Reply #3: Gee, that was a fairly bizarre read

[starroute]

"America provides uniquely fertile ground for Christianity, because immigrants to America leave behind the pagan elements that corrupted European Christianity."

:wtf: (And what about the Christian elements that corrupted European paganism?)

There's also this little masterpiece of false argument:

"Gelernter simply ignores the central fact of American religious history, namely that each Christian revival occurred among different people than the previous one. 'Different people than the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were swept up in the First Great Awakening, and yet another group of Americans, largely Westerners, joined the Second Great Awakening during the 19th century.' "

I've done a lot of genealogical research on my husband's side of the family, and I know for a fact that his ancestors were part of all three groups, with each religious revival coming about two generations after the one before it. But the author seems to have some sort of bee in his bonnet about corruption of true religion followed by renewal from untainted sources, so he is more than ready to ignore inconvenient facts.

He also seems to believe that religion consists of nothing besides an obsession with sin-and-redemption, and that anything else isn't real religion. This causes him to miss the point about a great deal of what is actually going on in both America and the world.