Protestant Establishment Research Articles

When the Center Held: America's Protestant Establishment from the Gilded Age through the 1960s

When the Center Held: America's Protestant Establishment from the Gilded Age through the 1960s

The Legal Imagination and the Protestant (Dis) Establishment

The Legal Imagination and the Protestant (Dis) Establishment

The Protestant (Dis)Establishment: Its Overlooked Role in the Ongoing Battles Over Religious Liberty (A Prospectus)

The Protestant (Dis)Establishment: Its Overlooked Role in the Ongoing Battles Over Religious Liberty (A Prospectus)

„V otázce ‚fenoménu Hromádka‘ je třeba se rozhodnout“: Vztah Josefa Smolíka k J. L. Hromádkovi v soudobém evangelickém kontextu

Josef L. Hromádka represented for Josef Smolík from the beginning of his study of theology and his active engagement in the Evangelical Church of the Bohemian Brethren as pastor and teacher of practical theology a dominant figure for his theological orientation. His view on the Czech systematic theologian saw a development from a more critical view in the time after the Second World War to a strong appreciation in the 1970s and 1980s. This study examines the evolution of Smolík’s view on Hromádka in the context of the stages of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia and compares it to the views of his contemporaries in both the Protestant establishment as well as in dissident circles of the time.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Mobilizing the Spiritual Resources of the Nation: The 1918 United War Work Campaign

On September 3, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson released a letter praising organizations that had provided services for soldiers, including the Young Men's Christian Association, the National Catholic War Council, and the Jewish Welfare Board. Through the work of these groups, the president declared, “the moral and spiritual resources of the nation have been mobilized.” Wilson then asked that, instead of the individual fundraising drives they were planning, the groups instead have single drive during the week of November 11, 1918, what he called a “united war work campaign.”The United War Work Campaign provides a window into understanding how a more pluralistic United States emerged through a process that involved competition and sacrifice as well as cooperation. The YMCA leadership fought to have a separate campaign, but they were forced into accommodating the changing religious dynamics of the nation. The Catholic and Jewish groups confronted Protestant establishment assumptions as they offered their own takes on how to appeal to a diverse American public. All the religious groups found themselves in situations where they had to downplay their faith commitments to ensure the campaign's success, and this led to tensions within the organizations and struggles with their co-religionists. Overall, the United War Work revealed the challenges of church-state collaboration and the compromises that were necessary for the emergence of a tri-faith nation.

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Defending the Nation Under God: Global Catholicism, the Supreme Court, and the Secularist Specter (1946–1963)

ABSRACTThis essay relies on American and newly available Vatican archival sources to reconstruct the ins and outs of the U.S. Catholic Church's involvement in First Amendment litigation between the 1940s and the 1960s. These reveal how Catholic leaders, far from urging the demise of the de facto Protestant establishment, cooperated with Protestants to protect it from legal challenges. They did so not because gaining the acceptance of their non-Catholic neighbors was their paramount concern, nor because American Catholics were more “liberal” than their Roman counterparts. Rather, they saw the “Nation under God” as effectively addressing traditional Catholic critiques of the liberal principle of church-state separation—and therefore a project worthy of their commitment. Ironically, while pursuing goals fully compatible with Roman orthodoxy, they found themselves allied with evangelist Billy Graham and Gideons International long before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973).

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 Mark Thomas Edwards Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. (New York: New York University Press. 2021. pp. x, 279. $45.00. ISBN: 9781479803545.) Evangelicals and fundamentalists were once marginalized in the study of American religious history, but now they receive too much attention. Thankfully, a new generation of scholars is proving that we still have a lot to learn about liberal, mainline, and ecumenical Protestants. Elesha Coffman, K. Healan Gaston, Kevin Schultz, Gale Kenny, and Gene Zubovich, among others, are moving the field beyond the "history of theology"—with its attendant obsession with the Niebuhr brothers—and establishing broader connections to American public life and identity. Nicholas T. Pruitt's new book is a welcome addition to that endeavor. His subject is the ecumenical Protestant "pluralistic bargain" (3) that culminated in support for the liberalization of immigration law under the landmark Hart-Cellar Act (1965). Pruitt's subjects were cosmopolitan in the (David) Hollingerian sense of championing controlled ethnic, racial, and religious diversity within a framework of continuing white Protestant supremacy. As Pruitt aptly puts it, "the pluralistic bargain amounted to an attempt by Protestant churches to incorporate progressive mores of toleration while bracing themselves against modern [End Page 633] cultural forces that threatened to decenter Protestant Christianity within American society" (7). Open Hearts, Closed Doors is an institutional history of Protestant home missions that highlights the social gospel's paradoxical inclusive-exclusive nature. Following the establishment of immigrant quota systems between 1917–1924, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pursued kinder, gentler forms of "Christian Americanization" (43)—like community centers, immigrant schools on Ellis Island, and the Bureau of Reference for Migrating Peoples—as alternatives to the violent nativism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Ecumenical Protestants advocated toleration for Japanese immigrants but did not begin challenging immigration restriction laws until during and after World War II. In the name of wartime "Christian brotherhood" (92), the FCC and SBC expanded refugee relief, aided the resettlement of interned Japanese Americans, and lobbied for increased immigration from Asia. Pruitt finds that "tri-faith" Christian Americanism still aimed to keep the country white and Protestant even while becoming more accepting of diversities of culture and language. Perhaps the most important Cold War liberal project ecumenical Protestants undertook was applying steady pressure on Washington for a more open immigration policy, including the passage of Hart-Cellar. The costs for doing so were both immediate and long-term: Ecumenical Protestants found themselves repeated targets of Red Scare churches and politicians, while the eventual consequence of their activism was the undermining of any white Protestant establishment. Pruitt concludes his study with a brief discussion of how evangelicals have taken up ecumenical Protestants' "pluralistic bargain" in the twenty-first century. He might have used that space to relay how ecumenical churches today have repented of Protestant exceptionalism and embraced a thoroughgoing cultural and religious pluralism centered around supporting immigrants—as Grace Yukich explored in One Family Under God (2013). But that is a minor point of disagreement. Pruitt has masterfully documented and detailed an unexplored dimension of Protestant social Christianity in action, including its direct and lasting impact on American life and politics. His book deserves a wide audience. [End Page 634] Mark Thomas Edwards Spring Arbor University Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press

American Crusades: The Rise and Fulfillment of the Protestant Establishment. By Jon P. DePriest. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2019. xxv + 347 pp. $120.00 cloth.

American Crusades: The Rise and Fulfillment of the Protestant Establishment. By Jon P. DePriest. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2019. xxv + 347 pp. $120.00 cloth.

‘from education, from duty, and from principle’: Irish Catholic loyalty in context, 1829-1874

The passage of the Emancipation Act in 1829 presented an opportunity for Catholics to reimagine their loyalty as equal subjects for the first time under the union between Great Britain and Ireland. This article explores the way Catholic loyalty was conceived in the decades that followed the act of 1829 through to the mid 1870s, when there was renewed focus on the civil allegiance of Catholics following the declaration of Papal infallibility. Historians are increasingly exploring a range of social, political and religious identities in nineteenth century Ireland, beyond the rigid binary paradigm of Catholic nationalisms and Protestant loyalisms that has dominated Irish historiography. However, Catholic loyalty in particular remains an anachronism and lacks sufficient conceptual clarity. Our understanding of a specifically Catholic variant of loyalty and its public and associational expression, beyond a number of biographical studies of relatively unique individuals, remains limited. By providing an exposition of episodes in the history of Catholic loyalty in the early and mid-Victorian years this article illuminates the phenomenon. It demonstrates that Irish Catholic loyalty took on different expressive forms, which were dependent on the individuals proclaiming their loyalty, their relationship to the objects of their loyalty, and its reception by the British state and Protestant establishment.

United Service in Divisive Times: The Pittsburgh Council of Churches, 1916–1929

ABSTRACT Despite the disruption of the Great Steel Strike of 1919 and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s, the Pittsburgh Council of Churches managed to hold together a fragile coalition for the cause of social betterment in the Steel City. Their noteworthy service record reveals a Protestant establishment eager to appear strong in the face of mounting criticism of indifference as well as a sincere desire to do good.

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George M. Marsden (review)

Reviewed by: The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George M. Marsden Leo P. Ribuffo The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief. By George M. Marsden. (New York: Basic Books. 2014. Pp. xl, 219. $26.99. ISBN 978-0-465-03010-1.) For two decades George M. Marsden, a leading historian of American religion, has argued that evangelical scholars like himself—along with other theists—receive insufficient respect from secular colleagues. In this book focusing on intellectual life since World War II, he attempts to explain the origins of this alleged inequity. Marsden emphasizes what is usually called the fifties, which he rightly sees as a time of “great cultural anxiety and uncertainty” (p. xii) despite unprecedented (although unevenly distributed) prosperity. His central theme is that leading cultural critics were trying to “preserve the ideals of the American enlightenment while discarding its foundations” (p. xv). As events since the early chronological sixties showed, this effort failed. To make his case, Marsden’s strings together brief examinations of significant social thinkers, cultural artifacts, and popular controversies. Perhaps because Marsden wants to reach the proverbial intelligent general reader, most of his stories will be familiar to historians. These include the post-Sputnik quest for a “national purpose”; pervasive use of psychological rather than economic concepts to explain the ups and down of everyday life; triumph of the “vital center” in the social sciences along with inadequate efforts by self-conscious centrists like Daniel Bell to understand immoderate activists like Senator Joseph McCarthy (R–WI); ubiquitous critics of conformity ranging from William H. Whyte to Betty Friedan; debate about the impact of “mass culture” escalated because ordinary Americans loved television; and religious developments, including [End Page 960] ritualistic public piety based on an “undefined common theism” (p. 108); a transition from fundamentalism to evangelicalism, the latest vogue of positive thinking; the ironies of Reinhold Niebuhr; and Martin Luther King Jr.’s adaptation of the social gospel. The treatment of rival psychological theorists Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner is especially interesting. Marsden also deserves credit for rediscovering the insightful critic Joseph Wood Krutch. His worst lapses are an underestimation of religious conflict and inattention to the frequently hyped intellectual “new conservatism.” Marsden’s reminders of failed predictions—notably the health benefits of smoking and safe nuclear energy too cheap to meter—are the most fun. The book becomes both more tendentious and more formulaic when Marsden reaches the alleged twilight of common premises. He has always sensibly seen an intersection in American history between religious faith with its emphasis on God’s grace and an Enlightenment commitment to science broadly construed. Both sides believed in the possibility of discovering some absolute truth. Since the 1960s, this shared if tenuous “absolute”—previously threatened by Deweyite pragmatists, historicists, and existentialists—has been rejected far and wide. To make this point, Marsden alludes to Thomas Kuhn, postmodernism, and so-called culture wars but devotes most space to the fall of the de facto Protestant establishment and compensatory rise of a “populist” Christian right with intellectual standards inferior to Enlightenment-tinged evangelicalism. Despite the recent resurgence of “seculars” reported in numerous polls, it remains to be seen whether or not these trends represent a watershed or just another cataract in the river of American religion. Marsden cannot make up his mind. He concedes that a “sizable minority” of Americans remains “seriously religious” (p. 158). Anyone with an interest in public life, a television, and a willingness to delete the adverb seriously would write “sizable majority.” Yet, as has been the case for twenty years, Marsden’s main complaint is that Enlightenment-tinged evangelical scholars like himself should not be second-class citizens in the academy. The real issues are metaphysical or epistemological rather than sociological. These cannot be addressed let alone resolved in a brief review. Suffice it to say that all scholars should consider interesting ideas from anyone regardless of his or her foundational beliefs (or lack thereof). Leo P. Ribuffo George Washington University Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

The outsider: Albert M. Greenfield and the fall of the Protestant establishment

The outsider: Albert M. Greenfield and the fall of the Protestant establishment

A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law. By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's A Ministry of Presence is a dazzling, meticulous study of the interdependence of law and religion. Sullivan contends that shifts in legal interpretation of the religion clauses of the constitution and in religious life are yielding a new form of religious establishment in the United States. In contrast to the previous de facto Protestant establishment, when jurists urged broad separation of church and state, the courts now expect government institutions to promote religion as a nondivisive, universal aspect of human being. With less judicial intervention, religion is regulated more by administrative decisions—through politics and public–private partnerships. “Religion is being neutralized and naturalized—de-constitutionalized, formally” (201). Sullivan brilliantly illustrates this re-configured interdependence of law and religion by analyzing the regulation of chaplains in secular institutions. What sets this book apart from others about chaplaincy is Sullivan's method. She constructs an inductive “legal anthropology of religion” from court documents, statements from institutions and advocacy groups, and allied literature about chaplaincies (15). This is a distinctive, well focused, and integrative choice that enables Sullivan to explore religion in the chaplaincies from several directions, without weakening the book's coherence. The conceptual center of her analyses is a regulatory scheme that she calls, “spiritual governance” (17) (akin to “Foucauldian pastoral care,” but lacking Europe's “church-and-statism”). What American “governance through spiritual care” entails for Sullivan grows clearer at each turn of her argument, which uncoils in five, long, and intellectually sinuous chapters. These chapters treat, respectively, a fundamental concept, actor, credentialing process, nexus of litigation, and central practice in Sullivan's story about chaplains and the new establishment.

THE RECOVERY OF AMERICAN LIBERAL RELIGION

For the past three decades, conservative Christian Americans have enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention. Historians have produced rich accounts of the evangelical conquest of early America, the twentieth-century rise of the Christian Right, and the advent of the culture wars. They have gleefully overturned the consensus historians’ confidence in America's unifying liberal impulse. They have refuted the prophets of secularization who once foretold the demise of organized religion. In the process, they all but abandoned the archives of mainline denominations—where generations of their colleagues once toiled in order to trace the histories of the mainline Protestant establishment—for the missions, ministries, and megachurches of ascendant evangelicals. The study of liberal religion has come to seem like the brittle great-aunt of American religious historiography, wheezing at the margins as her younger and more boisterous relations take center stage. She is still alive, barely—but some whisper that in her old age she has become rather boring.

The Bible as Literature? — Note on a Litigious Ferment of the Concept

The Bible has been considered one of the Great Books of Western Literature, and “the Bible as Literature” is regularly found in the curriculum of English departments in American colleges and universities. An underlying assumption is that the Bible possesses great literary value and cultural assets, and therefore its general educational employment within public institutions, as opposed to its religious or liturgical use, causes no offense to anyone's freedom of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Confidence in this idea, however, set in only after a long series of litigation and legislation. This essay recounts a lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century (Donahoe v. Richards) wherein the traditional practice of reading from the Bible in common schools was challenged and, perhaps for the first time, the idea of the Bible as literature was publicly articulated. At that time, the Bible — specifically, the King James Version (1611) favored by the majority Protestants, styled the “Common English Bible” — had been regularly used in the quotidian practice of piety, including in schools, as this practice was considered essential for the welfare of both the individual and the commonwealth. At the backdrop of the lawsuit was the emergence of the public school system and also a surge in the Catholic immigrant population, which began to challenge the de facto Protestant establishment of many American communities. The essay suggests that the hyperbolic estimation of the literary excellence of the King James Version, often voiced to this day, may be a reaction-formation, a symptom of the deeply troubling legacy of bitter quarrels yet unresolved.

Staging "a Queene opprest": William Habington's Exploration of the Politics of Queenship on the Caroline Stage

This essay deepens our growing understanding of Caroline theatre as a vibrant space that boldly engaged with contemporary issues. As England lurched toward civil war, there was growing unease within the Protestant establishment at the apparent success of Queen Henrietta Maria's Counter-Reformation ambitions. During this period, competing ideals of queenly conduct were performed on both the elite and commercial stages. William Habington's The Queen of Aragon (licensed and published in 1640) exposed the dilemma of a virtuous queen chastised by her people for seeking foreign support to quell insurrection. Notably, Henrietta Maria was criticized in precisely these terms during the Scottish crisis of 1638-40. Habington, a respected figure in the recusant community who enjoyed the patronage of both Henrietta Maria and the godly Earl of Pembroke, offered a surprising alternative to such political isolation. Through a brilliant revision of fashionable Neoplatonic drama, he successfully transformed the troubling image of "a Queene opprest" into a paradigm of queenly enlightenment.

Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left by Jill K. Gill (review)

Reviewed by: Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left by Jill K. Gill David E. Settje Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left. By Jill K. Gill. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 551. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-87580-443-9.) Jill K. Gill offers an exhaustively researched, well written, and important study about the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the fate of the ecumenical [End Page 396] movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on its reaction to the war in Vietnam, Gill provides sharp analysis into the NCC’s antiwar platform and how this and other theological stances led to a divide between the laity and leadership, as well as a diminishing of Protestant hegemony in America. Gill uses vivid and detailed language to illuminate this history. Much as a novelist brings characters to life in the reader’s mind, Gill allows one to see the history through her careful telling of the story. Long and dense with examples, Gill’s study rightfully places the NCC and ecumenism at the heart of post–1945 U.S. religious history. Gill begins with a broad survey of ecumenism from 1908 to 1963, including the 1950 creation of the National Council of Churches. This background roots her study in the theological framework of ecumenical outreach and activism that defined the NCC throughout its first three decades. Gill’s solid grasp of the theology behind the organization and its leaders reveals the fact that their faith drove their actions. She especially highlights their struggle against the erroneous assumption that ecumenism meant a gathering of two or more people from different denominations. As Gill describes: [ecumenism] emphasizes community over self-interest, peaceful discussion over violence, collaboration over competition, universalism over exclusivity, the prophetic role of the church to “speak truth to power” over affirming an oppressive status quo, benevolence over individual acquisition, preaching social justice over mere personal piety, and the separation of church and state. (p. 5) This complex theology laid the groundwork for the NCC’s antiwar initiatives during the American phase of the Vietnam War. Robert S. Bilheimer, the NCC’s director of the Peace Program and International Affairs Commission, stated that he was not really “an anti-Vietnam War guy” (p. 145) but rather expressed his ecumenical witness through an antiwar theology. Gill thus uses the Vietnam War as a way to concentrate on the NCC’s calling during this era. Through its vast network of national and international politicians and religious leaders, the NCC often gained firsthand government knowledge about or eyewitness accounts of the atrocities committed in Vietnam and the wayward turn of U.S. foreign policy as applied to this war. Such insider information spurred the NCC’s stance, which pushed it theologically to oppose the war by attempting to unite Christians across the country to join its prophetic witness. Yet this goal of unification brought about division within the very denominations that participated in the NCC, as Gill delineates in the NCC’s tension with the lay/clergy divide. Denominational leaders voiced concern that their more conservative constituents criticized the NCC’s liberal platforms. The threat of lost revenue kept even these more liberal leaders from always acting as the NCC hoped. Gill poignantly explains that this led to a diminished influence [End Page 397] for the NCC in national affairs by the 1970s, along with Richard M. Nixon’s courting of the evangelical vote and subsequent shunning of mainline Protestantism because it failed to support him. Gill concludes with an insightful epilogue that summarizes her findings, interprets their meaning, and offers ideas for future ecumenism and theologians. Yet calling it an epilogue seems odd, given that it serves more as a conclusion that readers will not want to miss. The treatment of these vital thoughts as almost an afterthought or optional reading feels awkward. Nonetheless, Gill provides a new must-read to post–1945 American religious history that details the triumphs, frustrations, decline, and yet importance of the mainline, liberal, Protestant establishment in the 1960s and 1970s. David E. Settje...

Waiting for Gospel: An Appeal to the Dispirited Remnants of the Protestant Establishment. By Douglas JohnHall. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Pp. xxix + 195. $25.00.

Waiting for Gospel: An Appeal to the Dispirited Remnants of the Protestant Establishment. By Douglas JohnHall. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Pp. xxix + 195. $25.00.