In August 1742, a little-known scene of the Great Awakening was unfolding in the Mahican villages that dotted the Housatonic Valley region of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. On August 10, the colorful Moravian leader, Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, arrived in the village of Shekomeko to check on the progress of the newly founded mission. Six months earlier, he had overseen the baptism of the first three villagers. Their baptized names—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—expressed the Moravians’ grand hopes that the men would be patriarchs to a new nation of believers. Zinzendorf was now in Shekomeko to witness as these three men assumed the Christian offices of elder, teacher, and exhorter. Twenty miles away and two days later, melancholic missionary David Brainerd preached the Presbyterian gospel of salvation in hopes of saving the residents of Pachgatgoch from Moravian heresy.

In the winter of 1905, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (L.D.S. or the “Mormons”) departed Utah on two, seemingly disparate, missions to the east coast. One contingent went to defend their church at Senate hearings in Washington, D.C.; the other, to Vermont to dedicate a monument to church founder Joseph Smith. These forays into national politics and religious memory re-fashioned Latter-day Saint identity, as well as public perception of Mormonism, for the remainder of the twentieth Century They also illuminate one of the quotidian mysteries of religion: how it adapts to the demands of time yet maintains its sense of mediating the eternal. It is axiomatic that religious communities are not exempt from the human condition; they must adapt to their temporal circumstances or die. What is not as often recognized is that churches bring a particular burden to this task because they offer their believers the hope of transcending time.

The impact of Horace Bushnell on American religion has been well documented, but the cultural significance of his life and thought has not been fully appreciated. A Congregationalist and pioneering ecumenist, Bushnell has been cast as the father of evangelical liberalism by theologians and religious historians. His numerous published sermons and treatises on child nurture, religious language, and the atonement were widely read during the nineteenth century and made him a celebrated and often controversial figure. Though vehemently opposed to Darwinian naturalism later in life, he nevertheless oversaw the collapse of Calvinist transcendence into the confines of historical and cultural development—which has been the definitive characteristic of liberal Protestant spirituality since the 1870s. Yet, during an age of social transformation, is Bushnell better understood as a laissez-faire liberal or an organicist social conservative? Better still, how might we characterize the relationship between his mediating theology and ambiguous social thought?