Exactly 50 years ago, as i was finishing graduate school, ready to enter the circle of historians who chronicled American religious history as a largely white Protestant preserve, my adviser introduced me to Will Herberg. Here was a Jewish-existentialist-theologian-sociologist who had just published "Protestant-Catholic-Jew." Herberg, through his classic book and his presence, planted a signpost to guide us into the pluralist understanding of the Americans' spiritual journey-and since then the effort to make sense of that journey has not ceased. Europeans, with whom so many Americans share religious heritages, are sometimes bemused to see us still going to church and synagogue, telling poll-takers that religion is "very important," and uniting to sing "God Bless America." But we are a believing people, a nation growing ever more diverse in belief and practice as the years roll on.
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