Protestant Accommodation by Martin E. Marty.
Just a quote, to raise your interest in this text:
‘The heirs of Fundamentalism and other now-Evangelicals may have accommodated to other “worldly” influences—I’d list “the market” and “nationalism” etc.–but they held the line on many intellectual and cultural trends. Hollinger adds: mark the change in political power when, thanks to Civil Rights legislation, the Mainline mainly lost the South. He also points to the drastic demographic shifts beyond the move to the South. The change in immigration laws in 1965 robbed the northern “white-ethnic” liberal accommodators of their former hegemonic position. The election of Catholic John Kennedy was another symbol of this shift.
How Evangelicals, often rejecters of the Enlightenment in the name of the heritage of partly-putative “Christian America” founders, will use their power will be fateful for the American future. But these now-”Public Protestant” Evangelicals are here to stay. For younger and newer interpreters of culture, as Hollinger sees it, they are virtually the only game in town, in the consciousness of post-1965 Americans.’
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