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Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that "religion poisons everything" should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly.

In her bookLiberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality(New York: Basic Books, 2008) the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach toegalitéhas remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms "the French tradition of "coercive assimilation" that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the "'delicacy and tenderness' that is owed to other people's 'conscientious scruples.'" The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea "that citizens are all alike," an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population.

Arguably, with respect to religious practice, the United States Constitution sought to metamorphose what had been restricted practices of religious toleration into what we more commonly and with more generous spirit call religious tolerance. The provisions of toleration laws, making legal concessions under the aegis of an official religion, were better than burning heretics at the stake, a practice that after the bloody Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–48) usually caused more trouble than it was worth. Still they extended only a grudging permission to "dissenters." The category "dissenter" did not include all religious minorities, and it placed the tolerated minorities at a disadvantage in almost all civil capacities. Religious toleration before the end of the eighteenth century gave some religious believers license to be wrong, but it carried no pledge of respect.

Cover -- The American Century in Europe -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Concept of an American Century -- PART ONE DIPLOMATIC RESPONSES -- The United States and Europe in an Age of American Unilateralism -- Democracy and Power: The Interactive Nature of the American Century -- Europe: The Phantom Pillar -- Utopia and Realism in Woodrow Wilson's Vision of the International Order -- The United States, Germany, and Europe in the Twentieth Century -- PART TWO CULTURAL RESPONSES -- European Elitism, American Money, and Popular Culture -- American Myth, American Model, and the Quest for a British Modernity -- American Religion as Cultural Imperialism -- Western Alliance and Scientific Diplomacy in the Early 1960s: The Rise and Failure of the Project to Create a European M.I.T. -- PART THREE SOCIAL RESPONSES -- American Democracy and the Welfare State: The Problem of Its Publics -- A Checkered History: The New Deal, Democracy, and Totalitarianism in Transatlantic Welfare States -- Consuming America, Producing Gender -- The Right to Have Rights: Citizens, Aliens, and the Law in Modern America -- Contributors -- Index

Explores religion's presence and contradictory role in public life, especially in politics, throughout US history, despite the founders' professed secularism and the constitutional separation of church and state, religion in the 2000 presidential campaign, and President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative. Included in a collection of articles under the overall title "After the election: Plan B".