(NYTIMES) - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once observed that being a minority in 19th-century Europe was like living in someone else's country home. The aristocrat owned the house. Other people got to stay there but as guests. They did not get to set the rules, run the institutions or dominate the culture.

Something similar can be said of America in the 1950s. But over the ensuing decades, the Protestant establishment crumbled and America became more marvellously diverse.