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“…oftentimes, people will talk about the United States and say, ‘Oh, it has a Puritanical streak to it’. That was what Berkovitch was partly responding to when he wrote this book, asking whether that was true, whether we Americans did have a knee-jerk puritanical response to things. There’s this sort of mythos about America that is grounded in the country’s Puritan origins in New England—you know, the first Thanksgiving and everything. There is a romance attached to that story. You don’t have anything comparable related to the origins of Virginia, or the beginnings of colonial New York, or the deep colonial South. There’s nothing there that people use as a cultural or historical touchstone—just Plymouth Rock.” Read more...
The best books on Religion in US Politics
John H. Smith, Historian
