Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics

“Getting Religion” is a concept born of H. L. Mencken’s observation that in the free market of American religion, citizens “get religion” when they convert or get steamed up. They do so in different ways and with different degrees of fever. Kenneth L. Woodward has taken the temperature regularly since the mid-Sixties (when he and I got acquainted and started following parallel but different paths, he in journalism and I as historian—and moonlighting in religious journalism). He was religion editor at Newsweek for over 40 years, where he could chronicle and interpret the dazzling, complex four decades of America and its people “getting religion.”