A Book that Explains the Culture Wars

This post reviews David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).  Sehat is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely loved this book.  It’s my favorite kind of history.  Sehat takes one idea and traces its history from the American founding to the present, giving his readers a deep understanding of the concept even as we are disabused of some common misperceptions along the way.  The concept here is American religious freedom.  The misperceptions are these.  Liberals often speak as if from our founding the United States has been a secular nation and that Christian efforts to impose Christian morality on everyone else are out of step with this history.  Conservatives often speak as if the United States has always been a Christian nation, and that Christianity is in fact the basis of the religious freedom we all hold so dear.  Both are wrong.

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Gunn on how the Cold War created a new American Religion

This post reviews T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009).

Gunn, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief (among many other assignments), here constructs a fascinating if flawed argument that the Cold War led to the unique blend of Christianity, militarism, and capitalism that is now the dominant religion in the United States.  First I’ll lay out his argument and then say why I think it’s flawed.  What does all of this have to do with homeschooling?  I think conservative Christian homeschoolers are perhaps the purest expression of the sort of religion Gunn is chronicling here–fiercely committed to the idea that the United States is (or was and should be again) a Christian and capitalist nation, and strongly pro-military.  Why are so many conservative homeschoolers like this?  Here’s Gunn’s explanation:

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