TEN years after the end of World War II, the Jewish theologian and sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant–Catholic–Jew, a seminal study of religion in contemporary America. As Herberg saw it, and although there had been no federal census of religious bodies since 1936, there was every indication that organised religion was booming by the mid-1950s. ‘That there has in recent years been an upswing of religion in the United States can hardly be doubted’, he wrote, ‘the evidence is diverse, converging, and unequivocal beyond all possibilities of error.’ With Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism now functioning as ‘equi-legitimate’ expressions of American religion, a prime indicator of national religious vitality was the pervasiveness of religious self-identification. When requested to state a religious preference, ‘95 per cent of the American people’ chose to identify themselves as Protestants, Catholics or Jews; in other words, so Herberg explained, ‘virtually the entire body of the American people, in every part of the country and in every section of society, regard themselves as belonging to some religious community’. Nor did the irreligious – or simply reticent – pose any kind of threat to this strong religious consensus, for the dominant trend of religious belonging had ‘led to the virtual disappearance of anti-religious prejudice’; as Herberg put it: ‘The old-time “village atheist” is a thing of the past, a folk curiosity like the town crier.’

However, the key indicator of what Herberg billed as ‘The Contemporary Upswing in Religion’ was the growing number of Americans who were now deemed to be church members. By 1953, they amounted to 59.5 per cent of the population, ‘marking an all-time high in the nation's history’. However, even this landmark statistic failed to do justice to the true vitality of American religiosity for, as Herberg stressed, ‘considerably more Americans regard themselves as church members than the statistics of church affiliation would indicate’.