Here's an easy way for you to help us contend for truth in an age of antitruth.

Subscribe to the Issues etc. podcast with YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Just type Issues, etc. in the YouTube search engine and click subscribe.

For Apple and Spotify, type Issues, etc. in the search engine, hit follow and leave us a five-star review.

Help us inform other podcast listeners by subscribing to the Issues et cetera podcast with YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. Dr. Barton Marty is kind of a legend in American religious studies. He recently died at the age of 97. He was a Lutheran historian who wrote extensively on religion in the United States, including a multi-volume work on fundamentalism in the U.S.

Welcome back to Issues, Et cetera.

I'm Todd Wilkin.

Joining us to talk about the obituaries for religious historian Dr. Martin Marty, Terry Mattingly, he's Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at St. Constantine

College in Houston, Texas. He writes Rational Sheep, a Substack Newsletter on Faith Family and Mass

Media. He's author of the National On Religion column for the Andrews McMill Universal Syndicate,

and for two decades, he led the getreligion.org website. Terry joins us from Australia. Terry, welcome.

Glad to be here. The New York Times wrote that Martin Marty was a, quote, staunch champion of pluralism.

What did that mean? Well, it's a very complex idea, and it's also critical to realize how difficult it was for him to continue to defend pluralism the longer he went into his career.

But let me back up for a second and try to explain what he meant by that.

It's interesting, in my case, I just wrote a column about him that I just shipped to the

syndicated desk in Kansas City.

I actually had some very direct contact with him on this issue, because when I wrote my

master's degree thesis at Baylor University and the church state program,

I wrote about civil religion during the 60s, specifically civil religion linked to the largest

protests in the history of the United States, the Vietnam War moratorium.

And I ran into the fact that there were many different definitions of civil

religion, which religion as it's expressed in public life, I think is a one short way to say that.

...