Blessed are the merciful.

Christianity was even more dominant as the national religion than it is today. But it was mostly a different kind of Christianity. Although there were extremists like Father Charles Coughlin, who called Roosevelt's program the "Jew Deal," the great majority of American Christians resisted efforts to fan their mild anti-Semitism into the kind of hatred Hitler ignited in German Christians. This was due, I think, primarily to two factors. One was the recent experience with Prohibition. If you remembered, as my father did, spending every other Sunday morning not attending religious services but driving up country roads to visit your bootlegger, it was difficult to bring self-righteousness to your religion, and easy to feel merciful to other sinners. When Mother would start to get indignant about some local girl who had strayed, my father would say, "Be human."