Post–Calvinist Society and the Rise of the Modern Intellectual

Daniel Bell, following Max Weber, has pointed out that the religious values that undergird the culture persisted for some time in post-Revolutionary America, but they began to erode in the late nineteenth century. This was partly endemic to the culture itself. The faith in science, rationalism, and the utilitarianism of liberal capitalism encouraged the desacralizing of the world. Protestants attempted to cope with modern science by drawing a distinction between the world we could know by science and the unknowable world of faith. In the end, however, the triumph of science in the mundane world could not help but reduce the salience of the sacred (Bell, 1976). ¹