Sunday School event), he nonetheless developed a deep interest in how people of different faiths interacted with one another, a tendency that was augmented during his high school days. He realized after he had published his book how much of an impact that his youth had on his thinking.
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