Belief and liberty – a doublethink nation
Alamy, Raihan Biswas
The United States of America is hard to get one’s head around in various ways. Its 250th birthday underlines its monumental oddity, its explosive elusiveness. I have struggled in particular to make sense of its religious story, which seems to be getting stranger by the day.
In my youth, I was aware of an anomaly: America was more modern than us, but also more religious. Even its ruling class and its intellectual elite were more religious than ours. And it wasn’t just conservatives who were religious: progressives had a strong religious streak too, embodied by Martin Luther King.
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