Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. By David A. Hollinger

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, white American Protestants were divided into two ideological camps. Evangelical Protestants resisted the civil rights movement, feminism, and religious and racial pluralism. Ecumenical Protestants, in contrast, welcomed these developments because they viewed ethnoreligious pluralism as a positive good. Those two ideological camps within Protestantism still exist, but ecumenical Protestant denominations have experienced such steep membership declines over the past half-century that evangelicals have been able to redefine the word “Christian” as synonymous with “evangelical” and write ecumenical Protestants out of the story. And with the decline of ecumenical Protestantism, secular Americans have become the leading champions of the racial and religious pluralism that ecumenical Protestants of the mid-twentieth century played a role in shaping. David A. Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate explains why ecumenical Christianity declined even as its political causes succeeded, why white evangelicals became the leading ideological party in American Christianity, and why this religious shift reshaped American politics.