Liberal Protestantism Research Articles

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

Identity and solidarity in a pluralist society:

In his recent book Protestants (2017), historian Alec Ryrie argues that while Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have been “the bravest theologian of his generation”, the impact of his prison writings and his opaque vision of a “religionless Christianity” in a world come of age was disastrous for mainstream Protestantism in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ryrie’s analysis of the trajectory of Western liberal Protestantism needs to be nuanced by a more critical and contextual reading of both cultural processes of pluralisation and Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. Still, Ryrie’s sweeping claim goes to the heart of the question about the “usefulness” of Bonhoeffer’s thought and witness for the future of Christian discipleship and engagement in an increasingly post-Christian and multi-religious world. Can Bonhoeffer’s legacy assist Christians to negotiate the delicate balance between identity as disciples of Christ within faith communities and solidarity with people of other faiths or no religion affiliation?

An Exercise in Liberal Biblical Theology (Keynote Address)


 
 
 This essay was presented at the “Who is my Neighbour? Theological Education in the Global Villiage of the 21st Century” symposium hosted by the McGill School of Religious Studies in the Fall of 2022. It offers an accessible set of reflections on how a liberal biblical theology can help people connect with the content of the Bible in ways that speak to their lived experience, thereby allowing the heart of the Bible to become more familiar and more widely accessible. In modern society, where the letters G-O-D seem like antiquated fiction and where the church has often failed to adequately and meaningfully explicate the Bible in ways that people can connect with, such a sound, gracious liberal biblical theology can be a source of renewal for both Liberal Protestantism and Christian theological education. To demonstrate this I will undertake an exercise in liberal biblical theology, contrasting the traditional Trinitarian language used by G. B. Caird (1951) to explore the unity of the New Testament with more accessible theological language, language arrived at by drawing from the work of Ralph Harper, Samuel Terrien, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Fromm, Howard Thurman, and Robert Frost. 
 
 

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By GeneZubovich, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By GeneZubovich, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

Book Review: Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

Book Review: Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By Gene Zubovich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 408p. $45.00 cloth.

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By Gene Zubovich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 408p. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 21 Issue 1

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States by Gene Zubovich (review)

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States by Gene Zubovich (review)

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By Gene Zubovich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. viii + 391 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. By Gene Zubovich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. viii + 391 pp. $45.00 cloth.

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

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).

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt

Reviewed by: Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt Kristofer Allerfeldt Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $45. ISBN: 9781479803545). When we encounter Protestantism in the US immigration debates of the early to mid-20th century, it is usually backing up Nordic supremacy and anti-Catholicism. In this context, Protestantism equates with nativism and restriction. This book argues that as well as fuelling anti-immigrant sentiments, over the 40 years between the harsh quotas of 1924 and their overturning in 1965, moderate, mainline, Protestant activists played a leading role in promoting religious and racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. When Pruitt calls his subjects “mainline”, he’s referring to “a collective label applied to numerically predominant, largely white denominations driven by ecumenism.” Their Protestantism was driven by “home missions, mid-century sensibilities, and internationalist views . . . to confront long-standing racial prejudice . . . and incorporate diverse immigrant groups into their churches” (p. 3). Driven by humane theoretical and practical responses to the refugee crisis of the 1930s, WWII, de-colonisation and the Cold War, they were highly instrumental in dismantling restrictions on both European and Asian migration. One of the central themes of the book is the irony that the cultural pluralism inherent in opening US borders to increased diversity was the inevitable decline in the influence of Protestantism itself. Yet, as Pruitt points out Protestantism retained its key role in defining the national identity, even as its authority seemed to wane. The shift in Anglo-Protestantism’s leadership from cultural, racial and religious gatekeepers to staunch advocates of E Pluribus Unum reflected, reinforced and drove the post-war Liberal consensus. Yet as Pruitt also points out, this was not necessarily the stance of the rank and file. He cites a Harris poll taken in 1965. On the eve of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which largely did away with the discriminatory quotas of the 1920s, 65% of American Protestant Americans objected to any increase in immigrant numbers. This thinking highlights—to my mind—one big gap in the book’s coverage of the declining influence of Anglo-Protestantism. If white Protestantism lost authority [End Page 218] over these years, the influence of African-American Protestantism powered ahead. Yet, this is barely mentioned. There is some attention paid to Mexican and Latin American immigration and migration. There is some commentary on Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. This is in spite of the fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans still identify as Protestant—and the figure for the period of the study was undoubtedly higher—their influence is largely skated over. It is also important because although church attendance generally declined over these years, that trend was slower in Black churches than in white. This is an anomaly. For if, as Pruitt argues, Anglo-Protestantism’s liberalism cost it influence, Black Protestantism’s humane stance made it far more visible and powerful, far more important, both within its own communities and on the national stage. Not only were Black churches and Black ministers vital to first the defense, then advance of civil rights, but they also formed crucial communal links in the continuing Great Migration from the Deep South. There is no analysis of liberal Protestantism’s failure to support federal anti-lynching measures, or the Federal Council of Churches for Christ’s (FCC) and National Council of Churches’ failure to make any significant inroads into integration. Professor Pruitt makes no mention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While these are not immigration policy matters, they do show that vaunted ideals of racial equality only went so far. This omission is serious, but in general, this is a keenly observed book. It is richly researched and clearly—if densely—written. It represents a vital counterargument and revision of the standard narrative of nativism and its reverse in the twentieth century. I will certainly order a copy for Exeter University’s library. Kristofer Allerfeldt University of Exeter Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Review: Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest, edited by Paul Bramadat, Patricia O’Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme

Religion at the Edge presents a collection of essays that analyze the most irreligious regions of the United States and Canada, namely the Pacific Northwest. Also called Cascadia, the area encompasses British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and even parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and northern California, although the book focuses on the first three provinces/states.The book is an exemplary model of how a diverse group of scholars can create a coherent volume. Working through the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, the authors met in person two times, read and discussed each others’ articles multiple times, and made revisions as a result of those encounters. They also drew from a common pool of resources, such as interview transcripts, focus group data, archival materials, and perhaps most important, results of the Pacific Northwest Social Survey (PNSS). The result is a cohesive volume that examines Cascadia’s unique, or “peculiar,” configuration of religion, spirituality, and secularity.The PNSS, conducted in 2017 (Wilkins-Laflamme), found that 49 percent of residents of British Columbia claimed no religion, while 44 percent of Washingtonians and Oregonians reported no religion. The essays in the book explain the historical and contemporary reasons for Cascadia being the “None Zone,” and speculate as to its anticipation of a post-Christian America in the future (Silk). They consider the influence of indigenous traditions and settler colonialism (Horton, O’Brien), the environmental beauty of the region and a concomitant “reverential naturalism” (Bramadat, Morrill), the tradition of irreligion across generations (Block and Marks, O’Connell Killen), and the effect of secularism upon Evangelical and Liberal Protestants (Wellman and Corcoran, Wilkinson) as well as upon minority religions (Brown).Readers seeking information about secularism, the spiritual-but-not-religious cohort, environmentalism and religion, and the future of religion across Canada and the United States will want to read Religion at the Edge. As Mark Silk points out, “Cascadia has proven to be not an outlier but the advance guard of religion in the public life of the two countries of which it is a part” (128). Highly recommended.

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa

Reviewed by: Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa Kristy Nabhan-Warren Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. Felipe Hinojosa. (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2021. Pp. xvi, 238. $45.00. ISBN: 978-1-477-32198-0.) Felipe Hinojosa’s Apostles of Change is a game-changer in how we view U.S. Latina/o history. In this meticulously crafted and researched book, the author urges his reader to move beyond the single-origin narratives that historians tend to embrace and retell about movements, in favor of a more complex, multi-layered story of “the thousands of small moments that gave birth to the Latina/o freedom movement” (p. x). Rather than focusing on one movement and a handful of mostly male leaders, Hinojosa shows us that “small but politically vibrant moments” form the impetus and stuff of a broader freedom movement (p. x). Apostles of Change is a must-read for anyone interested in U.S. Latina/o history and in how Latinas and Latinos worked to raise awareness of the entanglements of [End Page 821] racism, white privilege, and institutional churches’ complicity in perpetuating broken systems. Hinojosa’s book is a call for revisionist histories that runs parallel with his interlocutors’ calls for concrete changes in their institutions and communities. The stories that Hinojosa shares with his reader are about “the struggle to wholly transform the sacred space of the church, to move it into an embrace with its community, and to liberate it from its own strictures” (p. x). The book opens by quoting a statement from the 1969 Armitage Methodist Church in Chicago on its willingness to engage with grassroots anti-poverty measures rooted in social justice. White, liberal congregations such as this one, Hinojosa shows throughout the book, were spurred by Latina/o-led church occupations and protests by that directly challenged churches’ racist theologies and actions. Hinojosa begins the book with this particular vignette, and with 1969 as the start date, when churches “became strategic sites, indeed sacred places, where radical groups staged their movements and proclaimed their message of community control and power to the world” (p. 3). As many historians have chronicled, the late 1960s and 70s were decades of protest as Black Americans across the United States called attention to the inhumane, violent, racist treatment of nonwhite people, and churches were epicenters of the grassroots and widespread Black Civil Rights movement. But what scholars have not spent nearly as much time on, as Hinojosa convincingly argues, are the parallel Brown-led religio-spiritual protests of systemic racism and oppression and of oppressive institutional religion. The four core chapters of the book are deeply researched and compelling case studies of moments and components of what Hinojosa terms the “Latina/o freedom movement” which initiated a coming together of Brown, Black, and White social justice-focused individuals in a rainbow coalition of activists. Hinojosa offers four case studies of U.S. cities that were sites of Latina/o freedom movement protests and occupations. This freedom movement gained momentum in the late 60s and early 70s, and was comprised of young radical Latina/o leaders who deployed church occupations and disruptions in order to challenge the ways that the societal status quo seeped into churches and church politics. Hinojosa convincingly shows the reader that each of these moments, while on their own seemingly small and considered by some to be insignificant, built upon each other to form a pan-American Latina/o freedom movement. Hinojosa’s first case study is the Lincoln Park, Chicago seminary occupation by Puerto Rican, Mexican, Black and White allies in the Young Lords, where de jure “urban renewal” qua de facto urban removal was directly challenged by the young activists who occupied McCormick Theological Seminary, then a bastion of white liberal Protestantism. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles Latinas/os were organizing their own protests of institutional racism and negligence of nonwhite Catholics and people. A peak moment for Los Angeles Latina/o freedom movement was Católicos por la Raza’s gathering outside LA’s wealthy St. Basil Catholic Church...

The Angelology of Sergius Bulgakov

Contemporary angelology is primarily an apologetic response to the negation of the existence of the angelic reality by liberal Protestantism. Bulgakov’s teaching about angels, on the other hand, arose as an indispensable part of the theological system. The orthodox author defines angels as created ideas of reality. As with Plato, every thing has its own idea, so with Bulgakov it has its own angel. The angels are therefore closely related to the earthly world and are its guardians, leading the world to the realization of the meaning given to it. Angels are also closely related to God because it is their nature to be filled with divine life. Thus, they constitute “Jacob’s ladder” — the reality that connects the world with God.

Survivals: The Stakes of Religious Literacy

Abstract Johannes Wolfart makes a compelling case that the nebulousness of “religious literacy” belies a complicated history not just of “religion” but of “literacy” in his recent article, “‘Religious Literacy’: Some Considerations and Reservations,” in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. Wolfart has reservations about religious literacy, its instrumentalization, and specifically the lack of empirical evidence that would support programs that promote religious literacy. He is concerned that “religion,” “literacy,” and of course “religious literacy” are imbricated in theological projects, whether alive or long dead; ultimately, we might characterize his position as deeply concerned with religious literacy as a liberal Protestant project. In this response essay, I suggest that reducing religious literacy to Protestant liberalism prioritizes thought experiments over the survival of minoritized people and communities. It is clear that religious literacy is a framework deployed not for lofty goals of social betterment or a vague sense of liberation, but for survival: survival of academic programs and departments, survival of a body politic, and often the survival of individuals and groups who are targets of hate.

Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States by Kristy L. Slominski

Reviewed by: Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States by Kristy L. Slominski Courtney Ann Irby Kristy L. Slominski, Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) Motivated by a desire to complicate the standard narrative that positions sex versus religion, scholars in recent years have tried to illustrate that religious groups are not inherently sex negative. This binary thinking has been challenged by efforts to showcase the discursive shift in purity culture that presents sex as “great” and a “gift” as long as it occurs within heterosexual marriage. Yet the loudest voices continue to represent “religion” as a reactionary position. As Kristy Slominski’s Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States beautifully documents, long before conservative Protestants began to wage battles against sex, liberal Protestants had already formatively shaped public understandings of sex. By expanding the religious groups under investigation to include liberal Protestants, as well as their interfaith efforts with Jews and Catholics, she reminds readers that religion is not a unified concept, nor is it inherently a conservative force that seeks to restrict sex. Teaching Moral Sex weaves together the histories of two sex education movements that dominated the twentieth century—the first, initially called the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), played a critical role in the first part of the century until a group originally called the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) picked up the mantle in the [End Page 159] 1960s. To situate the role of religion in these movements and explore how it shaped their motivations and strategies, the book is divided into five substantive chapters that delineate the “phases of the movement for public sex education” (7) and also provide an overarching chronological narrative for how we arrived at contemporary sex education disputes. To provide a context for the emergence of sex education, Slominski convincingly argues in chapter one that readers must first understand how late nineteenth-century liberal Protestant efforts to combat prostitution were bridged with moralized medical efforts to reduce venereal diseases. Rather than science and religion existing in tension, she illustrates how liberal Christian values served as the glue that held together these different social movements as they merged to become ASHA. After establishing their origins, chapter two turns to explain the type of sex education curricula that ASHA helped to create and their efforts to partner with colleges, YMCAs, and the military to provide these programs. Recognizing the limitations of scientific facts to change the sexual attitudes and behavior of young people sufficiently, ASHA relied on liberal Christian ideals and normative frameworks to craft a “moral education.” Again, illustrating the failure of overly simplistic binaries, Slominski reveals how medicine and religion worked collaboratively to shape cultural norms around sexuality that constrained it to marriage but also challenged what they saw as repressive tendencies to label all aspects of sex as negative. Chapter three chronicles how these redemptive efforts to conceptualize sexuality as a positive force were channeled into family life education programs. In addition to taming the taboo subject, she notes how family life became a common framework that facilitated interfaith conversations, since Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants all saw the family as the basic unit of society and feared that it was in need of support. While family life education dominated midcentury efforts, chapter four explains how SIECUS emerged once again to argue that sex education should be a public health concern and how their efforts to develop comprehensive education programs incited what we have come to know as the “sex education controversies” of the 1960s. Conservative Protestants’ negative responses to their situational ethics that promoted personal choice and responsibility over moral absolutes showcase how these debates were not an example of secularism versus religion but were at least partially structured by theological differences in moral decision-making. Slominski also illustrates that liberal Protestants’ “new morality” began to transform sexuality into a site of spiritual growth long before conservative Protestants would do so. Chapter five pulls these themes together to showcase how conservative Protestants’ engagement with SIECUS...

The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-century America by Elizabeth A. Clark

The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-century America by Elizabeth A. Clark

Review: Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America, edited by James L. Heft, S.M., and Jan E. Stets

Review: <i>Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America</i>, edited by James L. Heft, S.M., and Jan E. Stets

Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II by Mark Wild

Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II by Mark Wild