America is a vast and free country, so it's perhaps to be expected that a vast and diverse

country is home to a large and diverse citizenry.

Now, in the history of politics, most cities and nations grow out

of and lay a state on top of a homogeneous population. And for most of political history,

it was thought that solidarity and unity were necessary for stability and order. But America's

different. Muslims, Christians and Jews, women and men from every nation on the face of the earth have made themselves

into Americans. This great democracy is a nation of nations. So it's perhaps not surprising

within this nation of nations that we disagree with our neighbors about things, large and small.

That's certainly true of the Jewish minority, never more than at most a couple of percent

of the American population. But whereas Jews remain a tiny minority, never more than at most a couple of percent of the American population.

But whereas Jews remain a tiny minority, the character of the majority culture in which we're

situated has changed dramatically. For many years, America's majority culture grew under a kind

of big-tent, denominationless Protestant Christianity. In that kind of religious environment,

the dominant Jewish anxiety was

assimilation into Christianity, and one should say that anxiety was understandable.

Christianity is, of course, an evangelical faith, and enjoying the moral confidence

that comes with its ubiquitous cultural presence, Christianity in America could be felt everywhere in American society. Today,

America's widely shared culture is not overtly Christian any longer. On any side of our main

political and class divides, neither in corporate America nor the educated classes and high

status professions, nor even in America's working class, the citizens portrayed in Hillbilly

Elegy by J.D. Vance,

or those studied in the fish town of Charles Murray's coming apart.

...