Neil J Young We Gather Together Sparknotes

Neil J. Young’s We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics is a religious history that seeks to explain American political developments from the years following the second world war through the present day. Young argues that the powerful emergence of the Religious Right at the end of the 1970s was not a political strategy of compromise and coalition building founded ad-hoc on the eve of the election of 1980. Rather, as he demonstrates through meticulous research, it was the “latest iteration of a religious debate that had gone on for decades, sparked by both the ecumenical contentions of mainline Protestantism and by secular liberal political victories” (p. 5). As Young writes, his book examines “the religious
Throughout this decade the Mormon Church led by David O. McKay expanded its national presence through a vigorous missionary campaign and the promotion of anti-ecumenism. At the same time evangelicals organized across denominations, establishing para-church organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today. The Catholic Church also worked to silence ecumenical ideas, insisting that Catholicism alone offered a path to
Young argues that all three groups used the death-of-God controversy and Supreme Court cases eliminating prayer from public schools to assert their messages of truth and salvation. As the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade legalized a woman’s right to choose, the clashes between the three faiths continued. In the wake of the ruling, Young shows, the Catholic Church stood nearly alone in calling for an overturn of the decision. Mormons condemned the ruling, but did not recommend political efforts against abortion. Evangelicals had varied reactions to Roe from outrage to indifference, especially among those who saw it as only a “Catholic concern” (p.