It’s hard for a person under 50 to imagine how Christian America was half a century ago. The shattering experiences of the Great Depression and World War II sent Americans back to church. The 1950s marked a high point in church attendance. Facing down godless Communism, in 1956 Congress passed a bill that made “In God We Trust” the official motto of the United States. Representatives of the leading Protestant denominations had political pull. Cardinal archbishops in Boston, New York, and Chicago were kingmakers.

I grew up in the shadow of that seemingly all-powerful Christian consensus. In my childhood, Maryland was governed by strict blue laws that closed down commerce on Sundays. The only establishments open were drugstores, gas stations, and restaurants. Thus my lasting childhood memory from the ’60s: stopping at Asbill’s Pharmacy after church, where my parents treated us to phosphate sodas as they picked up their reserved copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

There was a great deal of hypocrisy in those years. John F. Kennedy was a notorious philanderer, and I dare say he was far from the only American of that era who talked the talk of Christianity while walking down a different path. And there were critics. The atheist Betrand Russell won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. In his youthful polemic God and Man