February 11, 2022 Editor’s Note: Over the past week, we have published a series of five responses – by Darren Dochuk, Kai Parker, Slavica Jakelić, Molly Farneth, and Paul Dafydd Jones – to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. In this post, Gorski offers a response to the responses. It…
Month: February 2022
No Way Back? | A Response by Paul Dafydd Jones
February 10, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the fifth and final response to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. How did we get here? How did the “elective affinity” between Christianity and democracy in the United States devolve into antagonism and antipathy – so much so that the political identity of…
Democratic Virtue and the Fight for America’s Civil Religion | A Response by Molly Farneth
February 9, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of five responses to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. Robert Bellah’s classic essay “Civil Religion in America” argues that there is, in the United States, a kind of political religion that “exists alongside [but is] rather clearly differentiated…
Christianity, Nationalism, and Democratic Pluralism—Before, During, and After Populism | A Response by Slavica Jakelić
February 8, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five responses to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. Philip Gorski’s American Babylon considers Christianity and democracy as “complex social structures” (8) that have influenced and transformed one another through historical encounters and collisions to give rise to…
Babylon By Boom Bap | A Response by Kai Parker
February 7, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five responses to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. Philip Gorski’s American Babylon elucidates the relationship between Christianity and democracy in Western history. In its main text and footnotes, the book uses social scientific studies of racism…
Democracy After Evangelicalism | A Response by Darren Dochuk
February 4, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five responses to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. In American Babylon, Philip Gorski has done the near impossible: marshal in one hundred tidy pages two millennia of political thought to explain American democracy’s current crisis. Though…