textbook page 1066-7

A Religious People

The celebration of political pluralism accompanied the exaltation of the stabilizing role of religion. Signs of religious commitment seemed part of most people’s weekly, some- times daily, routine. Formal church membership grew at more than double the rate of the U.S. population during the 1950s. Moreover, public life appeared solidly anchored in religious values. As part of the crusade against “atheistic communism,” Congress emphasized the role of religion by constructing a nondenominational prayer room on Capitol Hill, adding the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and declaring the phrase “In God We Trust,” emblazoned on U.S. currency for nearly a century, to be the official national motto.

At the same time, observers claimed that intense religious allegiances no longer divided people as much as they had in the past. President Eisenhower urged people to practice their own religious creed, whatever it might be. “Our government makes no sense,” he declared, “unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”

A 1954 survey claimed that more than 95 percent of the population identified with one of the three major faiths, and religious commentators talked about the unifying power of a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The era’s leading study of religion, Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), argued that these three major faiths were really “saying the same thing in affirming the ‘spiritual ideals’ and ‘moral values’ of the American Way of Life.”

MLK on same sex marriage

http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=477

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/01/17_williamsb_wwmlkd/