<P> Historians agree that members of mainline Protestant denominations have played leadership roles in many aspects of American life, including politics, business, science, the arts, and education . They founded most of the country's leading institutes of higher education . According to Harriet Zuckerman, 72% of American Nobel Prize Laureates between 1901 and 1972, have identified from Protestant background . </P> <P> Episcopalians and Presbyterians tend to be considerably wealthier and better educated than most other religious groups, and numbers of the most wealthy and affluent American families as the Vanderbilts and Astors, Rockefeller, Du Pont, Roosevelt, Forbes, Whitneys, Morgans and Harrimans are Mainline Protestant families, though those affiliated with Judaism are the wealthiest religious group in the United States and those affiliated with Catholicism, owing to sheer size, have the largest number of adherents of all groups in the top income bracket . </P> <P> Some of the first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst, all were founded by mainline Protestant denominations . By the 1920s most had weakened or dropped their formal connection with a denomination . James Hunter argues that: </P> <Dl> <Dd> The private schools and colleges established by the mainline Protestant denominations, as a rule, still want to be known as places that foster values, but few will go so far as to identify those values as Christian...Overall, the distinctiveness of mainline Protestant identity has largely dissolved since the 1960s . </Dd> </Dl>

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