Patrick Allitt’s focus on paradoxes is an interesting angle to use as a starting point for his study of religion in
America between 1945 and 2001. People’s individual actions often involve a certain amount of paradox, so it seems certain that the trend would hold true for their religious practices, and would also hold true for the collective action of a nation of individuals. His use of oral history was particularly helpful to his argument since oral histories often highlight the paradoxes that people encounter even in their own worldview or belief system. It was suprising to me, though, that Patrick Allitt made the statement early in his book, that “…Jesus spoke vigorously against wealth and against having a care for the future” (xii). Many adherents to Christianity would vehemently argue with him on that point and make the claim that Jesus had a lot to say about money, and even more to say about the future, and none of it was negative. In fact, they would make the argument that Jesus speaks against greed (“The LOVE of money is the root of all evil”), but never against money itself. They would also probably point out that Jesus encouraged people to share their abundance with others so that no one would be in need. That must be why these same adherents to the Christian faith believe it is important to give to charities, or at least give to the church so that the church can fund various service oriented projects. Aside from the apparent flaw in Allit’s assumption that wealth and religious beliefs contains some type of paradox, the use of paradox does seem an interesting vantage point to use when studying religion. However, many readers would probably use caution when deciding how much of the information in the book is useful because of Allit’s statement on Jesus’ teachings regarding money. Their argument would probably be that if Allit was using an erroneous precedent as the foundation for one argument in the book, then it is possible that there are other erroneous foundational assumptions in the book as well.