´Through greater insight into the variety of religion, the dynamics of prejudice, and gthe complexities of national life, Americans can better avoid the biases, stereotypes and provications that betray their own ideals yet have too frequently appeared on the country´s political and social landscape´.
This is the main conclusion of a book which explores the roots of intolerance into the American public culture. Religious intolerance, to be more specific.
We are familiar nowadays with the Muslim ban and the alt-right aggressive - and sometimes deadly - public appearances, but before, in the 17th-18th and onwards, there were the Catholics and the Jews and the Native Americans. In American Heretics, Peter Gottschalk traces patterns and trends, public statements and perceptions based on fear, anger, indignation or religious panic.
It does not creates and build models per se though, but offers enough information to further explore patterns and further investigate public statements and positions.
At what extent the religious allegiances can endanger the universal ideas the American Constitution relies upon? What are the public ´dangers´ of organised religions, other than the Protestant, in the opinion of political pundits and public opinion makers? What are the cultural basis and are those universal or rather applies on a case by case basis?
I personally expected the research to be more specific and more comprehensive for the variety of cases analysed. Obviously, it offers interesting lines of research but it obliterates relevant nuances which are by far more important in understandining the phenomenon in all its acceptions.
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