Marilynne Robinson: preference

Transcript context

…Some thinkers, I think especially on the conservative right, have argued that as America becomes more pluralistic — ethnically and religiously pluralistic — that that, on net, marginalizes the influence of religion. That it’s easier for society to be fairly religious when there’s mostly one or maybe two religions in question, but when you have people from all over the world with a variety of religions or just very different understandings of Christianity, there’s a least-common-denominator effect, where most of us become more secular. Do you think that’s true? No, I think that one of the things that has been a resource in this country for many years is religious cultures that are derived from the place of origin. In other words, the multiplicity of religious institutions sustained religion as a phenomenon. I think that you would say, without much fear of contradiction, that if you’re going to find religious people now, you would go to immigrant communities because they sustain many things for people who might otherwise feel that they are adrift. Some commentators have suggested that the current woke movement, say from the progressive left, that it’s intellectually and ideologically an outgrowth of an earlier American Protestantism, that it has roots, in a sense, in the 17th century. Do you agree with that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.