Kenneth Woodward’s new book Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama is out, winning a positive review from D.G. Hart in
Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “His subject is how Americans get religion, and the author’s own formation as a Catholic both explains his approach to religion stories and provides a baseline for understanding the ways that getting religion changed between 1950 and the present day.” Woodward treats changes in Methodism in particular, not surprisingly, since Methodist Hilary Clinton could be our next president.
Methodists have always been “zealous monitors of American morals since the middle of the 19th Century,” Woodward wrote in a Journal op-ed last week, but by the early 1960s “the church’s social concerns had shifted from alcohol, gambling and shopping on the Sabbath to racism, sexism, and the war in Vietnam.” The latter would also become concerns of the Democratic party by 1972, the same year that the former Republican Hillary Rodham became a Democratic party activist. She already was a Methodist, of course, having been raised in that church. And like other serious Methodists she regarded public service as a form of ministry.
