The past few years have seen a growing tendency by political and religious leaders to invent a homogeneous past- a golden age of perfect consensus on values and morals. Martin Marty shows that such an age never existed. In his exploration of religious diversity in the U.S. from the colonial past to the present, Marty takes seriously the fragile character and modest promise of American pluralism. He reveals how the vitality of the American experience has always depended on the fact that values and morals are generated in subcultures and worked out in a common society.
