Liberal Protestantism Research Articles

The Quest for ‘Disenchantment’ and the Modernization of Magic

The initial premise of this article is that the lasting influence of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism on the modern conceptualization of religion has confined our understanding of a variety of traditions to a narrow evolutionary scope in which purer religious forms in line with scientific rationalism are seen as arising out of earlier impure systems akin to magic. The article presents the instrumentality of the Qur'an as an alternative lens through which to acknowledge what has often been labelled as “magic” in Islam. Recognizing that this modern conceptualization of religion has been appropriated as an ideal by Muslim modernist reformists, the article particularly intends to show that, through the use of this alternative analytical instrument, the modernist project of emancipatory “disenchantment” can be viewed as an instance of the modernization of magic just as easily as it can be seen as religious purification, the intention of this exercise being to further problematize our current distinction between religion and magic.

Are white evangelical Protestants lower class? A partial test of church-sect theory

Testing hypotheses derived from church-sect theory and contemporary research about changes in evangelical Protestants’ social status, I use repeated cross-sectional survey data spanning almost four decades to examine changes in the social-class hierarchy of American religious traditions. While there is little change in the social-class position of white evangelical Protestants from the early 1970s to 2010, there is considerable change across birth cohorts. Results from hierarchical age–period–cohort models show: (1) robust, across-cohort declines in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and liberal Protestants, affiliates of “other” religions, and the unaffiliated, (2) stability in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and moderate, Pentecostal, and nondenominational Protestants, (3) moderate across-cohort growth in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and Catholics, and (4) these patterns vary across indicators of social class. The findings in this article provide partial support for church-sect theory as well as other theories of social change that emphasize the pivotal role of generations.

The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. By Matthew S. Hedstrom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 278 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in Twentieth Century . By Matthew S. Hedstrom . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. x + 278 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesMatthew Hedstrom contributes to a growing body of recent work on American religious liberalism with his analysis of American Protestant book culture from 1920s through end of World War II. Focusing upon a range of literary campaigns conducted by liberal Protestant book clubs, and joined during World War II by joint publishing campaigns with Catholics and Jews, Hedstrom shows how an emerging book culture crafted a distinctive form of American popular religion that was geared toward a white, middle-class cultural center (what author refers to as middlebrow culture). He shows how desire of liberal Protestant leaders to forge a concerted campaign to promote religious literacy through books opened readers to a wider embrace of religious pluralism by middle of twentieth century. Increasingly this pluralism was defined not in terms of theological doctrines and beliefs. Rather the most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, healing ministry known as mind cure, and rise of modern psychology (15). Ultimately, this religious quest through books opened new vistas of spirituality in latter half of twentieth century.An assistant professor of American Studies at University of Virginia, Hedstrom builds upon a spate of recent scholarship arguing that liberal Protestants were far more influential in shaping religious and cultural worldviews than often given credit. Building upon arguments from Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), Hedstrom follows religious liberalism's impact beyond parameters of churches and denominations. Beginning with an examination of religious book clubs in 1920s, he discusses how these liberal Protestant endeavors lived in tension between a wish to preserve an older Protestant culture of privilege and a desire to capitalize upon a growing consumer demand for reading. Influenced by insights on religious experience articulated in early twentieth century by figures such as Rufus Jones and William James, emerging movement of book publishers promoted religious literacy while increasingly exposing Americans to intellectual currents that moved beyond exclusive domain of American Protestantism. While these initial efforts in 1920s and 1930s were often rooted in a hope to promote a vision of America as a Protestant Christian nation, increasingly these book clubs exposed readers to a wide range of religious traditions. This pattern is especially evident in author's discussion of Eugene Exman. The longtime religion editor at Harper & Brothers (including serving as Harry Emerson Fosdick's editor), Exman's expanding interest in Eastern religion helped foster a spate of works that both promoted core values of liberal Protestantism while also fostering a growing interfaith consciousness.By time of World War II, these earlier Protestant reading clubs joined forces with Catholic and Jewish publishing interests to promote reading in both American military and on home front. These wartime ecumenical-interfaith campaigns helped forge a distinctive vision of American religion (what would become commonly known in 1950s as the Judeo-Christian heritage). …

American Religious Liberalism. Edited by Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xii + 416 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Religious Liberalism . Edited by Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey . Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2012. xii + 416 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesAlmost four decades ago William Hutchison wrote then-definitive work on the modernist impulse in American religious life. He viewed religious liberalism through lens of intellectual history and focused exclusively on nation's Protestant theological heritage. Not surprisingly, Hutchison framed liberal religion as way that certain progressive ideas long-grown in Protestant theology guided those adjusting to defining features of a dawning modernity (for example, science, biblical scholarship).Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey set out to explore broad diversity of American religious liberalism free from categories that constrained Hutchison's vision of this fluid spiritual impulse. To do this they invited sixteen scholars to contribute original essays exploring topics that might be broadly characterized as 1) spirituality in arts, 2) agendas born of religious cosmopolitanism, and 3) interactions between religious and secular forms of liberalism.It is somewhat ironic that many of strongest essays in collection echo at least parts of Hutchison's basic take on liberal strain of American religious thought. Christopher White, example, tells fascinating story of artist Juliet Thompson. Living in an era when Christian claims to superiority were undermined by increased interreligious contact and modern biblical scholarship, Thompson discovered universalist message of Baha'i' faith en route to discovering an artistic style enabling her to experience a spiritual presence through material forms. Matthew Hedstrom's article in book's second section shows that push greater interfaith connections led many Americans beyond religious parochialism to a cosmopolitan faith that dissolved fixed orthodoxies. Hedstrom focuses on wide reading audiences books that John Dewey described as written for people who feel inarticulately that they have essence of religious with them and yet are repelled by religion and are confused (221). Bestselling books, many promoted by Religious Book Club, provided new vocabularies that rendered personal faith consistent with latest scientific thinking and sensitivity to cross-cultural diversity. Yaakov Ariel's essay on Jewish liberalism similarly understands Reform Judaism in terms of same impulses Hutchison and others discern in liberal Protestantism such as embracing idea of progress, affirming scientific discoveries, and incorporating higher criticism of Bible.An insight developed through several of book's essays has to do with role that metaphysical religion has played in historical expressions of American religious liberalism. Whereas intellectual historians typically focus on highbrow sources of theology, decidedly middlebrow philosophies associated with western esotericism and New Thought have played important roles in stretching Americans' ontological imaginations in ways that encourage theological innovation. …

‘... conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary’: The exposition of the Heidelberg Catechism in the light of present-day criticism

The article is a contribution to the 450 year celebrations of the Heidelberg Catechism (HC). Sunday 14, Questions and Answers 35 and 36 receive attention. It deals with the two statements of the creed ‘… conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary’. The exposition of the HC is compared to the catechisms of Zacharias Ursinus and John Calvin in order to capture something about the historicity of the text. The exposition of the creed is an on-going process. Karl Barth, Eberhard Busch and Jan Milič Lochman are good examples of Reformed theologians who remain faithful to the intention of the HC, but who explain these statements with present-day criticism in mind. The exposition of Peter Berger is valuable because this sceptic argues that the opinion of modern, liberal Protestantism is of no value. The article concludes that the ‘virgin birth’ as such has no great value. It is only one aspect of the Christian gospel. It also does not proof the divinity of Christ. The divinity of Christ is presupposed.

«The committees are two, in fact both Savonarola». Identity and political and religious tensions during the First Vatican Council

While in 1869, with the First Vatican Council, the Catholic Church attempted to affirm the vitality of the papacy and to stress the importance of the transcendent foundation of society, in Florence - the capital of the new Italian Kingdom - three committees were founded to build three different statues of Girolamo Savonarola. Through this case study and the images of the Medieval friar developed in those years, this essay offers an insight on the relationships between religion, politics and Italian identities in the few years after Unification. Debates, tensions and solutions on the role of the Catholic Church within Italian society were developed as part of a «cultural war» with a European dimension, involving values, practices, and loyalty. Since religion played a fundamental role in the Italian national-patriotic discourse, a Dominican friar became a slogan, a useful tool in the political battle, and his life was distorted according to convenience, even by anti-Catholics and anticlericals. Savonarola embodied the ambition of different political visions: a society in which Catholicism and freedom were in communication, or a society without religion and in which the papacy had lost its powers. Liberal Catholics, Freemasons, freethinkers, radicals, and Protestants were involved in these re-elaborations of Savonarola's image with different aims; but with the capture of Rome all hope for reform and renewal of the Church, as well as all hopes for a weakening of Catholicism, had faded.

Caitlin Carenen. The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel.

Despite President Harry Truman's immediate endorsement of the newly established state of Israel, the special relationship that Israel enjoys today with the United States government and people was not a foregone conclusion in 1948. Rather, as Caitlin Carenen demonstrates in her pioneering history of American Protestants' shifting views of Jews and Judaism between 1933 and the turn of the twenty-first century, the “fervent embrace” of Israel depended upon a slowly developing “attitudinal change” which, she argues, “permanently altered the religious and political landscape of the United States” (p. xii). During the first half of the twentieth century, it was still accurate to speak of a “mainline” American religion, the influential perch of which was occupied by liberal Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Lutherans. Their cultural and theological sensibilities were shaped by an aggressive nationalism that equated WASP and American values—Jews and Catholics would have to conform—and by a critical, non-literalist reading of the Bible that de-emphasized miracles, prophecy, and any historical-eschatological relevance of the restored kingdom of Israel as the fulfillment of God's end-time plans. Instead, liberal Protestants focused their energies and Middle Eastern resources on missions to the Arab world, and on the plight of Palestinians displaced by Jewish immigrants and by the wars surrounding the establishment of the Zionist state.

Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with David A. Hollinger

Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with David A. Hollinger

Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution

The late Peter Hart's tentative yet provocative application of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the Irish revolution, especially as practised in Co. Cork, continues to arouse widespread indignation and incredulity. Two associated issues have dominated the debate: the influence of sectarian hatred on the conduct of the I.R.A., and the extent to which Protestants were actually forced out of their homes by intimidation or fear. Though a few historians have endorsed Hart's claim that a substantial number of Protestants were murdered or expelled because of their religion, most argue that such attacks were primarily motivated by political or economic rather than sectarian motives. Similar points have been made, from the revolutionary epoch onwards, by liberal Protestants as well as republican sympathisers, whose rejection of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ hypothesis has sometimes degenerated into vicious ad hominem attacks on Hart and his allies. The issue of motivation is notoriously resistant to historical analysis: all motives are mixed, some are deliberately concealed, and others are unconscious. Little would be gained by making yet another attempt to disentangle the often contradictory hopes, fears, resentments, and rationalisations underlying republican conduct in the revolutionary years.

Mark Chaves American Religion: Contemporary Trends (review)

American Religion: Contemporary Trends Peter Heinegg This handy summary of the best available data on patterns of religious thought and behavior in the United States from roughly 1972 to 2008 is little short of indispensable for anyone who wants to understand or comment sensibly on the most pious country in the First World. Chaves is a triple‐threat professor of Sociology, Religion, and Divinity at Duke, and he has mined vast amounts of material from the University of Chicago's GSS (General Social Survey), which has examined the lives of American adults at least every other year since 1972. His broadest finding sounds rather unsexy: Over that stretch of time, we as a nation have kept up our unusually high degree of attachment to, and involvement in, religion. But within that fairly steady flow run all sorts of interesting currents, some which bid fair to make dramatic waves. First of all, the country is getting more religiously diverse (like society as a whole). Believers are more accepting of outsiders, including non‐believers. From 1998 to 2006–7, the percentage of predominantly white congregations with at least some black members went from 27 to 36. For Hispanics, the percentage rose from 24 to 32 and for Asians from 17 to 20—the first of many slowly‐but‐surely trends that Chaves calls attention to. Protestants are on their way to being a religious minority for the first time in our history; and interdenominational marriages are increasing even faster than inter‐racial ones. Seventy‐five percent of all Americans now agree that religions other than their own also “offer a true path to God,” and people with no religion (though often they are not atheists) are the fastest growing individual group. Many others now describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” (from 11 to 18% among young people over the last 10 years measured), even if it is hard to say exactly what that means. Americans still believe in heaven (86%) and hell (73%) about as much as they did in the 1970s; but belief in the literal inerrancy of the Bible has taken a hit, presumably because of more college education. Believers still believe, but they are “less tolerant of intense religiosity of any sort” (the fundamentalist carryings‐on parodied in Bill Maher's Religulous?). Percentages of traditional faith are either steady or slightly declining, with the single exception of belief in life after death. (Most stunningly, the percentage of Jews who say they believe in the afterlife has soared over the 36‐year period from 20 to 63. Go figure.) Forty percent of Americans declare that they go to church services every week, but the real number is closer to 25, which is roughly where it is been for some time. Yet there is been a marked drop in involvement with other church activities (down about a third since the 1990s). More Protestant congregations are breaking free from their denomination (one of five churchgoers is now an “independent,” a spurt of over 25% in less than 10 years). Congregations are using the Internet a lot more; services are more informal and jazzed up, with drums, jumping and shouting, overhead projectors, raising of hands, applause, and cries of “Amen!”; congregants are older (aging more quickly than the population as a whole), richer, better educated, and attending ever‐larger churches (not just megachurches)—the latter a process known as “increasing concentration.” Along with the mounting suspicion of other professionals such as lawyers, politicians, business executives, and bankers, the perceived desirability of a clerical career has plummeted. From 1966 to 2008, the number of college freshmen headed to the ministry dropped from 10 to 4 per 1000. Interest has plunged most markedly among students who take (and do well on) the Graduate Record Examinations (GREs)—down to zero among winners of Rhodes scholarships—and the performance of seminarians on that test has slipped, although women consistently outscore their male counterparts. The clergy, especially Catholics and liberal Protestants, are also aging faster than the American population as a whole. Women are entering seminaries at a much higher rate; currently they make up around 31% of the whole (as compared with 5% in 1972), which...

Een vrijzinnige 'meneer'. <i>De Hervorming</i> als toonaangevend en representatief persorgaan van de modern-godsdienstige richting in Nederland (1873-1934)

De Hervorming , issued as a weekly between 1873 and 1926, and as a monthly from 1927 to 1934, was one of the most important religious magazines in the Netherlands. It wanted to promote the interests of so-called 'Protestant modernists' or 'liberal Protestants', whose community of faith was characterised by differences between members of the Dutch Reformed Church and members of other denominations, between church-goers and non-churchgoers, between 'monists' and 'dualists', between political liberals and socialists, and between laymen and 'religious professionals' such as theologians. This article investigates how the editors of De Hervorming dealt with the multiformity of Dutch liberal Protestantism, and how they attempted to do justice to all - often conflicting - opinions and convictions that existed among modernists, and to be opinion leaders themselves at the same time. A systematic and complete analysis of all sixty-two volumes of De Hervorming not only sheds light upon the thematic preoccupations of Dutch Protestant modernists, but also shows how the magazine's editors tried to create a strong sense of unity among liberal Protestants, without harming the varicoloured character of the modernist community.

The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen (review)

The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen (review)

Book Review: The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

Book Review: The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

Religion and Regional Culture: Embedding Religious Commitment within Place

Recently, there has been a call for social scientific studies of religion to start taking “place” seriously. This paper adds to this growing literature by embedding religious commitment within place. We propose that the tension religious groups experience with their surroundings partly depends on local contexts and that certain types of local contexts may generate more tension. These contexts include regions in which the nonreligiously affiliated constitute the majority of the population, such as the American Pacific Northwest (PNW) region. Analysis of qualitative data on evangelical and liberal Protestants from western Oregon and western Washington suggests that they are aware of and experience tension with the regional PNW culture, which shapes their religious experience.

The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. By MollyOshatz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 183. $49.95.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 39, Issue 2 p. 125-125 The Americas: USA Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. By Molly Oshatz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 183. $49.95. Jonathan Chism, Jonathan Chism Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Jonathan Chism, Jonathan Chism Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12042_6Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume39, Issue2June 2013Pages 125-125 RelatedInformation

“Ten Times the Size of Germany” and “As Real as Los Angeles”: American Christians Map Heaven

“Ten Times the Size of Germany” and “As Real as Los Angeles”: American Christians Map Heaven James T. Fisher (bio) Gary Scott Smith. Heaven in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 339 pp. Notes and Index. $29.95. In early childhood I was taught that heaven meant forever, but since eternity was a concept beyond human understanding, we could only dimly comprehend the meaning of time in paradise; it was akin to forever: plus. That was the good if mystifying news to the mind of a first grader at Pittsburgh’s Saints Simon & Jude School in autumn 1962. The bad news—especially to a severely hyperactive miscreant—was that the same post-temporal dynamic obtained in the precincts of Heaven’s infernal opposite number. Before reading Gary Scott Smith’s highly informative, prodigiously researched Heaven in the American Imagination, I assumed middle-aged and older evangelical Protestants were as likely as aging Catholics—or ex-Catholics—to remember a time when the prospect of eternal damnation remained an all-too live option. But according to Smith, no subsequent “group of believers stressed the horrors of hell” (p. 27) with an ardor to match that of the colonial-era Puritans. Enter the declension, quickly: as early as the mid-eighteenth century, hell “was no longer the source of terror it had been” (p.45); for no less an authority than Jonathan Edwards, fruitful contemplation on the fate of the eternally forsaken, far from terrifying the elect, should “excite them to joyful praises” of God’s grace and love (p. 44). With hell reduced to a relatively minor role in the drama of salvation by the early national period, evangelical American Christians speculated buoyantly over an ever more accessible, even assured, final destination, a celestial territory crafted, not surprisingly, in their own idealized image: “a majestic realm characterized by holiness, perfection, love, and phenomenal blessedness.” Since, as Smith notes, the Bible’s “few descriptions of heaven are vague and veiled” (p. 237), evangelicals limned expectations of paradise with an imaginative ardor—and certitude—rarely witnessed in more earthbound forms of theologizing. This lavishly speculative, rather brazenly self-assured tradition endured well into the late twentieth century. While theologians might debate over [End Page 298] whether heaven’s dimensions “covered ‘almost 65% of the continental U.S.’” or measured in at “ten times the size of Germany” (p.188), nearly all agreed they were talking about a place—in Billy Graham’s words—“as real as Los Angeles” (p. 163). In the absence of imagination-curbing scriptural counter-weights, well-furnished and companionable afterlife triggered no Christian schisms, heresy trials, or banishments. Smith argues that evangelicals’ views of heaven “were more widely embraced” (p. viii) nationally than those of liberal Protestants, though the boundaries he sets between these groups are exceptionally porous. Unitarian and Deist claims that “dogmas and creeds were unimportant and sometimes detrimental” gave no scandal to most nineteenth-century evangelicals when pondering humankind’s eternal destiny (p. 57). The Arminian “stress on man’s role in responding to God’s offer of salvation” represented common sense, not heresy, to Smith’s subjects: the inhabitant of heaven, promised Lyman Beecher in 1819, will find “his knowledge is growing, his mind is expanding, and his holiness and joy will increase forever” (p. 55). The Second Great Awakening’s brief re-flirtation with hell and “the purposes it served” (p. 69) only further highlighted, by contrast, “the progress in knowledge, love, and power and heavenly rewards” promised to those who simply made the right choices (p. 69). The mass migration of European Catholics to the U.S. fostered a vast devotional subculture far too enamored—for flintier Protestant tastes—of purgatory as a kind of disagreeable, uncomfortable anteroom to heaven. But when it came to paradise eternal, the most popular twentieth-century Catholic preachers and theologians spoke in the vernacular, and none more effectively than the international celebrity and star of the early television age, Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. Citizens of heaven, Sheen assured millions of viewers of all faiths at mid-century, will find “constant enjoyment without satiety,” “peace and quiet without idleness,” and perhaps, most glorious of all...

Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. By Molly Oshatz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. x + 184 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. By Molly Oshatz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. x + 184 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Liberalismo y ascetismo protestante en la construcción de la ciudadanía en la Argentina de principios del Siglo XX

This article is the result of research into the pedagogical and political discourse practices of liberal Protestantism in Argentina in the early 20th century. Through the source material, the monthly journal “LA REFORMA: Revista de Religión, Educación, Historia y Ciencias Sociales,” (The Reform: journal of Religion, Education, History and Social Sciences) run by William Case Morris, we attempt to approach the contents attributed to the moral education of this particular group, which had strong links to the powerful elites in the period of expansion and consolidation of the Argentinian educational system and its intrinsic links to the political conservatism of the oligarchic state. Even when it is possible to observe the political relationships the liberal Protestants established with the oligarchic sectors, we find that moral edification promoted by liberal protestants for the education of a citizen questioned and disputed the hegemony with a collective imagination of citizenship that was being consolidated by the 1930s, driven by nationalist and corporative liberalism with Hispanic roots linked to Catholic integralism. Following a Foucauldian perspective, we attempt to deal with the Protestant ethics present in the domination techniques exercised over others and

MOLLY OSHATZ. Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism.

Antebellum liberal Protestants faced two uncomfortable realities in their work to end human bondage. First, defenders of slaveholding made a formidable case for the practice using a literal, common sense reading of scripture. Second, immediatism was a new thing under the sun, making antislavery activists vulnerable to charges of moral innovation. In their efforts to overcome these obstacles, Molly Oshatz argues, antislavery clerics and theologians abandoned literalism and discovered the “essential insights” of liberal religion, that “morality progressed, truth emerged from the life of the community, and God spoke through human history rather than through unchanging moral codes” (p. 14). Significantly, Oshatz is most interested in moderate antislavery thinkers who attempted to balance their appreciation for scripture with their antislavery commitments, not in abolitionist radicals like William Lloyd Garrison who were willing to reject the authority of scripture altogether. Other scholars, most notably Mark Noll but including also E. Brooks Holifield, Eugene Genovese, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have already discussed in detail the new hermeneutics that moderate, white, northern Protestants deployed in their efforts to combat southern proslavery arguments. Oshatz's primary contribution, then, is not her discovery of a “theological crisis” related to slavery, but her elucidation of “the actual relationship of the slavery debates to the postbellum development of liberal Protestantism” (p. 10).