Search This Blog

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Response to Samuel Huntington

My high school is one of the 50 most liberal in the country, and I've found Chapter 7 of "Who Are We?" to be a breath of fresh air. I feel like the American Politics course I took in high school was taught primarily through the lens of multiculturalism and statistical discrimination. I deliberately used the passive voice in that last sentence.

I committed the grammatical error of confusing "federal" and "national" in my paper, which Huntington pointed out in one of the footnotes.

Is there any evidence of Americanization of religions/denominations other than Catholicism?

2 comments:

Mark Munro said...

Although my high school is not considered one of the most liberal in the country, I completed the International Baccalaureate Diploma program and am a product of a "multicultural education." Huntington would consider recoil at the multicultural lens in which we analyzed world literature, psychology, and business. Huntington wants students to understand american culture, but my education ignored the confines of our borders and addressed the globalization of civilization.

Huntington fails to acknowledge the alienation of racial groups when he traces the formation of subnational groups. The internment of the Japanese and police brutality against African-Americans contributed to the disillusionment of racial groups in America.

Jeremy Merrill said...

Judaism, indubitably, has been subject to Americanization. The rise of the Reform movement and other progressive movements came in America as a result of Jews' desires to assimilate into American culture, hence a desire not to abstain from work on the Sabbath, not to follow rules of Kashrut (dietary purity) or not to follow rules forbidding intermarriage/inter-dating. (Although Jewish mothers of all denominations still guilt trip you about that one.)