The highlight of the year I spent as a postgraduate at Harvard was a speech given by Tom Wolfe to the graduating class of 1988. His theme was the decline of Christianity in America and the extraordinary freedom that had given rise to. Until quite recently in American history, he argued, people’s personal behaviour had been circumscribed by their sense of right and wrong, which was largely dictated by the morality associated with various puritan sects dating back to the first European settlers.

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