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The Culture Of Disbelief has been the subject of an enormous amount of media attention from the first moment it was published. Hugely successful in hardcover, the Anchor paperback is sure to find a large audience as the ever-increasing, enduring debate about the relationship of church and state in America continues. In The Culture Of Disbelief, Stephen Carter explains how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so intriguing is that he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends. Explaining how preserving a special role for religious communities can strengthen our democracy, The Culture Of Disbelief recovers the long tradition of liberal religious witness (for example, the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements). Carter argues that the problem with the 1992 Republican convention was not the fact of open religious advocacy, but the political positions being advocated.

"It is gratifying to come upon a book that is quiet in tone and reasoned in argument, and that consciously seeks the middle ground--especially when it deals with topics around which the most strident debates have raged. 'The Culture of Disbelief' is such a book..... [Carter's] considerable achievement is rooted in his capacity to think through these crosscurrents and to empathize with people who do not share his political or religious views....A thought-provoking and thoroughly useful book. To those who have maintained, with some justification, that the vital center, the middle ground of civility and reasonability, is disappearing, Stephen Carter can be cited as a counterargument."

Peter L. Berger, New York Times Book Review

"A provocative and thoughtful book about an important aspect of our national life that's all too often the subject of knee-jerk thinking and reaction....Such forcefully delivered arguments help shed new light on the contentious and highly polarized abortion debate, and they also help put into historical perspective the religious rhetoric increasingly employed by the right wing."

William F. Buckley

The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion: Search Results