Rosenstock-Huessy again: He writes that Christian conversion always involves a break with an old way of life, a breach with old loyalties and commitments, and a “verification” of that experience by an induction into a new people, “formerly overlooked or even despised, who now enable us to strengthen experience into habit.” (There’s a bit too much of Weber in that formulation, but leave that to the side.) In a footnote, he adds: “America was practical Christianity as lon as millions of immigrants experienced a change of allegiance from an Old World to a New World, as long as tears shed in the Old World backed up as seed the harvest of joyful experiences in the New.”