Mainline Protestantism

For the last several decades, the United States looked like an outlier among industrial nations in the North Atlantic West, remaining a robustly religious country while its European peers moved into ever deeper secularization. But the recent trajectory of decline among those holding liberal religious beliefs strongly suggests that the long-term trend in the United States is toward pervasive secularism on the European model as well, the intellectual historian David A. Hollinger told audiences at Trinity College in Hartford this week.