PB: The phenomenon that America has not become as secularized as Europe is sometimes referred to as the “American exceptionalism.” Some might say that you owe this to the Protestant Evangelical churches, which are more fundamentalist, rather than Catholicism. If one looks at “red” America I often have the impression that what kept America sane and Christian is this fundamentalist [I use the term in its original meaning, to denote the more traditional beliefs of Christianity as opposed to modernism – pb] Protestantism rather than Catholicism.
GW: Evangelical Protestantism is a very elastic term.
PB: It is something specifically American. You do not have it in Europe.
GW: But you do have it all over Latin America and Africa and parts of Asia.
PB: That is true, and it is growing there because people are leaving the Catholic Church and are turning towards this more fundamentalist Christianity.
GW: There is a kind of revolving door there. In Latin America people tend to go into these Evangelical churches and then ten years later come out and return to Catholicism. But, anyway, we are talking about North America here. The single biggest event that created the present religious, cultural, political dynamics of the United States took place on January 21, 1973.
Oh, and here’s a recent Weigel column responding to that Garry Wills NYReview of Books piece:
I take it as an iron law of controversy that people turn to conspiracy theories and personal nastiness when they’ve run out of ideas. Dr. Wills is, evidently, out of ideas, or at least arguments. In the course of his New York Review essay, he doesn’t engage a single idea that Neuhaus, Novak, or I have proposed over the past twenty-five years. As our students will readily attest, my friends and I relish real debate; but how does one respond to cartoons masquerading as arguments?
Garry Wills is a very intelligent man who has made important contributions to our understanding of American history — which makes it all the more discouraging when his commentary on things Catholic comes unhinged. So, for the record, here are what I take to be some of the key ideas three of his Great Conspirators have been propounding
[snip]
5. The pontificate of John Paul II was not a pontificate against modernity, but a pontificate advancing a distinctively modern appraisal of modernity, one that included both affirmation and critique.
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