"With its historical consciousness, emphasis on institutionalized structures, and combination of skepticism and assurance of grace, Catholicism seems to embody the very opposite of the American cultural principle. Zoller here reexamines widely held notions about secularization and the role of religion in civil society to show how Catholicism was integrated into the Protestant, egalitarian, and populist American culture and to determine what distinguishes American Catholics from both European Catholics and other Americans."--BOOK JACKET.