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President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it bluntly, if privately, in 1942-the United States was "a Protestant country," he said, "and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance." In Tri-Faith America, Kevin Schultz explains how the United States left behind this idea that it was "a Protestant nation" and replaced it with a new national image, one premised on the notion that the country was composed of three separate, equally American faiths-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Tracing the origins of the tri-faith idea to the early twentieth century, when Catholic and Jewish immigration forced Protestant Social Gospelers to combine forces with Catholic and Jewish relief agencies, Tri-Faith America shows how the tri-faith idea gathered momentum after World War I, promoted by public relations campaigns, interfaith organizations, and the government, to the point where, by the end of World War II and into the early years of the Cold War, the idea was becoming widely accepted, particularly in the armed forces, fraternities, neighborhoods, social organizations, and schools.
About the Author
An award-winning historian and teacher, Kevin M. Schultz was born in Los Angeles but lived in Nashville, Utah, Berkeley, San Jose, San Francisco, and Charlottesville, before settling in Chicago, where he now teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) . He has special interests in American intellectual and cultural life, and he mostly likes how ideas move around in the world, getting used and abused in all sorts of unpredictable ways. He has written for academic and popular audiences alike, including once having had an article of his appear immediately before that of the Pope. His most recent book, which was an Amazon #1 New Release in History, is Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the 1960s (W.W. Norton & Co.) .
