Sublime

In short, it would be the first century in which science would have a greater impact than religion on the course of history. With his declaration that God was dead, Nietzsche had encapsulated the crisis that would accompany this triumph of science over religion. Although science provided a better understanding of how the world worked, it didn’t

The triumph of popular democracy brought an anti-intellectual bias to American politics that never entirely disappeared. Self-government didn’t require any special learning, just the native wisdom of the people. “Even in its earliest days,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “the egalitarian impulse in America was linked with a distrust for what in its

The effects of this progressive movement on American religious life were vast. It began the long liberalization of Mainline Protestantism by infusing it with a passion for social reform, over and against personal piety and evangelizing. Progressives turfed the Protestant religious establishment out of universities and other leading cultural

We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different. Now the fugitives are from Central America, and the unfree laborers are in prison. Some kids are still hungry, even so many years after the breakfast programs and Head Start and all of the gains fought for by Black elected officials, because the gag is in the

The Amish community in Berne provided an ideal test case, and Shapiro applied to the National Institutes of Health for funding to perform a study. Her grant application was rejected: the NIH didn’t think 100 subjects would be enough to discern a statistically robust effect. How wrong they were.

For all the good that religious tolerance undoubtedly brought to a young country with a diverse and contentious population of Protestant sectarians and a Catholic minority, it also laid the groundwork for excluding religion from the public square by making it a matter of private, individual choice.

In one Alabama textbook, students were told that “with all the drawbacks of slavery, it should be noted that slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States.” In another, in Virginia, students learned that the state provided “a better life for the Negroes than did Africa. In his new home, the Negro was far away from the spears

The emergence of anti-intellectualism.