II. How did you come to Study Liberal Protestantism?

Elesha Coffman: Having been a magazine editor before grad school, I wanted to write my dissertation on a magazine, and I did not want to choose an evangelical magazine, because that was the world I knew as an insider. The Christian Century came up a lot in seminar readings, so I went with that one.

Of course, the choice wasn’t quite that serendipitous. My graduate mentor at Duke, Grant Wacker, had studied with William Hutchison at Harvard. Among Hutchison’s publications was the 1989 edited collection Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960. Footnote ¹ He noted in the preface to that volume, “In recent years, especially, historians have paid far more attention to dissenters and other outsiders than to the more massive mainline religion they rejected” (viii), and that statement was even more true when I started PhD work in 2002 than it had been in 1989. I did not know anyone else writing on liberal Protestants then. All the energy seemed to be around evangelicals, Pentecostals, New Religious Movements, and edgy Catholic history. But I found a lot of Hutchison’s questions really intriguing – not specifically about liberal Protestantism, but about cultural influence, with liberal Protestants being a kind of test case for what it means for a religious institution, or leader, or magazine, to have influence in a place as big, diverse, and contested as the United States. Because I was interested in cultural influence in the twentieth century, I ended up writing about liberal Protestants.Footnote ²

Janine Giordano Drake: I found liberal Protestants entirely by accident. I was taking a graduate seminar in Labor and Working-Class History and became interested in the role of religion in class formation. Both E.P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, titans of the previous generation of labor history, wrote extensively about how religious “consciousness” both cemented and fractured identities built around class. I was particularly drawn to Paul Johnson’s Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978), which illustrated the way regular church participation distanced workers from class consciousness in antebellum Rochester. I wanted to ask similar questions about the role of religion in class formation during the 1910s. I encountered the Rev. Charles Stelzle, a German machinist and trade union member who left the shop floor to become a Presbyterian minister around 1900. Stelzle opened “extension” churches for working people in St. Louis and New York, set up a “Department of Labor” within the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, and called himself an “apostle to labor.” He regularly told wage earners that Jesus would have supported trade unions while rejecting socialism. He also warned fellow clergy that “either the church will capture the labor movement, or the labor movement will capture the church.” I wondered, was Stelzle trying to use church affiliation to disabuse workers of other forms of working-class consciousness? Why did he think “labor” was so important to the Presbyterian church, and why did he spend so much time building ecumenical alliances with Episcopal, Methodist, and Baptist ministers similarly interested in making connections with “wage earners”?Footnote ³ It honestly took me many years to realize that this ecumenical alliance I ended up studying – the Federal Council of Churches – was the foundation of “liberal” Protestantism in the United States.Footnote ⁴ The Federal Council spent its first ten years sponsoring evangelistic campaigns on shop floors and in mining communities! For several years, I was calling these Social Gospel leaders “evangelicals.”

Mark Edwards: I was working on an Honors Thesis on evangelist Francis Schaeffer when my advisor said, “you should really read some Reinhold Niebuhr.” I grew up Fundamentalist and had never heard that name before. So I started reading Niebuhr and his brother H. Richard. In contemplating grad school, I thought I would focus on the Niebuhrs and Paul Tillich. I also thought that everything that needed to be said about evangelicals like Schaeffer had already been said (mind you, this was 1995). I was wrong about evangelicals but right about liberal Protestants – there was and still is a lot to be said about the people that Martin Marty, William Hutchison, Sydney Ahlstrom, and Gary Dorrien have written about. I ended up writing a group biography of Christian Realism, similar to Heather Warren’s Theologians of a New World Order (1997), the inextricably titled The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (2012).Footnote ⁵ It’s a good example of white Protestant male-centric history of theology that recovered some forgotten Christian influencers. I would still say that if you want to understand liberal Protestant theology and theological education in the mid-twentieth century, you need to look at John Bennett, Henry Van Dusen, and Walter Horton, not only the Niebuhrs and Tillich. In retrospect, my book exemplified the kinds of conceptual limitations that the scholars gathered here have been exposing and transcending. My present work is trying to keep pace and conversation with them.

Gale Kenny: I initially went to graduate school with a plan to study antebellum evangelicalism, slavery, and race in the American South. After a few seminars, I ended up becoming more interested in religion, race, and the abolitionist movement, a turn shaped in part by the glut of scholarship on evangelicals that others here have mentioned, but also because of current events. In Fall 2004, just months after the United States had invaded Iraq, I took a graduate seminar with Ussama Makdisi called “Civilizing Missions” that offered a timely critique of the emancipatory discourses of both liberalism and Protestant Christianity in relation to imperialism. Reading work by postcolonial studies scholars examining the limits and exclusions of liberalism in colonial contexts provided a new framework for how I was thinking about white evangelical abolitionists.Footnote ⁶ It is also why I took what I thought would be a quick look at some microfilm reels of letters from the American Missionary Association’s Jamaica Mission that ended up becoming the subject of my dissertation and first book.Footnote ⁷ As I began to think about a second book project, I was interested in what I saw as the continuities between these earlier abolitionists and the Christian feminism of the later white women’s missionary movement. Whether or not we consider antebellum evangelical abolitionists “liberal Protestants,” I could not help but notice how their theological linkage between spiritual and political freedom informed the “woman’s work for woman” ethos of later missionary women who advocated for women’s emancipation from so-called “ethnic religions.” Earlier women’s historians had tracked this, but that scholarship was not often integrated into more recent histories of liberal church institutions.Footnote ⁸ As I tracked how these missionary women became churchwomen in the interwar and postwar years, I’ve sought to highlight the missionary inheritances and Christian imperial feminism that liberal Protestant women brought to Protestant institutions and their local churches and communities.

Gene Zubovich: Like Janine, I never expected to become a historian of American religion, much less liberal Protestantism. I wrote my first book, Before the Religious Right, because I recognized the centrality of liberal, ecumenical Protestants to both US and world history.Footnote ⁹ As I researched how Americans reimagined their place in the world during the mid-twentieth century, liberal Protestants kept showing up. Liberal Protestants were in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, helping create the United Nations. They were in Paris a few years later, drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were cooperating with labor leaders and NAACP officials, helping write social security legislation and filing lawsuits against segregation. In other words, whenever I investigated places of power and authority in the twentieth century, I found liberal Protestants. I came to three big conclusions about the place of liberal Protestants – whom I call ecumenical Protestants – in US history. First, Protestant liberalism was a pillar of mid-twentieth-century political liberalism. Second, international engagement was central to both liberal Protestantism and political liberalism at mid-century – something books by Mark and Gale also show.Footnote ¹⁰ Lastly, in the political activism of ecumenical Protestants, we can see the origins of our present-day political polarization. For these reasons, if you want to understand today’s political and cultural landscape, you need to look to the history of liberal Protestantism.

III. How do you Define Liberal Protestantism?

Mark: The short answer might be, “What Gary Dorrien writes about.” And Dorrien (as well as Hutchison) is a great place to start for an understanding of the history of liberal Protestant theology.Footnote ¹¹ But here we confront one of the main concerns of this roundtable: Should “liberal religion” or “liberal Protestantism” be understood only or primarily in theological terms? It might be possible to state a liberal Protestant “quadrilateral” – an understanding of the Bible as a human record of divine encounters; an evolutionary rendering of nature, religion, and humanity; a comparative, synthetic world religions perspective; and a stress on God’s immanence over transcendence. In my current project, I see liberal Protestantism starting in America with the migration of British Unitarianism to New England, which in turn only succeeded by winning over those pastors and theologians upset with revivalist Calvinism. But, seriously, who cares? Do theological ideas make a difference in history, or are they just a cover for some sorts of personal and group interests?

What if we subject the history of theology to other historiographical frames, such as many scholars have done with evangelicalism, or as Janine has done in rethinking the Social Gospel through the lens of labor history? My own question of late has been: To what extent have liberal Protestants been politically liberal? My answer is: not much, but everything hangs on what we mean by liberal. If the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedoms and separation of church and state are examples of “liberalism” in the Lockean tradition of religious toleration, Baptists and Methodists were more liberal than Unitarians, who (as the late Daniel Walker Howe noted) opposed Locke and favored Edmund Burke and religious establishments. One of the most influential liberal Protestant voices of the nineteenth century, Horace Bushnell, blamed the Civil War on Jeffersonian individualism (even though he frequently voted Democrat).

Gene: American “liberal Protestantism” is hard to pin down because the term “liberal” evokes both theological liberalism and political liberalism. Many scholars have turned to “ecumenical Protestantism” to avoid conflating theology and politics, and to signal that ecumenism, the breaking down of boundaries between denominations, has a lot of explanatory power for the trajectory of Protestantism since the late nineteenth century. I’m less dismissive than Mark of theology’s role in the formation of the ecumenical Protestant movement. Higher Criticism, a European import, profoundly shaped boundaries within American Protestantism. The Protestant variety of Personalism, which Dorrien writes about, provided the language and theological underpinning of how ecumenical Protestants understood human rights.Footnote ¹² The theology of ecumenism itself was part of the liberal theological tradition, albeit one that was preceded by decades of ecumenical practice before it was recognized by theologians. In fact, theologians were often late to the party and debated questions far removed from the concerns of denominational heads and missionary executives, let alone everyday churchgoers. I’m also sympathetic to arguments that political liberalism shaped ecumenical Protestantism, particularly through the disestablishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. David Hollinger makes a broader version of this argument: a fundamental characteristic of liberal Protestantism is its accommodation with the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹³

What I would add to these observations is that the American part of American liberal Protestants mattered. How Protestants responded to the historical transformations of the market revolution, slavery and emancipation, industrialization and the labor movement, and the ascendancy of American power in the world profoundly shaped liberal Protestantism.Footnote ¹⁴ In the same way that scholars now rarely define evangelicalism solely by its theology, so too should scholars of liberal Protestantism take a wider view of the ways this community formed its identity, justified its authority, and policed its boundaries. For much of the twentieth century, institutions, politics, and international engagement were fundamental. In particular, the confluence of the Social Gospel and Wilsonian internationalism had tremendous sway over the liberal Protestant community.

Gale: As both Mark and Gene noted, it is important to define the term liberalism in context rather than as a transhistorical term. After all, a Unitarian theologian in late eighteenth-century Boston would have articulated his liberalism, and his difference from other Protestants, in a completely different religious, political, and cultural climate than that of a Unitarian in 1880 or 1950 or 2026. Perhaps because of the term’s slipperiness, I’ve shied away from it, although I do use it as a shorthand, as it is the easiest way to explain the twentieth-century churchwomen that I write about to nonspecialists. Like the much-dissected term “evangelicalism,” “liberal Protestantism” still offers a legible if simplistic way to map the landscape of American Protestantism, even if historians of religion spend our time parsing these terms!

To this end, I sought out other ways to distinguish the missionary women and churchwomen who eventually formed the United Council of Church Women (UCCW) in 1941. The mostly white women who belonged to ecumenical women’s councils and who led interdenominational missionary organizations were liberals when it came to women’s rights, civil rights, immigration, internationalism, and international development, and in their support to regulate and reform capitalism. But they also strongly supported positions that grew out of decades of women’s activism, and that read as more conservative (support for Prohibition, for example) or more left-radical (staunch anti-militarism and pacifism). Also, since the UCCW included white and black women from dozens of denominations, there was not a singular theological lineage identifiable as “liberal” here either. When I had to describe my subjects collectively, I opted instead for terms that better captured the intertwined beliefs and practices that they foregrounded. I most often call them “organized Protestant women,” since so much of their time and energy was devoted to institution-building. To Gene’s point, “ecumenical” similarly captures both the organizational work and the moral, theological, and spiritual investment they placed in “cooperation” and unity across denominational, racial, and national boundaries.

Elesha: My default approach is more like Gale’s than like Mark’s or Gene’s. I’m less interested in tracking liberalism across time through ideas (theological or political) and more interested in comparisons within a specific time and place. Liberal compared to what, or to whom?

In my research on The Christian Century and on Margaret Mead, who was an active Episcopal laywoman as well as a cultural anthropologist, the predominant comparison was liberal versus conservative on issues like biblical interpretation, human rights, acceptance of science, and whether the main task of Christians is to proclaim supernatural truth or try to make this world a better place.Footnote ¹⁵ Mead and the Century editors were on the liberal, or progressive, side of those issues, albeit with blind spots. Compared to the more radical labor Christians that Janine has written about, however, my liberals were pretty moderate, even conservative.

In the conference session of which this written exchange is an extension, audience member Matthew Hedstrom suggested another comparison, liberal versus illiberal. If liberal includes any American who accepts the First Amendment and expects religion to be voluntary, then most theologically and politically conservative Protestants – really, almost all American Christians – are and always have been liberal, with just a few Catholic integralists and sectarian would-be theocrats in opposition. That comparison would seem to be less analytically useful than liberal versus conservative and liberal versus radical, but with figures like Douglas Wilson on the rise, it may be worth thinking more about.

Janine: Indeed! I always find this question very difficult to answer. I think of “Liberal” and “Conservative” as relative terms – sort of like “Left” and “Right.” I found prominent Social Gospel leaders of the Federal Council of Churches to be “liberal” primarily on the question of interdenominational partnerships. (As Gene has emphasized, perhaps a better word here is “ecumenical.”) These leading denominational leaders were rather open-minded about trusting members of other white Protestant denominations in crafting a common set of public-facing values and working together on shared evangelistic projects. On matters of patriarchy, free speech, economic philosophy, and even Biblical interpretation, they were not – as a group – particularly tolerant of multiple Christian perspectives.

IV. Where do we Find Liberal Protestants in American History? To What Extent were they Reliable Narrators of their Own Stories?

Gale: If we narrow our focus to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberal Protestants are everywhere in American history. Beyond the books, articles, and sermons of liberal Protestant clergy and theologians, Protestant laypeople occupied positions of power in government, business, philanthropy, and civil society. Because they tended to be educated, affluent, and white, and had strong bureaucratic tendencies, liberal Protestants produced archives. When we pay attention to liberal Protestantism, it is possible to see the networks and interconnections across church and secular institutions. This invites analysis of the underlying Protestantism of American secularism that many scholars have explored, and it points us toward a more nuanced analysis of (white liberal) Protestantism and power.

Take the case of Emory and Myrta Ross. Ross and his wife, Myrta, worked as Disciples of Christ missionaries in Congo in the 1920s. From the 1930s through the 1950s, they lived in New York City, the arguable center of liberal ecumenical Protestant institutions. Emory headed the Foreign Missions Conference of North America for a few years and sat on the boards of several philanthropies, including the Phelps-Stokes Fund for black education and the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer. Myrta was on the Federal Council of Churches’ Church Women’s Committee on Race Relations and helped found the United Council of Church Women. Together, they coauthored books and penned articles advocating for US foreign aid and development programs on the continent, seeing foreign aid as an extension and secularization of Christian missions. Emory Ross’s papers (housed in the Missionary Research Library at Union Theological Seminary) also show his behind-the-scenes correspondence with politicians, civil servants, and activists. From the 1930s through the 1950s, he operated as a kind of powerbroker when it came to philanthropy and US policy in relation to Africa.

Ross and many other foreign missionaries were able to translate their experiences abroad into expertise, as historians David Hollinger, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and our co-panelist Gene have shown.Footnote ¹⁶ While they were often quite vocally critical of imperialism and white supremacy, white liberal Protestants like the Rosses also had a hand in influencing domestic and foreign policies that reinforced the continued authority of white liberal Protestants as the rightful and moral managers of a diverse United States and a postcolonial world. Mapping out liberal Protestants’ networks within and beyond their church institutions points historians toward the tension between their words and self-representation and the consequences of how they wielded their power.

Janine: I think Gale offers a fabulous answer to this question. If we take the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a case study, liberal Protestants built tremendous “social service”-oriented bureaucracies within interdenominational church alliances, philanthropic organizations, and both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. These included State and County Boards of Charities, the coalition of directors who ran all orphanages, asylums, corrections, reformatories, poor houses, and sanitariums on behalf of states. As Gale indicates, the fact that liberal Protestants worked across the imagined divide between “church” and “state” invites analysis of underlying Protestantism inside American “secularism.”

I want to return to the question of why liberal Protestants kept such good records of their own activities. Because of this power across multiple spheres, their “missions” usually had the moral support, if not also financial support, from governmental and professional authorities within the broader culture. Many saw preservation of these records, especially in the midst of debates with Protestant denominational conservatives, as evidence of both personal and institutional commitments of faith. However, when we engage with these records, I think it is essential to keep in mind the context in which they were often curated. Again, while liberal Protestants enjoyed hegemony over the domains of social services, missions, and international diplomacy in the twentieth-century United States, they also struggled to hold onto this hegemony as many rivals came into view. Within their own self-curated collections, rarely do liberal Protestants acknowledge publicly, in print or speech, the degree to which they see the Roman Catholic Church, American Jews, or American Socialists as rivals in the quest to define, say, “human rights” or “social justice.” This elision of this set of interlocutors from preserved and curated records should not lead us to mistakenly conclude that these other religious and secular actors were irrelevant to their ministries or outside their spheres. I read so much of liberal Protestant “mission” work in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an effort to defend their historic control over the spheres of social services, missions, and international diplomacy in the United States. To understand liberal Protestant power in its full context, it is necessary to critically interrogate many of the claims that liberal Protestants make about their own goals and accomplishments at the time, keeping in mind what they gained by failing to mention those who threatened their ongoing power.

To name a single example, in the early twentieth century, liberal Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Social Democrats all told very different origin stories of the popular language of “human rights.” Both Mark and Gene have recovered the role of white ecumenical Protestants within the work of international diplomacy, and particularly within the United Nations.Footnote ¹⁷ Their scholarship does not include a lot of attention to Catholics because liberal Protestants often wrote Roman Catholics out of their stories entirely. Meanwhile, Roman Catholics often trace the origins of “human rights” and social justice ideas to Rerum Novarum (1891) and the work of Father John Ryan in popularizing it.Footnote ¹⁸ Social Democrats, similarly, give themselves credit for developing nascent concepts of human rights in the late nineteenth century, serving as the inspiration for both religious bodies and nation-states.Footnote ¹⁹ I am not suggesting that liberal Protestant sources should be scrutinized any more than any other set of sources deriving from leaders with significant power and privilege. Rather, it is important to acknowledge how rarely liberal Protestants spoke publicly of their ideological rivals or allies. Each of these groups performed rival, partnered, and parallel work to theirs in the spheres of social services and international diplomacy, but rarely did liberal Protestants acknowledge this publicly before the 1960s.

Elesha: Ironically, liberal Protestants’ reticence to acknowledge rivals, as well as their tendency to overstate their own influence, can make it harder to identify them archivally. When the editors of The Christian Century used terms like “Christians” or “the church” in the early twentieth century, they meant liberal Protestants like themselves, but their use of such generic terms blunts the utility of text searching as a way of finding them. You can find Fundamentalists via text search because that was a defined term, used by adherents and their opponents. I looked in published and unpublished materials to try to determine whether Christian Century types called themselves liberal, modernist, progressive, or something else, and they just did not. They either used denominational labels or “the church,” which was a useful discovery for understanding their mindset, but a logistical challenge for research.

It wasn’t until 1960, as Janine notes, that liberal Protestants had to begrudgingly acknowledge their status as one group with plausible rivals for custodianship of American culture. The rising political profile of (neo-)evangelicals and Roman Catholics put firmer definitional boundaries around liberal or “mainline” Protestants. (Unlike Gene, I do not use “ecumenical” as an equivalent term, because willingness to work across denominational lines, or to erase them entirely, is not unique to liberal Protestants. Many evangelicals in nondenominational churches are unaware that such lines ever held meaning for anyone.) The emergence of rivals also made liberal Protestants somewhat more reliable narrators of their own stories. They could still describe what they were trying to do, with the same admixture of bluster and blind spots as any historical narrator, but they were less likely to assert that they spoke for the entire Christian tradition.

Gene: I largely agree with my colleagues’ observations about the prevalence of ecumenical Protestants in positions of authority across religious and secular institutions, and their tendency to self-aggrandize and to position themselves as the custodians of American and global morality. But we should not lose sight of other important functions of this community. One of the most important was the way liberal Protestants disseminated radical ideas, repackaging them in Christian idiom and making them safe for an overwhelmingly Christian public. I am thinking of Curtis Evans’s argument about how the Federal Council of Churches came out against segregation in 1946, well ahead of other comparable groups, and Matthew Hedstrom’s argument about the dissemination of tolerance and cosmopolitanism through the ecumenical Protestant press.Footnote ²⁰ Even when, as Gale points out, the proclamations of liberal Protestants did not match their actions, the rhetoric could nonetheless empower certain constituencies and sanction their work. For example, ecumenical student groups in the mid-to-late 1950s tried to enact the antiracist values ecumenical Protestants had been proclaiming by living interracially and joining sit-ins, presaging the student activism of the 1960s.

Self-aggrandizing proclamations also shaped liberal Protestants’ long-term trajectories, even when the proclamations had not been acted upon initially. I am working on a new project on ecumenical Protestants’ relationship with the liberation movements in southern Africa since the 1960s.Footnote ²¹ I am finding that the Americans working with the World Council of Churches framed support for Marxist liberation movements as an act of reparations and explicitly adopted post-colonial frameworks for giving aid to rebels fighting Portuguese colonialism and white minority rule. This liberal Protestant trajectory toward decoloniality is illegible without the grand proclamations and position paper liberalism of the mid-twentieth century.

The propensity to claim stewardship over American and global morality was not what made liberal Protestants distinctive among Christian groups. There is now a large body of literature showing that Catholics and evangelicals made these very same claims. What distinguishes liberal Protestants was the concentration of power they held before 1960, and the values and political causes they used their power to promote.

Mark: My go-to answer is that theologically liberal or “Modernist” Protestants – those embracing the higher criticism, evolutionary views of human development, usually the Social Gospel – could be found scattered throughout mainline and ecumenical institutions after 1900. These are not synonymous terms. Ecumenical, encompassing the Federal Council of Churches (National Council after 1950) and the World Council of Churches, is the broadest term. Mainline, the so-called “Seven Sisters,” is a subset of ecumenical Protestantism. Liberals or Modernists (who almost no one self-identified as) could be found everywhere and nowhere within mainline and ecumenical circles – although most visibly in seminaries such as Union Theological Seminary in New York, the Chicago Divinity School, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Divinity School. Yet, as everyone has noted here, liberal Protestant influence was often most felt outside of churches and church networks, especially in civic institutions.

To the reliability question: While in graduate school, I joined some colleagues in teaching a church history class at a United Methodist Church. I lectured on liberal anti-Catholicism in the 1940s and 1950s. The attendees were not having it. They could not imagine that their churches had ever been hostile toward Catholics. In that instance, liberal, mainline, and/or ecumenical Protestants misremembered their own pasts in ways that Janine suggests. At the same time, their incredulity at my claims also showed how far the “tri-faith” movement – which started in the 1920s in reaction to the bigotry of the First Red Scare and anti-Al Smith campaign, led by the National Conference on Catholics and Jews – had transcended the clergy-laity gap.Footnote ²² Liberal Protestants both followed and pioneered moderate (maybe “respectable?”) multiculturalism following World War I. Since 1970, Protestant liberals within mainline and ecumenical institutions like the Metropolitan Christian Council (Detroit Council of Churches) have become leaders in interfaith work alongside interfaith Muslims and Jews. Grace Yukich’s One Family Under God (2013) suggests that interfaith mobilization, notably on behalf of immigrant rights, represents a new religion altogether.Footnote ²³ The Metropolitan Christian Council purportedly represents several hundred congregations, but it is about a ten-person project today. And it has kept really good records.

The claims made by my colleagues above about liberal complicity in maintaining white Protestant hegemony are well taken. One early interfaith voice, the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking, authored an interdenominational Rethinking Missions report (1932) that simultaneously decried Western Christian imperialism but reaffirmed that the world’s religions would find their fulfillment in some generalized Protestantism. Yet one of Hocking’s main sources, the ex-missionary to China Pearl S. Buck, highlighted Gene’s point (and Hollinger’s) that at least some liberal Protestants could overcome their positionality to some degree to become sincere champions of civil and human rights.

V. What is the Relationship, if any, Between Liberal Protestantism and the American Liberal Political Tradition?

Mark: As I noted earlier, everything rests on what we mean by “American liberal political tradition.” If we were doing a genealogy of liberalism today, we would go back to the Progressives, the Roosevelts, and Woodrow Wilson. In American Crucible (2001, 2017), Gary Gerstle terms this the “Rooseveltian state” or “strong-state liberalism” to distinguish it from the so-called “classical” or Enlightenment-era liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill.Footnote ²⁴ The defining orientation of Rooseveltian liberalism was benevolent antiradicalism, or tempered reforms to improve the lives of marginalized populations within a white Protestant male-led corporate commonwealth so that they did not break that system altogether. If we accept that definition and lineage, what does that tell us about the liberal Protestants who helped craft the Federal Council of Churches and “Social Creed of the Churches” during the very years of strong-state liberal genesis? One of the things I loved about Janine’s book was that it seemed to me an indictment of the entire antiradical liberal project and not simply of the Social Gospel. However, I’m not sure if she agrees with my reading.

Gerstle dates the “collapse of the Rooseveltian nation” to 1968, when infighting between radical and Cold War liberals over Vietnam, Black Power, and gay and women’s rights exploded, and the New Right began to occupy the blast zone. Those are also the years in which the “decline of the mainline” first became evident. To what extent were liberal, mainline, and ecumenical Protestants tied to a particular political order – Rooseveltian or strong-state liberalism – reveling in its successes at promoting social and national security yet unable to unentangle itself from its limitations of race, class, and sex? Several scholars in this roundtable and elsewhere have been exploring this question, including Hollinger and, earlier, Jill K. Gill in Embattled Ecumenism (2011).Footnote ²⁵ But more could be done to understand how the histories of Protestant liberalism have and have not tracked with mass political structures. Jefferson Cowie, in The Great Exception (2017), has suggested the New Deal order was, well, an exception to the nation’s longstanding commitment to self-made individualism and the resulting acceptance of vast inequalities of opportunity.Footnote ²⁶ If true, is the notion of a liberal Protestant “establishment” bunk, and have revivalist-Fundamentalist-Evangelical Protestants always represented the libertarian American mainstream?

Janine: That’s a fantastic question, Mark. That is, can we trace the revivalist-Fundamentalist tradition all the way back through the nineteenth century? And if so, has it been as much a mainstay in American public life as that of the liberal Protestant “establishment”? In his 1971 Winning of the Midwest, Richard Jensen argued that “pietists” and “liturgicals” were the competing interest groups of the Gilded Age Midwest, defined in part by ethnicity and social class.Footnote ²⁷ The liturgicals, of course, were the liberals.

I also agree, Mark, that the Wilsonian and Rooseveltian “liberalisms” were intimately connected to the dominant white middle-class Protestant liberalisms of their time. By around World War I, the terms “liberal” or “liberal Protestant” had also become a modifier to describe a professional middle-class Protestant habitus. I have recently been revisiting a 2001 essay collection, The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class. So many of the contributions, including Debby Applegate’s essay on Henry Ward Beecher, Edward James Kilsdonk’s essay on “Scientific Church Music,” and Andrew Reiser’s essay on Chautauqua, observe nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism’s role as the foundation for a set of sensibilities and social networks that we can call middle class. Indeed, Protestant liberalism was a signifier that distinguished the leadership class of clergy, reformers, and professionals from the ordinary, wage-earning classes. In a fantastic essay on the role of liberal Protestant networks in cultivating middle-class authority, Andrew Reiser observed that “as late as 1976, the foremost encyclopedia of United States history defined middle class as “the embodiment of the ‘American Way,’ with its dedication to business, emphasis on ambition, faith in progress, and devotion to the pervasive influence of the Protestant ethic.”Footnote ²⁸ Again, I do think that Protestantism helped construct middle-class consciousness, and Protestant liberalism helped construct the white middle class.

Gale: I do not have much to add to the excellent points made by Mark and Janine, and I will instead respond with a slightly different question about the legacy of liberal Protestant institutions.

In our present moment (I’m writing this in February 2026), I’ve been thinking about what happened after the liberal consensus collapsed in the 1970s. What are the narratives that help us to understand how people representing most of the denominations and ecumenical institutions, once identified as “liberal Protestant,” signed a statement released today that condemns Christian nationalism and “government-sponsored cruelty and violence,” and that calls on Christians to “resist the injustices and anti-democratic danger sweeping across our nation.”Footnote ²⁹ In one way, the statement’s defense of democracy is not all that different from a mid-century liberal Protestant statement on anti-fascism or anti-communism. Yet I think the mobilization of Protestant (and many other) religious leaders to protest and resist ICE – at courthouses, at Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis, and in the streets – is quite different from how mid-century liberal Protestants exercised their power. If we have a good grasp on liberal Protestantism’s (perhaps exceptional) rise and then collapse, what histories do we need to explain its trajectory from the 1980s through the 2020s? Of course, scholars are already doing this work on religion and politics related to many issues, among them studies of churches’ refugee resettlement work, involvement in the Sanctuary Movement, the schisms over LGBTQ+ rights, and the internal debates and activism around divestment in South Africa during apartheid and related to the BDS movement with respect to Israel.Footnote ³⁰ Are the once-liberal denominations of the past now considered the Religious Left? Or, is this the clergy-laity divide all over again?

Gene: Gale’s point about the reinvention of Protestant liberalism after the 1960s is so important, especially because it has been so little studied by historians. In many ways, the decline narrative still dominates the scholarship on liberal Protestantism. If we are solely focused on the hegemonic character of liberal Protestantism, why bother to chronicle this community beyond the Sixties, when its public authority collapsed? Gale’s answer is a list of this community’s many contributions to social justice causes. And these contributions were made by both liberal Protestants and post-Protestants, folks who grew up in the ecumenical milieu and were shaped by its values but disaffiliated from organized religion later in life. I think Gale is right that what is happening today is partly explained by the clergy-laity gap (a slight majority of “mainline” Protestants vote for Trump). And Mark is right that the liberal Protestant propensity for self-criticism and for self-reinvention also plays a role.

Let me add that the liberal Protestant inheritance of the Social Gospel, internationalism, and ecumenism made this community more receptive to many of the transformations of the 1960s. And liberal Protestantism always contained communities within itself that could legitimately be characterized as standing on the left of American politics. I am thinking of Baptists’ and Congregationalists’ loud condemnations of the “profit motive” in the 1930s, or Federal Council of Churches officials telegraphing Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 to denounce Japanese Internment as “totalitarian,” or the Fellowship of Reconciliation organizing in the late 1940s the Journeys of Reconciliation, a precursor to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. Well before the Sixties, the left-liberal distinction was often blurred, and there was always the potential in this community for the kinds of politics and activism we see today. So, I would describe the post-Sixties trajectory of ecumenical Protestantism as a shift in its center of gravity, not as a complete reinvention.

The significance of liberal Protestantism was not only in fostering communities that engaged in leftist politics, although that is certainly important. From the 1930s through the 1960s, liberal Protestantism became so enmeshed with political liberalism (in both the Democratic and Republican parties) that it is hard to imagine mid-century liberalism coalescing as the major political and cultural force of the era without support from liberal Protestants.

Elesha: This discussion takes me back to where I started, with the question of influence. At the top echelons of liberal Protestantism – theologians, seminary professors, Federal and World Council of Churches delegates, pastors of big-city churches, guys with radio shows and bestselling books – there has long been a symbiosis with the liberal political tradition. I’m confident of this for the twentieth century, somewhat less confident for earlier periods, although Amy Kittelstrom’s The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition traces a longer lineage.Footnote ³¹ Frances Perkins got a Cabinet position under FDR. John Foster Dulles advised Harry Truman and became Secretary of State for the centrist Dwight Eisenhower. Jimmy Carter called Margaret Mead as she lay dying in the hospital (the nurse did not want to wake her, so she missed the call). There are countless stories like this of liberal political and religious elites influencing each other.

Elite liberal Protestants always struggled more to influence the less-elite members of their own churches. We see this in the clergy-laity gap – perhaps nowhere as viscerally as the 1966 documentary A Time for Burning – but also in gaps between denominational headquarters and rank-and-file clergy, or between big-city pastors and small-town pastors of churches within the same denomination.Footnote ³² A layman who had participated in a World Council of Churches conference told me that nobody else at his church knew or cared what happened at such meetings. Attendees enjoyed the conferences precisely because those were the only spaces where they found kindred souls.

And yet, there have been counterexamples, and I believe that phenomenon is likely to grow. Christian socialism had elite spokesmen and women, but it drew its energy from laborers, which is why, as Janine shows, elites tried so hard to bottle it up. Civil rights activism belongs in the American liberal political tradition, and it was fueled by some elite white liberal Protestants, some non-elite white Protestants, and a whole lot of politically liberal but not necessarily theologically liberal black Protestants. Since civil rights and anti-Vietnam activism accelerated the division of American Protestantism into a two-party system, largely replacing the older denominational order, you are more likely to find congregations full of self-selected liberals who are politically out in front of their clergy rather than lagging behind. As Gale noted, liberal clergy were more visible in opposing ICE in Minnesota than they were in supporting or opposing anything that I can recall in my lifetime, but their numbers were eclipsed by laypeople (and, of course, lots of people of other faiths or no faith) blowing whistles in the streets, delivering food, accompanying children to school, and countless other acts of resistance. The American liberal political tradition is, demographically, very secular now, but ties between that tradition and liberal Protestantism persist.

VI. Is it Ever Possible to Talk about Liberal Protestant Clergy and Laity Together, or do you always have to Specify which Subgroup you are Talking about and Limit your Claims to them?

Gene: It is not only possible but necessary to discuss the clergy and laity together because their identities, theologies, and politics are formed in relation to one another. Clergy tends to be more “liberal” or to the “left” of the average churchgoer. Compared to many churchgoers, Protestant clergy of the ecumenical denominations tended to be more accepting of religious pluralism, more supportive of anti-racism and the labor movement, more skeptical of US foreign policy, and more tolerant of same-sex relationships. This is even more true of the national ecumenical leadership. This gap in values helps explain many of the triumphs of ecumenical Protestantism. Clergy supported the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests precisely because they did not need permission from the laity to do it. If placating conservatives among the laity was a greater concern for clergy, liberal Protestantism would have played a much lesser role in supporting left-liberal politics. The same clergy-laity gap in values, as Elesha’s book helpfully points out, did create a vulnerability for ecumenical Protestantism.Footnote ³³

We can get even more analytic value from the “clergy-laity gap” if we historicize “the laity.” My sense is that most scholars treat the laity as all the church folks who are not clergy. But what if we treat “laity” as an identity category and ask, as E.P. Thompson did of the “working class,” when did churchgoers start identifying themselves as members of a distinct group?Footnote ³⁴ Who was most invested in promoting this identity, and what theological, cultural, and political values did the term “laity” presuppose? Toward what ends was this identity mobilized? In my research, I found that “laity” came into widespread use as an identity in the 1930s, promoted by wealthy corporate executives as part of a countermobilization against clerical support for the New Deal. The wealthiest members of mainline denominations were trying to wrest back control of the cultural capital of Christianity by claiming that they, not the clergy, were the rightful arbiters of morality and politics. Kevin Kruse brilliantly captures the politics of this group in One Nation Under God. Footnote ³⁵ And these claims were repeated during the early Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and so on. This anti-clerical countermobilization by the laity looks quite different from the clergy-laity gap. It was a contest between two rival groups of elites with very different visions of American politics and international relations: the leadership of the National Council of Churches and the corporate executives and conservative activists, who called themselves the laity.

Evangelicals also played an important role. Strangely, we have not said much about evangelicals even though they are central to just about everything we have discussed. Evangelicals noticed both the clergy-laity gap and the anti-clerical countermobilization by corporate executives, and they worked to exacerbate both. My point is not to deny a clergy-laity gap in values but to point out that everyday churchgoers were not a self-mobilizing community nor the clergy’s loudest critics. Before the 1960s, ecumenical leaders were quite effective at mobilizing some segments of the laity on behalf of what they called “social action.” They also played an important role in tamping down conservatism within the mainline churches. To put it like a political scientist: ecumenical Protestant leadership deprived the conservative movement of “political resources” and foreclosed “political opportunities” before the 1960s. It took the countermobilization of corporate executives and evangelicals to challenge the authority of liberal Protestant clergy.

Gale: Gene’s point about “the laity” as an identity category makes me think about how the organized Protestant women I’ve studied did not typically call themselves “laywomen” (although almost all of them were). They instead described themselves as “church women,” a term they liked so much that they called their organization the United Council of Church Women (UCCW) and named their magazine The Church Woman. I think this is more than just a matter of terminology, and it helps shed light on the gender dynamics of liberal Protestantism.

First, I do not think that church women saw themselves as part of “the laity” that Gene and Kevin Kruse (and others) describe. The UCCW’s assorted interests grew out of the women’s missionary movement and focused on issues related to education, children and family life, humanitarianism, and international and domestic women’s rights. In some cases, women probably took a more conservative view on some of these issues than some men, but in other ways, their advocacy for women’s leadership probably put them at odds with even a more liberal/left-leaning male clergy. Their politics did not always map easily onto the conservative/liberal divide.

The second complication to considering women within “the laity” is that I suspect that many church women, particularly those employed by Protestant institutions, understood themselves to be something in between an ordained minister and a layman. Church women’s groups held liturgies in which they “consecrated” themselves to service, and I think this underscores how they saw themselves as something more than just a regular churchgoer. Church women were also institutional insiders in that some were paid employees of church institutions, and many more gave hours of volunteer labor. Women staffed the offices of denominations and ecumenical bodies, and local churches relied on the labor of wealthy and middle-class church women who were able to do administrative work, run the altar guild, teach Sunday school classes, organize social and fundraising activities, and so on.

Church women lacked the social power of corporate executives and clergymen, yet it would be useful to look more into the roles church women played as Protestant men fought for control over mainline institutions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mark: The point Gene made above about historicizing the laity is well taken. I’m interested in the extent to which the ecumenical and mainline clergy-laity gap does or does not map onto the nation’s two-party system. Are mainline and ecumenical clergy, seminarians, and administrators mostly liberal or progressive Democrats, while their churches are filled with conservative or moderate Republicans? I realize this question can lead to oversimplification at the same time that Gene and Gale are rightly arguing for complexity. Yet the numbers are interesting. In the 2024 elections, 82% of white evangelical Protestants went for Trump, but so did 61% of white Catholics and 58% of non-evangelical Protestants. In a 2022–23 study of mainline churches, 49% of clergy identified as Democrat, 14% Republican, and 28% as Independent. Meanwhile, 36% of mainline churchgoers were Republican and 24% Democrat. About 43% of white mainline attendees called themselves conservative and 23% liberal, while white clergy were 55% liberal and 22% conservative. Younger mainline clergy (in their 20s and 30s) went 60% liberal Democrat, while 29% of younger mainline churchgoers said they were conservative Republicans. The rural–urban–suburban divide among self-identifying liberal mainline clergy was not as pronounced as one might think – respectively, it was 49%, 63%, and 61%.Footnote ³⁶

These findings should only be surprising if we take evangelical and fundamentalist talking points about “liberal churches” to heart. In fact, the Northeastern and Midwestern mainline first came together during an age of Republican dominance of the Northeast and Midwest. Some mainline and ecumenical clergy sided with Democrats like Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith before rallying behind FDR with an updated Social Creed from the Methodist Episcopal leadership (1932).

Their affinity for Democrats has only become more pronounced since 2000. Most mainline “laypersons” only appeared to be a reliable voting bloc within the New Deal coalition. They returned to the Republican fold frequently, including support for Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. The mainline vote started to become more evenly split starting in the 1980s, seemingly in opposition to Republicans’ reorientation toward the social conservatism of the evangelical right. Yet Trump has been able to mobilize more white mainline voters – really, all white Christian voters – behind god’s own party.

I’ll end with this question: Given these statistics and voting patterns, have church leaders ever really had much influence on the political attitudes and behaviors of their congregants, and how would we know if they had?

Elesha: I would lean toward no on that question, if we are confining the discussion to white, mainline Protestants in the twentieth century. Clergy subscribers to The Christian Century complained constantly to editors that their congregations could not handle the liberal theology and progressive politics that the subscribers learned in seminary and read about in the magazine. In the 1940s, laymen’s groups – not, to Gale’s point, laywomen’s groups – openly revolted in several denominations, calling for “renewal” that looked a lot like evangelical anti-New Dealism. The Century’s signature initiatives, including support for Prohibition, a campaign to outlaw international war (the Kellogg-Briand Pact), resistance to the United States joining World War II, opposition to Japanese internment, and even small gestures toward civil rights, got very little cultural traction. That lack of traction shows up in voting patterns, opinion polling, membership declines, and case studies such as R. Stephen Warner’s 1990 sociological study New Wine in Old Wineskins. Footnote ³⁷ I do not think you can generalize from this dynamic in white mainline churches to other kinds of churches, however. Clergy influence may be stronger in (some) Catholic churches, or fundamentalist churches, or black churches, or immigrant and other ethnic minority churches.

Even if white Protestant clergy cannot nudge the political attitudes and behaviors of their congregants very much, though, they can draw people in or push them away, compounding the political sorting between churches. If a preacher takes a stand in favor of LGBTQIA rights, for example, this could very well influence her congregation in a progressive direction, not because anyone’s mind is changed, but because opponents stream out while Christians seeking an affirming space stream in.

Janine: I agree with my colleagues here. Clergy and laity are both socially constructed “classes” with their own particular “consciousness.” On the whole, liberal clergy have aligned with social justice initiatives more intentionally than have the laity within their congregations. In part, this is because liberal Protestant clergy have access to a different kind of theological training than most of the people who sit in the pews. Since the early twentieth century, liberal Protestant seminaries have discussed systematic oppression built into systems like capitalism and empire. Walter Rauschenbusch, writing in 1907, spoke of the need to interrogate “the moral nature of profit” and consider to what extent it was fairly extracted from poor wage earners. ^{Footnote 38} This was a good provocation for discussion at Union Theological Seminary. But in 1907, most of the middle-class and wealthy members of his congregation were not equipped with the theological tools or life experience to understand sin residing in the nation’s own economic and legal systems, criminal justice systems, and immigration systems. The mythology of the “self-made man” has always had a strong attraction for white middle-class Christians. It takes unusual humility to see systemic bias in favor of people like yourself and call it sin. Hence, while there have always been “radical” intentional communities with laity who are well-trained in what we might call systemic sin, these communities have largely been the exception that proves the rule. More often than not, liberal laity (like all Christian laity) has had trouble seeing “sin” in institutional structures that benefit them.

I have spent some time thinking about why twentieth-century liberal Protestants did not develop more robust Christian education programs or print culture to “educate” their laity more intentionally on systemic sin and the need for systemic “redemption.” Again, this has never been easy. As Gale points out, some liberal Protestant laywomen acted as clergy when they continued to engage themselves in social justice initiatives, especially welfare work and reproductive justice work. But, as other historians observe, Cold War era definitions of Christianity that celebrated “free trade” and rejected “communism” made this initiative even more challenging.Footnote ³⁹ So much mid-century Protestant print culture valorized the violent work of the US military and of military-supported missionaries.Footnote ⁴⁰ While historians might identify the most popular Christian books as “evangelical” in their origins, most were read far beyond evangelical circles, especially among so-called “liberal” Protestant laity.Footnote ⁴¹ To return to an earlier discussion, I remain a big fan of H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929). As he opened the book, “Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder. The church, as an organization interested in self-preservation and the gain of power, has sometimes found the counsel of the Cross quite as inexpedient as have national and economic groups.”Footnote ⁴²

VII. “Liberal” and “Liberalism” in American Religious History: A Response from Thomas A. Tweed

I attended – and enjoyed – the conference session. I appreciated its five-question format, which revealed panelists’ agreements and disagreements. In particular, the first two questions, which inquired about their aims and definitions, advanced the conversation by surfacing usually unstated presuppositions. The subsequent discussion also raised intriguing questions, including whether some figures, like Reinhold Niebuhr, might be thought of as liberal during one stage of life but not another, and whether Pauli Murray, who advocated for racial justice and gender equity before her Episcopalian ordination, might be added to our list of important liberal Protestants.Footnote ⁴³

The panelists asked me to add a response that situates liberal Protestantism within the larger story of American religion and suggests directions for future work. I am happy to do so because I have long advocated “exegetical fussiness,” reflection on key terms, and recently published a historical survey.Footnote ⁴⁴

Focusing on the first four questions, I suggest that textured answers to the first two – about aims and definitions – might reduce the conceptual “slipperiness” that enters as historians try to identify liberal Protestants and analyze US politics, the focus of the third and fourth questions.Footnote ⁴⁵

Historians’ Aims and Terms: The roundtable participants were asked to describe how they came to study liberal Protestantism, and we learned that different research questions, everyday circumstances, and institutional contexts informed their work. Elesha Coffman’s first book, she tells us, arose from her interest in magazines and concern to assess Christianity’s “cultural influence.” Janine Giordano Drake cared more about Christianity’s role in fostering or suppressing “class consciousness.” Mark Edwards was searching for the worthy subject of a biography when an advisor suggested Reinhold Niebuhr. Gale Kenny wanted to understand religion and “imperialism,” including the role of foreign missions, while Gene Zubovich cared about “political liberalism,” hoping to trace how Protestants shaped domestic as well as international affairs.

In the same spirit, I should explain how a Catholic came to study liberal Protestantism. After earning an MTS at Harvard, I entered the PhD program at Stanford, where I prepared to write a dissertation in US religious history on the nineteenth-century debate about Buddhism. As I identified what David Hollinger called the “discourse community” and contextualized the transatlantic exchange in terms of what Daniel Walker Howe called “Victorian culture in America,” I found that white northern Protestants were vigorous participants in the public conversation between 1844 and 1912.Footnote ⁴⁶

Howe, a specialist in antebellum religion and politics, kindly stepped in to serve on my Qualifying Exam Committee after my Stanford advisor passed away, and then I returned to Harvard, where William Hutchison, a specialist in liberal Protestantism, served as my advisor. In my revised dissertation, I used several adjectives, including mainline and modernist, but I also used liberal. Footnote ⁴⁷

The panelists acknowledge what Kenny calls the “slipperiness” of that term as they answer a second question: what do we mean by liberal Protestantism? Some avoid the adjective liberal or prefer an alternative, like ecumenical or organized. Among those who use it, there is some agreement. Whether liberal refers to a cluster of ideas (as for Edwards) or a particular “community” (as for Zubovich), the contributors seem to agree with Giordano Drake’s assertion that liberal is “a relative term.” It gains its meaning not only in a particular historical context, as Coffman says, but also from an explicit or implied comparison. It presupposes a stated or unstated categorical opposite, as historians of US religion have been doing since Robert Baird’s 1856 survey distinguished “evangelical” and “non-evangelical” churches and contrasted “Romish hierarchy” and “liberal minds.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Edwards offers an implied comparison with evangelicalism as he wonders if we might talk about “a liberal Protestant quadrilateral.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Others compare liberal and conservative ideas and institutions or juxtapose political and religious liberalism.

Finding Protestants and Analyzing Politics: The panelists next addressed questions about where we find liberal Protestants in US history and how Protestant liberalism is related to “the American liberal political tradition.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Surprises await researchers in the archives, but historians usually find what they look for. The panelists’ varied guiding definitions, thematic interests, and presumed timetables led them to find liberal Protestantism in different periods and places. Some focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while others highlight the mid-twentieth century or look beyond the 1970s. Some feature liberal ideas, as Gary Dorrien and William Hutchison have described them, while others are guided more by David Hollinger’s After Cloven Tongues of Fire, a study of “Protestant liberalism in Modern American History,” which foregrounds denominational leaders, government officials, and ecumenical organizations that shaped US and global politics.Footnote ⁵¹

Liberal: To locate liberal Protestants in US religious history, we need to return to questions about aims and definitions. What does liberal mean, and why use that term? Ethicists or theologians who hope to retrieve a tradition of reflection can define it in any way that advances their moral or theological project. If the scholarly project is understood as a work of history, however, there are constraints on how interpreters can responsibly and persuasively use liberal. Historians can either create an interpretive category or mirror vernacular usage.

Historians can suggest that a self-consciously constructed category has interpretive power, even if it was not used by the historical actors studied. In 1904, Max Weber used “the Protestant ethic” in this way, as an historical “ideal type,” as he interpreted early modern religion and economy.Footnote ⁵² American religious historians who co-edited an influential 1963 sourcebook invented a category, “the Christocentric Liberal Tradition,” to distinguish “evangelical” from “progressive” liberals.Footnote ⁵³ More recently, Hollinger proposed “ecumenical Protestants” to capture the liberal side of “the post-1940s version of the recurrent conflict between what is often called American Protestantism’s ‘two party system.’”Footnote ⁵⁴

Or historians can try to recover everyday language, tracing how historical actors in a particular time and place used liberal as a self-descriptor or a dismissive label. A preliminary word search in library catalogues, databases, and the Google Ngram Viewer suggests that the adjective liberal might have peaked in US print culture during the 1820s.Footnote ⁵⁵ If that’s right, why? I suspect it is because William Ellery Channing published his popular 1819 sermon on Unitarian Christianity, which used the noun liberality to describe a cherished moral and intellectual virtue, and early Unitarians started using liberal in pamphlets and periodicals during the 1820s.Footnote ⁵⁶ The 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary reported that the noun liberality signified generosity or “largeness of mind.” In turn, the adjective liberal meant generous, candid, and large; not narrow, literal, or contracted. Those who welcomed liberal as a self-descriptor during the 1820s understood their chief opponents as “orthodox” or “Calvinist” Protestants, though some also condemned illiberal Catholics. The word liberal became less popular after the 1820s, though its frequency increased slightly again during the 1980s, when it became a term of derision for political opponents during the Reagan Era.

While the adjective liberal enjoyed some popularity in the nineteenth century, the phrase liberal Protestantism only became more common between the 1930s and the 1950s, with its print usage peaking around 1955.

Liberalism: Webster’s 1828 dictionary included no entry for liberalism. The rise of Britain’s Liberal Party during the 1840s attracted some limited attention across the Atlantic, but US publications only started using liberalism more frequently between 1916 and 1936.Footnote ⁵⁷ Liberals’ opponents published twelve paperback volumes called The Fundamentals between 1910 and 1915, and in 1920, a new descriptor, fundamentalist, was coined. Then “fundamentalist militancy reached its height” during the 1920s, as self-described liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick asked, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” and Shailer Matthews defended The Faith of Modernism, as modernists joined liberals in the lexicon.Footnote ⁵⁸ In turn, works like J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism challenged the anti-Christian “naturalism” of both liberalism and modernism.Footnote ⁵⁹ The noun liberalism only became more frequent in print after 1980, as it took on more political significance.

The roundtable also asked about Protestant liberalism’s relation to “the American liberal political tradition.” I took that question to mean, in part, how it relates to the political liberalism identified in Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, which appeared in 1955, the same year that “liberal Protestantism” peaked in print usage. Hartz was clear about his aims and his definitions. He wrote the book to explain and challenge “red scare hysteria.” Hartz suggested that America’s “monolithic liberal society” grounded in Lockean political philosophy generated a “moral absolutism” that, in turn, inspired the Fifties’ anti-communist panic.Footnote ⁶⁰ I am not a political historian, but I am persuaded by the criticisms in the 2010 volume, The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered, including the suggestions that Hartz overlooked religion’s role and minimized the impact of other Enlightenment thinkers.Footnote ⁶¹ I also agree with scholars who suggest that America’s political culture has been shaped by the interaction among competing traditions, not only Lockean liberalism but democratic republicanism and “inegalitarian Americanism,” an inexact label for traditions that have advocated narrow notions of national belonging.Footnote ⁶²

Religion in the Lands That Became America discusses variants of Americanism as it reconstructs the contests for national belonging, but I avoid the noun liberalism because its distinct meanings in religion, politics, and economics confuse general readers.Footnote ⁶³ For religious descriptors, I use denominational labels when I can, since they seem less contested. For similar reasons, I appreciate the precision of William Hutchison’s definition of the mainline Protestant establishment in terms of seven northern denominations and leaders’ personal networks.Footnote ⁶⁴ To acknowledge Protestants’ disproportionate public power after legal disestablishment, I refer to the de facto establishment.Footnote ⁶⁵

I reserve the adjective liberal for specified periods and purposes – and frame it in relation to historical actors’ real or imagined opponents. During the 1820s, it did not yet refer to a political or economic philosophy. It took on those meanings by 1900, however, and after the 1970s, the adjective’s religious and political meanings became hopelessly entangled. So, to avoid confusion, I use liberal Protestant to describe the beliefs and values of elites affiliated with the white mainline churches as I discuss varieties of “industrial religion,” a category I borrow to analyze developments between 1870 and 1920, and again as I reconstruct the continuum of “social religion,” a vernacular phrase from the same period.Footnote ⁶⁶ Extending the periodization only a little, I suggest the adjective liberal might be used to describe some but not all mainline Protestant elites between the 1870s and the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁷ So I do not read liberals back into debates about the mid-eighteenth century “awakenings,” as some do, and I rarely use the label for people or ideas after the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁸ That does not mean it might not be useful to do so. There might be good reasons to add Pauli Murray, for instance, to the list of influential Protestant liberals, if only to prompt more discussion about definitions.

I hope future historians of liberals and liberalism follow the roundtable participants’ lead by clarifying how they came to study the topic and how they view their central adjective or noun. Is it an interpretive category constructed for a particular purpose or a word that reflects everyday language from the period? If it is a vernacular term, I suggest, it might help to situate the term in the longer trajectory of its everyday meanings and scholarly interpretations.