n class="init-cap">Unlike our current era, the 1940s and 1950s are often imagined as an age of consensus in the United States, when Americans agreed that their democracy flourished because it was rooted in shared ethical commitments common to the Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic religions. The vicious battles over Darwinism in public schools in the 1920s had disappeared from view. And it would not be until later decades that the “culture wars” would reignite over issues like abortion, sex ed, and prayer in public schools. Beginning in the 1970s the Christian Right mobilized politically to support conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. The mid-twentieth century, on the other hand, was thought to be a time when the truce was called in America’s perennial culture wars because of a shared agreement that the United States was a “Judeo-Christian” nation.Read Full Article »
