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A MAINLINE MOMENT: THE AMERICAN PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT REVISITED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

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

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.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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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).

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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.

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26 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 192.

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