In 1945, with the Great Depression and the Second World War behind them, citizens of the United States, often led by academics, with surprising confidence projected visions of the religious future – and, with them, of the secular future of their country. They stood in a grand tradition that reached back to the original Catholic explorers, was best articulated by the Puritan founders of the Protestant colonies, and then intentionally expanded to include all the people who formed the nation. The motto on the seal of the United States, Novus Ordo Seclorum, typified the widespread if not universal sense that the future was open to the enterprise of the people, many of whom would say, using a phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, that they were acting “under God.” Some of them projected utopias, others announced that they were advancing the Kingdom of God, while others included religion in their civil concepts of Manifest Destiny.

Projecting their visions of the future in every case built upon their assessments of the American present and past. Since that record was rich in variety and since it included competitive claims and ambiguous reports, the new visions, programs, and plans necessarily reflected great diversity. To anyone who tries to gain a synoptic view of these by reference to the literature or the use of the Internet, the first impression can be one of chaos. The hippie philosopher Emmett Grogan in the 1960s may have provided the best summary when he wrote, “Anything anybody can say about America is true.”