Podcast: Yuval Levin on How Religious Minorities Survive in America—Then and Now

This Week’s Guest: Yuval Levin

American democracy is a nation of nations. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, women and men from every nation on earth have made themselves into Americans. Nevertheless, across its early history a unique majority culture developed within this nation of nations: a kind of big-tent Protestant Christianity. In that culture, the dominant Jewish anxiety was about assimilation into Christianity. Today, however, America’s widely shared cultural pieties are no longer overtly Christian. There remain pockets of Christian vitality, but those pockets are now minorities in a new kind of American culture, one characterized less by its religious sensibilities and more by its secular liberalism.

In a short essay called “Christmas, Christians, and Jews,” published in National Review in 1988, the writer Irving Kristol suggested that the democratic principles of civility and prudence should govern how American Jews and Christians relate to one another. But are those principles, and the other habits of mind American Jews adopted to resist melting into America’s old Christian-majority culture, adequate for resisting assimilation into America’s new secular culture?