He most sobering feature of Yuval Levin’s brilliant analysis of America’s “fractured republic” is what he calls a “revolution in the structure of American religiosity.” Multitudes of Americans, Levin persuasively argues, have ceased to view traditional religion as “an ideal with which to nominally identify” and have come instead “to see it as an option to reject.” It is not, he points out, that the dedicated members of traditional faiths are dwindling on the contrary, religious communities are vibrant, and flourishing. I called it “the book of the year” in a New York Post column, and in a review in these pages in May, David Bahr said The Fractured Republic “merges a deep philosophic understanding of the American experiment and a conceptual analysis of American history into a practical basis from which we can examine contemporary American problems with crystalline clarity.” Given the richness of the book, we invited four right-of-center intellectuals to expound upon, and expand on, Levin’s themes and message. -John Podhoretz It has excited more attention in the weeks leading up to its release than any comparable work in memory. Yuval Levin, the editor of the quarterly National Affairs and a sometime contributor to Commentary, has just published The Fractured Republic, an essay in book form about the political divide in the United States.
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