Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By Gene Zubovich

Abstract

For scholars laboring in any number of subfields—intellectual history, religion, political economy, international relations—March 2022 brought a long-anticipated publication date. Over several years in the pages of leading journals, Gene Zubovich had offered snippets of his larger project, articles that immediately became footnote mainstays. The finished product, Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States, is as expected: a work of erudition that evinces mastery of numerous literatures and scrupulous primary source research. Before the Religious Right redresses historiographical imbalances. While Zubovich commends scholars who have analyzed the mid-century political mobilization of evangelicals, he “offers a corrective” by recovering the story of ecumenical Protestants, demonstrating how constitutive they were to postwar American liberalism (p. 12). The lines between church and state, if they existed at all, were invisible. He rejects simplistic narratives about faith’s role in American hegemony, both those that depict religious actors as uniquely guilty villains and those that credit them as especially noble critics. And where scholars have only recently attended to the role of religious groups in the propagation of human rights (with even those exceptions tending to focus on Catholicism), he “locates the religious roots of human rights in the ecumenical milieu” (p. 7).