(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism . By Mark Thomas Edwards . New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2012. x + 298 pp. $90.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThe story is by now familiar: after dominating the American religious landscape, the hegemony of the mainline Protestant churches began to wane in the 1960s and then deteriorated rapidly in the decades that followed. Replacing them were conservative churches of what came to be called either the Christian Right or the Religious Right. The split in Protestantism that first surfaced between modernists and fundamentalists a century ago has now more or less played itself out. The modernists did not fare well.But reports of the death of the mainline are clearly exaggerated. At least, that seems to be the case in the historiography of American religion, which is witnessing a surge on works on white, liberal, modernist, ecumenical Protestants in the twentieth century. Even if the major liberal churches have never recovered their influence, the mainline has never been more interesting to historians.With The Right of the Protestant Left , Mark Thomas Edwards joins a growing list of scholarship on how liberal white Protestants helped shaped American politics and foreign relations in the first half of the twentieth century. His focus is on Christian realists, a diverse and disputatious group usually overshadowed by, and often even conflated with, the towering figure of Reinhold Niebuhr. Edwards does not want to add to the growing field of Niebuhr studies, though as he admits the great man is impossible to ignore. Instead, Edwards seeks to recapture the political ideology of those establishment clergy who led the Christian realist movement, and mainline Protestantism more broadly, from the 1930s to the 1950s. In doing so, he provides a highly original interpretation of twentieth-century religious history. Authoritative in tone and persuasive in its conclusions, The Right of the Protestant Left will be an important and influential book.Edwards's argument is nuanced and complex, but it can be essentially boiled down to three propositions: first, members of the old Protestant left marked a continuation of the Social Gospel movement into the 1930s and beyond, long past the point (c.1920) when most historians have declared its death; second, they sought world order, particularly after 1945, through a global ecumenism that would be led by American Protestants working with their government; and third, and most innovatively, they had much more in common with traditionalist conservatives than has been previously recognized. Motivating all three concerns was the emergence of industrial authoritarianism. Industrialization everywhere undermined the moral bases of society and, through its dehumanizing power structures and reliance on machines and bureaucracies, threatened to destroy the dignity of the individual. The subsequent rise of communism, fascism, and National Socialism imperiled not only democracy but Christianity itself by elevating the state above all else as an object of human veneration. …