n the introduction to his 1987 Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch Jr. laments the loss of a shared American culture — a body of knowledge, from Shakespeare to the Bible, that united Americans.
He recalls his father’s propensity for quoting a particular truncated line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar whenever encouraging his colleagues to act swiftly: “there is a tide [in the affairs of men / which taken at the flood leads to fortune].” His colleagues — educated men themselves, Hirsch implies — would understand the reference, and so cultural communication would function smoothly. This shared consciousness, he suggested 20 years ago, was on its way out.
Hirsch’s nostalgia may seem even more dated now than it did in 1987. The idea of a “canon” of a shared cultural shorthand has been challenged as outmoded and exclusionary, unfitting for a pluralist society. Likewise, among the “neoreactionaries” of the alt-right in particular, the shared shorthand of (white, Judeo-Christian) cultural literacy is symbolic of a disappearing, homogenous “West” to which we can and must return.
Three decades later, in the fascinating, complex 2016 book The End of White Christian America, the Public Religion Research Institute’s founder and CEO Robert Jones traces the decline not merely of a demographic, but of the racial and religious contours of that very culture. Jones described the decline of “a shared aesthetic, a historical framework, and a moral vocabulary … [a] lingua franca.”
Source: The age of white Christian America is ending. Here’s how it got there. – Vox