For several years after the founding of National Review in 1955, the magazine had no dedicated beat for matters of religion. But William F. Buckley Jr. knew that religion was integral to cultures and societies and relevant — often highly relevant — to politics and policy. He also understood that Christianity and its mother religion, Judaism, had helped to shape American culture and the American polity.
Buckley was a religious believer — a Catholic — and he knew that the conservative values he held and was building a movement to propagate came in large measure from the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, he tapped Will Herberg, a Jewish scholar — an ex-Marxist — who was teaching at Drew University in New Jersey, to be NR’s first religion editor.
Herberg had come to Buckley’s attention after he shot to prominence with his widely acclaimed book Protestant, Catholic, Jew. This year marks the 70th anniversary of its publication as well as of the founding of this magazine.
Protestant, Catholic, Jew was an instant classic. Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering theologian and public intellectual of the era, described it as “the most fascinating essay on the religious sociology of America that has appeared in decades.” In the book, Herberg argued that America had undergone a process of religious and cultural homogenization, one in which Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans drew from their traditions to shape America as a country that was at once deeply religious — in some cases much more religious than the European nations from which they or their ancestors had emigrated — and constitutionally nonsectarian.
According to Herberg, despite the different histories and particularities of their traditions, American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews understood their faiths to be pillars undergirding what was, in effect, an American civil religion. While theological differences certainly endured, Americans — even the most devout and committed — found ways to ensure that such differences did not impede the friendship and cooperation needed to maintain a flourishing republican civic order. Far from imagining that they had to lay religion aside, they drew on the teachings of their faiths as essential “supports” (to use George Washington’s word) in fulfilling their civic responsibilities.
Niebuhr’s mentorship was instrumental in Herberg’s rejection of secularism and return to the practice of the Jewish faith. Herberg’s advocacy of a deeply religious conservatism led him to be, in Buckley’s words, “the Orthodox Jew, who sometimes sounded like a Christian triumphalist.” In fact, Herberg wrestled with the prospect of conversion to Christianity, though at Niebuhr’s suggestion he instead committed to religious orthodoxy within his Jewish tradition.
Among the matters Herberg addressed in Protestant, Catholic, Jew was an issue that struck him as puzzling and even paradoxical. On one hand, most Americans identified, often strongly, with one of the three religious traditions; self-reported atheism or even secularism was exceedingly rare. On the other hand, in the public sphere, many religiously affiliated Americans maintained seemingly secular habits — they acknowledged in polls that their faith did not decisively shape their political outlooks or profoundly affect the way they conducted and presented themselves in the public dimensions of their lives.
Herberg attributed this at least in part to something observed by the Harvard sociologist David Riesman — that the other-directedness of the increasingly large American middle class put a premium on social belonging over personal belief and authenticity. Americans valued the sociability of the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish tribe. This was different from inner-directedness: a characteristically American individualism guided by personal beliefs and purpose.
Herberg, in a spirit of friendly criticism, suggested that many Americans too easily accepted an other-directed faith focused on communal belonging rather than on spiritual transformation. Americans wanted to belong to a religious tribe and wanted their fellow citizens to belong to one too, even if it wasn’t their own. They felt this was important to the civic order as well as to individual flourishing. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously (or infamously) observed, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
Herberg described the civil religion of the American way of life as “American cultural religion,” which is other-directed toward sociability. In his articles for NR, Herberg allowed that this civil religion is not always harmful to true faith, even if its adherents are sometimes (or even often) not people of great spiritual depth. Civil religion, for Herberg, was a safeguard against statist totalitarian ideologies such as communism. While public religious symbols may be co-opted or misused, they have worth as reminders of the transcendent — a power greater than the state, which stands in judgment over the decisions and actions of political leaders — and they may even encourage Americans to aspire to greater spiritual depth and religious orthodoxy.
However, enduring religion must, Herberg insisted, move beyond mere public symbols and ceremonies. Here he puts his finger on a central insight of biblical religion: true faith does not consist simply in man’s search for belonging. God condescends to meet us by making Himself known to us, in both scripture and “the tradition of the believing community.” Public religion inevitably decays if it is disconnected from transcendence and submission to God. Hence Herberg’s warning: “In this kind of religion it is not man who serves God, but God who is mobilized and made to serve man and his purposes — whether these purposes be economic prosperity, free enterprise, social reform, democracy, happiness, or ‘peace of mind.’”
Today, of course, the landscape of American religion is far more diverse than it was in 1955. While well over half of Americans still identify as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, they are joined by people from an array of other faiths. What’s more, almost a third of Americans are “nones” — people who profess no denominational affiliation, though many of them identify as “spiritual.” There has been another big change, one that Herberg did not foresee. Over the course of the past half century, a massive divide has emerged between more-liberal and more-conservative (and orthodox) elements within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. In many ways, liberal Catholics, for example, have more in common with liberal Protestants and Jews than they have with their conservative co-religionists. Orthodox Jews in important ways have more in common with conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants than they have with Reform Jews and other Jewish liberals. And so forth.
Herberg did not foresee these developments, but he can hardly be faulted for that. Something he did foresee — prophetically, one might say — was that a militant secularism would emerge that challenged the American social order. Just as atheistic or secularist French philosophes laid the groundwork for the revolutionary overthrow of the ancien régime, many intellectuals and other cultural elites in the United States have promoted ideologies that are antithetical to anything resembling the traditional beliefs of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews — beliefs that were, going back to and beyond Tocqueville’s time, foundational to the American cultural and civic orders. Of course, there has been opposition from traditional believers. It is to the American tradition of what Tocqueville called “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty” that Herberg attributed popular opposition to attempts by the Supreme Court of his day to secularize our public life (for example, in the 1962 case of Engel v. Vitale, in which the justices banned officially sponsored prayer in public schools).
Even while noting the social and civic role of religion, Herberg emphasized the intrinsic importance of deep personal faith and fiercely objected to a purely social gospel. As for the movement that came to be known as “the social gospel,” a movement within what we would today call liberal Protestantism that had and has its Catholic and Jewish analogues, Herberg had little sympathy for it. He regarded it as soft and even equivocal on what he viewed as the existential and civilizational threat posed by communism. The ex-Marxist knew that atheism was no merely incidental feature of Marxist ideology. It was, rather, absolutely central to it. Whatever might be said about the possibility of an enduring secular democracy, a flourishing regime of self-government need not marginalize or even privatize religious faith, and it can be supported by such faith inasmuch as religion promotes and supports virtues necessary for people to be good democratic citizens. Communism, by contrast, cannot live with the idea of God — an authority higher than, and standing in judgment over, communist rulers.
In 1955, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism represented separate centers of cultural influence, each tradition contributing to the American civil religion (without being submerged into it). Today, we whose faith is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures — along with some perhaps unexpected new allies — find ourselves in what Baptist theologian Timothy George calls “an ecumenism of the trenches” in defense of such shared values as the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions, marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and religious liberty and the rights of conscience. In the conservative movement, we are profoundly allied with one another across the lines of historic theological division, though often in conflict with liberals of our own faith traditions who ally with liberal secularists to push causes such as abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia, the redefinition of marriage, and gender (and transgender) ideology.
What we can learn by revisiting Herberg on the 70th anniversary of the publication of Protestant, Catholic, Jew is that our civil religion must be grounded in a deep, truly personal faith that helps to foster a sound understanding of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. Such a faith allows us to disagree more civilly and productively as we search for theological truth as well as to pursue the temporal common good together, guided by principles supported by, and in no small measure derived from, our heritage as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
This article appears as “Keep the Faith” in the December 2025 print edition of National Review.