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A MAINLINE MOMENT: THE AMERICAN PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT REVISITED

Review products

Elesha J.Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
David A.Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)
Mark ThomasEdwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

DAVID SEHAT
DAVID SEHAT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Georgia State University E-mail: dsehat@gsu.edu
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Extract

William R. Hutchison had a complaint. Though he was a dean of American religious history and a gatekeeper of the field at Harvard, Hutchison could not shake the feeling that the discipline was going in the wrong direction. In 1989, when he wrote an introduction to his edited volume, Between the Times, his fellow religion scholars were busy examining trans-denominational movements like revivalism, smaller religious practices like voodoo in New York, and “dissenters and other outsiders” to the mainstream. But their efforts had ignored what Hutchison considered the most important subject of all, the Protestant denominations that had guided American life since the American Revolution.

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Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 735 - 747
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Hutchison, William R., ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989), viiiGoogle Scholar.

2 Schultz, Kevin M., Tri-faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York, 2011), 10Google Scholar.

3 Hutchison, Between the Times, ix.

4 Ibid., ix–xv.

5 Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Noll, Mark A., Hatch, Nathan O., and Marsden, George M., The Search for Christian America (Westchester, IL, 1983)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Joel A. and Shipps, Kenneth W., eds., Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America (Grand Rapids, MI, 1987)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989)Google Scholar.

6 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 229; Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Hutchison, William R., Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 Tweed, Thomas A., ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley, 1997), 12Google Scholar.

8 Schmidt, Leigh Eric and Promey, Sally M., eds., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington, 2012)Google Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality—From Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco, 2005)Google Scholar; Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar; Hedstrom, Matthew, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2013)Google Scholar; Brekus, Catherine A. and Gilpin, W. Clark, eds., American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity (Chapel Hill, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Schultz, Tri-faith America; Preston, Andrew, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Herzog, Jonathan P., The Spiritual–Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

10 Coffman, Elesha J., The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York, 2013), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hollinger, David A., After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013), 57Google Scholar; Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, 57.

12 Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, 12–32, 52, 59, 201.

13 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 82 (first quotation), 84 (fourth quotation), 85 (second quotation), 87 (third quotation).

14 Ibid., 119 (first quotation), 131 (second quotation).

15 Edwards, Mark Thomas, The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism (New York, 2012), 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, 114–16.

17 Ibid., 117–21.

18 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 211–23, 214.

19 Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left, 4 (fourth quotation), 51 (first quotation), 105 (second and third quotations).

20 Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, 145–81.

21 Ibid., 182–205, 213–16, quotation at 186.

22 Schultz, Tri-faith America; Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, 216 (first quotation), 223 (second and third quotations).

23 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 21 (first and second quotations), 27 (third quotation).

24 Ibid., 45.

25 Hollinger, David A., Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princton, NJ, 1996)Google Scholar.

26 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 192.

27 Ibid., 199 (second and third quotations), 208 (first quotation).