Maglor.valinor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Will Herberg moved from Communist Party organizing in his youth to become one of mid-century America's most influential sociologists of religion, arguing in Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) that the three traditions functioned as parallel routes into a shared American civic identity. He went on to write for the conservative National Review, an unusual arc from radical labor activist to religious traditionalist and Jewish theologian.