Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: Inventing Tri-Faith America, Ending "Protestant America"
Chapter 1: Creating Tri-Faith America
Chapter 2: Tri-Faith America as Standard Operating Procedure
Chapter 3: Tri-Faith America in the early Cold War
Part II: The Effects of Tri-Faith America
Chapter 4: Communalism in a Time of Consensus: Postwar Suburbia
Chapter 5: A Secular Rationale for Separation: Public Schools in Tri-Faith America
Chapter 6: Choosing Our Identities: College Fraternities, Choice, and Group Rights
Chapter 7: Keeping Religion Private (and Off the U.S. Census)
Chapter 8: From Creed to Color: Softening the Ground for Civil Rights
Conclusion: The Return of Protestant America?
Notes
Index

About the Author

Kevin M. Schultz is Associate Professor of History and Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reviews

"Schultz's work is an important part of recent scholarship...that examines how access to the political, social, and cultural 'mainstream' was expanded during World War II and the postwar period...Tri-Faith America is an important work that challenges historians to think more critically about religious and ethnic relations in the postwar period."--Journal of American Ethnic History
"A creatively imagined, subtly rendered narrative...Schultz has produced a terrific, timely book that not only accomplishes its stated goals admirably but also helps us consider anew the character of public life and debate."--Journal of American History
"One of the finest studies of twentieth-century religion and politics in America published in the past two decades."--Sociology of Religion
"Schultz offers a work filled with contradiction, irony, and unintended consequence. It exemplifies good intellectual history."--Religion and Politics
"For scholars of twentieth-century American Jewish history, this book is a must-read."--American Jewish Archives Journal
"Kevin's Schultz's...tremendous study...brilliantly shows that between the labor-capital divide of the 1930s and the racial divide of the 1960s was an ideological contest over the religious composition of the nation."--Religious Dispatches
"As Kevin M. Schultz demonstrates in this insightful and highly judicious study, 'Tri-Faith America' represented far more than an interfaith celebration of the postwar nation's 'new religious sociology.' Catholics and Jews pressed their own visions of pluralism with an often militant fervor that changed everything from collegiate fraternity life, manuals of social etiquette, and even America's public education system. This is a timely and important
book."--James T. Fisher, Fordham University
"Kevin Schultz has placed the history of American religion squarely at the center of political history and, in this insightful and deeply researched book, he has pinpointed the origins of America's embrace of religious pluralism. He has located these fundamental changes in the early decades of the twentieth century and has shown how the emergence of 'tri-faith' rhetoric involved much more than just talk. Rather it reflected a tectonic shift in the life of the
nation, and Kevin Schultz deserves our applause for teaching us about it."--Hasia R. Diner, Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University
"As Kevin M. Schultz amply demonstrates in this fresh, absorbing, and admirably nuanced study, the central drama of twentieth-century American religion was the tense, complex, but ultimately successful path to mutual accommodation traveled by American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Many authors from Will Herberg onward have treated this theme in various ways, but none has done so with more subtlety and insight, balancing the achievements of 'tri-faith
America' against its weaknesses and liabilities. Schultz has given us a book we will need to learn from, and contend with, in the years to come, as we make our way through a very different landscape of
religious complexity."--Wilfred M. McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
"Nicely illuminates the pre-World War II origins of contemporary ideals of tolerance and inclusion. Riveting reading."--Balkinization
"The reader who relishes a nuanced view of the forces that have shaped American history and the American Jewish experience will find this book a delight."--Jewish Book World
"Timely...This important book opens up a promising new framework for reevaluating the American religious and political landscapes of the twentieth century."--Journal of Church and State
"This well-researched and clearly argued book explains how Protestant America became Judeo-Christian America and then how the success of that achievement led to results that many who cooperated to promote the transition did not expect...[U]nusually fine book."--American Catholic Studies
"One of the finest studies of twentieth century religion and politics in America published in the past two decades."--Sociology of Religion