Between 1875 and 1896, the response of American Catholic thinkers to theories of organic evolution was characterized by little rancor and discord. Among the small number of clergy and lay intellectuals who addressed the subject, there existed a wide variety of positions on the scientific plausibility of such theories. These prominent Catholics were not deeply wedded to their views, however, and few saw any significant conflict between their religious commitments and biological evolution. This state of affairs stemmed from several elements of Catholic thought, particularly as it existed in the late-nineteenth-century United States: the conviction that church authority could mediate any apparent tension between science and Scripture; the affirmation that theories of organic evolution would not undermine existing theological tenets about the relationship between religion and science, as well as that between First Cause and secondary causes in nature; the belief that Catholic intellectuals since the time of Augustine had endorsed a system of natural development that closely resembled modern conceptions of evolution; and, most important, the insistence that the theory could be reconciled with the resurgent neo-Scholasticism that had come to dominate Catholic thought. Organic evolution proved far less significant in discussions of the relationship between religion and science among American Catholics than it did among Protestants, and it did little to contribute to the split of Catholics into liberal and conservative groups.

Radio drama gave Americans a new form of commercial entertainment in the 1930s, but the stories themselves contained time-honored elements. One of these was the rhetorical tradition scholars have identified as American civil religion. Radio Westerns were particularly well suited to promulgate familiar civil religion themes. They described the United States as an instrument of divine will in history, celebrated Americans as pious people, and associated national expansion with the implementation of God's will.

The Lone Ranger was the most famous Western to articulate these themes. The show's writers consciously sought to create in their hero a “composite of all men who uphold the laws of God and man.” During its long broadcast history from 1933 to 1954, the show attracted a large audience and inspired publishing, film, and television ventures. By the late 1940s, however, owing in part to World War II and in part to the Cold War, some Americans on both sides of the microphone found the old formula unsatisfactory.

Gunsmoke, which premiered in 1951, exemplified a second generation of radio Westerns. Though still civil religious, these Westerns located the United States' religious significance less in national triumph than in personal triumphs of its citizens. In doing so, they critiqued the earlier Westerns and shifted from what Martin E. Marty has called the “priestly” to the “prophetic” form of civil religion. Their impatience with the older Westerns' use of civil religion also paralleled theological critiques of the popular Christianity of the 1950s.

The transformation of Mormonism from a small, persecuted sect into an established, global faith has attracted scholarly attention for decades. By all accounts, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were critical for the church's evolution and modernization. The rapidity of the change, however, leaves nagging questions. After years of costly, principled resistance, how could Mormons, with any semblance of dignity and self-respect, suddenly embrace the institutions and values of their tormentors? How did members of the nineteenth century's “most despised large group” become so loyal to the United States in the twentieth?

This essay explores the unique, crucial role that American universities played in fostering Mormon-Gentile reconciliation. Right when the animosities were at fever pitch—in the decades between the death of Brigham Young (1877) and Utah's admission into the Union as the forty-fifth state (1896)—the American university became a liminal, quasi-sacred space where Mormons experienced a radical transformation of consciousness and identity. In the process, they developed an enduring devotion to non-Mormon institutions and deference to non-Mormon expertise. These extra-ecclesial loyalties would dismantle the ideological framework of Mormon separatism and pave the way for Mormons' voluntary reimmersion into the mainstream of American life.

The Christian Century is generally regarded as the most influential Protestant magazine of the early twentieth century. But what does it mean to call the Century influential? Whom did it influence, and how? This article takes a historical approach, examining the size of the Century's audience, the nature of the magazine's impact on its readers, and the ability of those readers to extend the magazine's impact beyond themselves. The main source for this investigation is a cache of more than 2,100 unpublished letters collected in 1928 to celebrate Charles Clayton Morrison's twentieth anniversary as editor. In subscribers' own words, the letters illustrated the Century's role as a crucial link among readers with similar backgrounds and aspirations, as well as the limits of its reach beyond this cohort. The article argues that the Century was influential, but not because it converted (directly or through its clergy readers) large numbers of American Protestants to its progressive vision for Christianity. Rather, the Century was primarily influential in the process of mainline identification, both in the sense of defining which writers, institutions, and ideas belonged to the emerging mainline tradition and in the sense of offering readers an opportunity to identify with that tradition. A better understanding of the Century's influence during the Morrison era sheds light on the rise of the mainline. Additionally, a better understanding of the kinds of influence magazines do and do not exercise is helpful for anyone who looks to periodicals to provide a barometer of cultural trends.

In Roman Catholic theology, saints are intermediaries between heaven and earth. In American Catholic practice, saints could also serve as intermediaries between two cultures—the minority religious community and the larger Protestant one. This article focuses on two female saints who became popular among American Catholics in the early twentieth century in part because American Catholics believed that devotion to them would help to undermine negative images of Catholicism in American culture. Presenting St. Bridget of Ireland as an antidote to popular stereotypes of Bridget the Irish serving girl, Irish-American Catholics argued that the former's beauty and wisdom provided a more authentic rendering of Catholic womanhood than the ignorance and coarseness of the latter. Seton's devotees, meanwhile, highlighted her status as a descendant of the American Protestant elite, offering her as model of Catholicism that was socially, racially, and culturally distant from that presented by recent Catholic immigrants. Taken together, the revival of Bridget and the quest to canonize Seton show how U.S. Catholics looked to the saints not only as models of holiness but also as agents of Americanization. It may seem counterintuitive that Catholics would choose to mediate their Americanness through saintly devotion, the very religious practice that appeared most alien to Protestant observers. There is, however, no question that hagiography took on a decidedly American dimension in the early twentieth century as U.S. Catholics repackaged European saints for a U.S. audience and petitioned for the canonization of one of their own.

Concern for the plight of Soviet Jewry grew steadily from the early 1950s. The rise of this issue to the forefront of American Jewish consciousness, however, was driven by the broader protest movement that emerged in the mid-1960s. Its central goal was to ensure civic and religious rights for Jewish residents of the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis on the ability to emigrate. The movement's peak impact was in the 1970s. This decade witnessed the proliferation of grassroots organizations throughout the United States, along with the adoption of a more activist orientation by large segments of the American Jewish establishment.

To date, minimal attention has been paid to the place of the Soviet Jewry movement in the religious history of American Judaism. The article's investigation of American Orthodoxy's role is intended to confront this lacuna and describes the central role played by Orthodox Jews in the rise and development of the Soviet Jewry movement. Through their actions, the members of this segment of American Jewry experienced a role reversal in which they helped to redefine the nature of the Jewish relationship to the public sphere. Simultaneously, such activism sharpened the internal divide between Modern Orthodoxy and its traditionalist counterparts who opposed demonstrations, encouraged quiet diplomacy, and were loathe to work in unison with the broader Jewish community. Through their involvement in a core Jewish activity that entailed partnership with non-Orthodox Jews in efforts for their common brethren, a generation of Modern Orthodox leaders arose that made Jewish solidarity a central expression of their Orthodox religious identities.

This article analyzes the broadcast activities of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club (CSEC), a mainline Protestant organization founded in 1908 and still active today. The CSEC began broadcasting its weekly meetings on the radio in 1922 and on television in 1956. Drawing on archival organizational records from the CSEC and from listener correspondence, this essay traces how the club's use of the new media of particular historical moments shaped its history as a public entity.

This study makes two claims. First, it argues that, though evangelicals and fundamentalists took to radio and television broadcasting with greater vigor, mainline Protestant groups did as well, and the persistence of a group like the CSEC offers a way to understand the challenges that broadcasting presented to religious organizations. Second, this article shows how audience expectations for religious programming evolved from radio to television. For many listeners, radio offered what they told the CSEC was a spiritual and even miraculous experience, and they marveled at being able to tune in to religious services from their homes. Television, however, prompted remarks often focused on visual style, and the club found itself struggling to compete with the newly emerging group of religious television programs not only on denominational terms (many were evangelicals and fundamentalists) but also on aesthetic terms. In contrast to radio, as many viewers wrote to the CSEC, television seemed to provide not a singular “experience” but rather spectatorial access to events taking place elsewhere. In the context of competition from the more telegenic programming of evangelicals and fundamentalists, these shifting audience expectations shaped both the history of the CSEC as a public entity and the broader history of mainline Protestantism in the mass media.