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Beginning in the late 1870s, liberal Protestants including Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, Theodore Munger, Newman Smyth, and Charles Briggs endeavoured to construct a form of Christian orthodoxy that could make its peace with evolution and historical criticism while expressing the religious and moral experience of modern Christians. The final chapter traces the impact of antislavery, the Civil War, and emancipation on the New Theology of the postwar decades, including the liberal Protestant acceptance of evolution and historical criticism and the early development of the Social Gospel. This chapter also traces the dual postwar trajectory of abolitionist theology in both “free religion” and budding fundamentalism.

In “Godlessness and the Scopes Trial,” Kevin M. Schultz examines the most famous battle over religion in the 1920s, and perhaps the most famous battle in the entirety of the twentieth century, the Monkey Scopes Trial of 1925. Schultz shows how the two sides that hogged the limelight during the debate—the thankful godlessness of Clarence Darrow and puritanical jeremiads of William Jennings Bryan—have crowded out a third tradition that was burgeoning in the 1920s, a tradition that matured into mainline liberal Protestantism. Schultz also explains that Bryan's fear of evolution had more to do with Bryan's opposition to the then‐respectable tradition of Social Darwinism, and not his fear that the Darwin account de‐centered man in the Biblical story of creation. Bryan's fear, thus, was not the damnation that would result from rising secularism but rather of the effect of exposing America's school children exposed to the dangerous notion that only the fittest will survive—a notion that potentially invalidates any attempt at social welfare.

Over the course of the nineteenth century both interest in and knowledge about the life and writings of Calvin increased substantially among French Protestants, for whom he was a distant, little understood figure in 1800. Theologically divided between liberals and evangelicals, the Protestant minority in France found common cause in the defense of Calvin’s reputation against Catholic attacks through the work of the Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français, a meeting ground for members of the rival tendencies. Under the influence first of Emile Doumergue, then of Karl Barth, French Reformed theology became increasingly marked by Calvin’s own ideas between 1890 and 1970.

A fresh outburst of Liberal Protestantism represented by the work of Schubert Ogden in the middle of the twentieth century exposed afresh the captivity of Protestantism to epistemology. Reworking the New Testament canon to be a canon before the canon that operated as a criterion of identity, Ogden embraced a version of secularization that looked to secular science and history for the truth about the world. The Christian faith was, for him, a representation of truths that are given universally in experience. He embraced a vision of neoclassical theism that effectively aided in the creation of new post‐Christian religious tradition that systematically displaced the varied components of the canonical heritage of the Church.

Calvin was practically absent from Dutch theology of the eighteenth century. Even those Reformed theologians who defended old orthodoxies tended to define their thought in relation to the Synod of Dort while scarcely invoking Calvin. Those who embraced toleration or a Protestant Enlightenment moved yet farther away from his ideas while often condemning him for the intolerance he showed Michael Servetus. The shift from polite indifference to the reformer to the active appropriation of Calvin for the theological ends of Dutch neo-Calvinism came between 1830 and 1900.

The creation of Anglo Catholicism represents a fresh way to deal with the epistemological crisis at the heart of Western Christianity. John Henry Newman's journey from Evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism can be seen as a valiant effort to find a way to salvage scriptural foundationalism. While he appealed to conscience and judgement, he developed a vision of the infallibility of the Church and of the pope that emerged as a real alternative to Liberal Protestantism and scepticism. Epistemology has by now fully triumphed within Western Christianity.

Although certain currents of modern British Evangelicalism owed a strong debt to the views on predestination and saving faith conventionally labelled “Calvinist,” the figure of Calvin himself was less well known and less consistently praised by Victorian British Evangelicals than the great figures of the English and Scottish Reformations such as John Knox and William Tyndale. Knowledge of and interest in Calvin’s person and thought nonetheless grew between 1850 and 1950. In the twentieth century first the influence of Dutch neo-Calvinism and then that of Karl Barth led to the emergence of currents that explicitly identified themselves with Calvin and Calvinism.

The first major event in the modernization of religious publishing in the twentieth century was the Religious Book Week of the 1920s, an initiative spearheaded by Frederic Melcher and the National Association of Book Publishers. Religious Book Week brought together an emerging American consumerism and a liberal Protestantism in crisis to forge a new approach to marketing religious books, and indeed liberal religion itself. Among the key factors facing the Protestant establishment was a crisis of authority rooted in deep gender anxieties, anxieties revealed in the work of popular author and advertiser Bruce Barton, but most especially in the advertising posters and other materials used to promote Religious Book Week. This commercial poster art reflected a moment of cultural transition, as religious, economic, and cultural forces transformed the long-standing cultural value of character into an emerging ethos of personality. The marketing of liberal religion in Religious Book Week unwittingly aided this cultural shift, even as many of its leading promoters expressed nostalgia for older norms and practices. The work of the psychologist and bestselling author Henry C. Link illustrates many of these developments, especially the emergence of laissez-faire liberalism from religious middlebrow culture.

Once the Church had privileged epistemology over its canonical heritage, its theologians were drawn inescapably into solving problems in the epistemology of theology and into developing fitting material theological proposals. Schleiermacher, the founder of Liberal Protestantism, opted for religious experience as the foundation of faith and allowed only that which could be grounded in the religious affections. He rejected the Old Testament canon and reworked the conception of the New Testament canon as a norm of Christian identity. The doctrine of the Trinity became strictly optional.

This chapter examines how shifts in ideas, culture, and politics reconfigured dissenter Protestantism in twentieth-century North America. The first of these shifts, the rise of modernist ideas, divided dissenter Protestants into strict biblicists and more intellectually inclusive ‘liberals,’ which set mainline denominations on a path to theological pluralism and institutional stagnation. The second, the rise of consumer capitalism, pulled these two Protestant streams away from a shared social vision of ‘Christian civilization’ and toward consumer individualism in the forms of therapeutic, prosperity-driven theologies and consumer models of outreach. The third, the expansion of the liberal pluralist state, threatened American Protestantism’s privileged cultural status, set mainline advocates of pluralism against evangelical defenders of ‘Christian America,’ and restructured the ways dissenter Protestants engaged society. By the close of the twentieth century, these changes had propelled the demographic and cultural assent of evangelical organizations over older Protestant denominations, making them the new ‘mainline.’

Charles Clayton Morrison’s personality set the tone for the refounded Century, and his personal connections enabled the magazine’s survival. It makes sense, then, to begin this study of the Century with a look at Morrison’s biography, particularly the ways that his life tracked with the lives of other early mainline leaders. As the Century reflected Morrison’s character, he, in turn, reflected the character of liberal Protestantism at the opening of the twentieth century, particularly its eagerness to accumulate and deploy cultural capital. The power associated with cultural capital was not the divine right of kings, but the deserved right of experts. It became a potent force as the nineteenth century gave way to the early twentieth, the heyday of idealistic, ambitious, and credentialed Progressives.

Using materials and events from the years immediately following the Great War, this chapter examines the religious dimensions of the relationship between the United States and its military in the interwar period. Written sources from the period used Christian language and imagery to develop a civil religious orthodoxy to which idealization and veneration of the soldier are central. Embodied and performative sources, such as parades and anti-communist riots, indicate that soldiers engaged with and often embraced this civil religion, accepting the authority society bestowed on them and acting the part of the word of the nation made flesh.

The rise and fall of the renewal movement illustrates the mutual influence between religion and the city during a traumatic period for urban America. The renewal movement created a network of church-based and secular institutions that challenged the effects of deindustrialization and racism, and sought to restore a cohesive and just social order to urban neighborhoods. This network buttressed other movements for community empowerment and social justice, which collectively nourished a broad, eclectic collection of liberal and leftist organizations. However, the liberal consensus could not hold, as internal tensions in the renewal movement mirrored broader tensions across this alliance. Ultimately, renewalists abandoned plans for a reconciled community in favor of pluralism; they endorsed ministries and church structures that encouraged local and ethnic autonomy, at the expense of more ambitious agendas for spiritual or social reform. Ultimately, the renewal movement indicates how the urban experience shaped liberal Protestantism in the postwar period.

Chapter 7 traces the initial favorable reception of Bushnell’s God’s Word to Women among biblical scholars, as well as its ultimate failure to accomplish the social and religious revolution that Bushnell had hoped to achieve. As it turned out, the book that transcended simple categorization proved ill-suited to an era marked by the increasing polarization of American Protestantism. Sharing a commitment to the authority of the Scriptures with Fundamentalists, but advancing a progressive feminist interpretation of those Scriptures, Bushnell failed to fit securely within either Fundamentalist or Modernist camps. With liberals and conservatives sorting themselves into opposing factions, the once-vibrant Protestant women’s culture that had flourished in late-Victorian America began to break down, and with it the cultural space that had been vital to the development of a robust Christian feminism.

Chapter 3 argues for the materiality of emotional practice, even when emotion is conceived of as immaterial or “immediate” experience. Emotions are especially important mediators of experience for Protestants because they can be conceived of as immaterial. Drawing on ethnographic studies of mainline and Charismatic church communities, this chapter shows that styles of enthusiastic practice (Enlightened, Romantic) make a difference as to what emotions are taken seriously. Emotions count as evidence in different ways for each: “depth” indicates for mainstream, liberal Protestants a real emotion, one that is in the immaterial part of the self, whereas for the Charismatics, “intensity” provides evidence, i.e. the material force of bodily movements and sensations counts as real. Their “belief” is framed as “knowledge”: they are certain. Rather appalled at this claim, the liberal Protestants engage in an emotional practice of doubt, which they view as essential to maintaining personal autonomy, even as they subscribe to conviction. Doubt is, however, also a material practice, dependent on a specific way of doing enthusiasm.

This chapter outlines the foundations that shaped the racial liberalism of American liberal Protestants from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Included is an overview of their missionary service with the Japan YMCA, the modernist theology that inspired their social reform, and the role emerging trends in the social sciences played in shaping their views on race and assimilation in the early 1900s. The chapter also introduces the impact racial liberalism had on Asian North Americans who embraced assimilation and acculturation in the 1920s and 1930s as the best solution to prevent racial discrimination.

After examining who supported the Society for the Suppression of Vice, this chapter explores why so many social leaders and prominent liberal ministers, usually recognized as leading social and cultural progressive voices in their particular fields, wholeheartedly supported the censorship activities of the Watch and Ward Society. Four key sources shaped the anti-vice reformers’ rationale for the censorship of obscene literature: liberal Protestant theology, nineteenth-century moral philosophy, the Whig-Republican view of the public role of religion in society, and their Victorian view of literature. To the anti-vice activists, licentious literature fostered an animalism that hindered the gradual Christianization of society, ruined individuals moral character, encouraged other antisocial behaviors, and contradicted the basic canons of what constituted good literature. For these reasons, the moral reformers argued, voluntary organizations and the state had a moral obligation to suppress obscene works that threatened the well-being of society.