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This chapter examines the decline in Liberal Protestant denominations in recent decades. This is one of the best known religious trends of the last several decades, but it often is misunderstood. Contrary to what many believe, this decline has not occurred because droves of people have been leaving more liberal denominations to join more conservative religious groups. Nor does the decline of liberal denominations mean that liberal religious ideas are waning. Indeed, as a set of ideas, religious liberalism steadily has gained ground in the United States, whatever the fate of the denominations most closely associated with it. Indeed, Americans' increasing endorsement of theological liberalism's core tenets—appreciating other religions, adjusting traditional belief and practice to modern circumstances, rejecting biblical literalism—shows that religious liberalism is a more potent cultural presence than many realize.

This chapter examines religious disaffiliation as itself a potentially religious act. It argues that “nothing in particular,” a religious option commonly presented to respondents on social scientific surveys, often entails an affirmation of religious cosmopolitanism rather than simple secularization or the rejection of religion altogether. This kind of religious cosmopolitanism—this preference for religion “in general” rather than “in particular”—has a long history in the United States, which this chapter tracks across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attends especially to liberal Protestantism and other forms of religious liberalism as the source of modern religious cosmopolitanism and argues that the development of religious cosmopolitanism made religious disaffiliation easier for many Americans and even necessary for some. Understanding the religious nature of some religious disaffiliation is essential to understanding the broader phenomenon of religious disaffiliation in the twenty-first century.

The conclusion opens with the story of Frank Laubach, an American missionary to the Philippines who became a noted mystic, bestselling author, and most famously, a hugely influential global promoter of literacy. Laubach's story illustrates many of the most important trends in liberal Protestantism in the twentieth century, especially the way its evangelistic energies became sublimated into social reform. But Laubach's story also reflects significant changes in American spirituality in the twentieth century, changes that undergirded the “cultural victory” of liberal religion. As a bestselling author on prayer and mysticism, he shows how religious reading and consuming became critical components of the lived religion of countless ordinary Americans. The conclusion considers the implications of reading as a religious practice for the field of religious studies. Laubach's encounter with Islam as a missionary, which prompted both a spiritual crisis and his shift from evangelism to literacy work, underscores another key facet of religious liberalism in the twentieth century: the spiritual and the ethical implications of religious cosmopolitanism. The conclusion then relates these mid-century developments to the wider religious environment of the 1960s and beyond, including the re-emergence of a more politically oriented evangelicalism and the increasing diversity of American religious life.

Fundamentalists are the perpetual malcontents, the reactionaries, who dislike what they see in the movies, what they read in the newspapers, and what they know to be going on in liberal churches. If there is a dialectic of some kind between fundamentalism and modernity, then the other side of the coin is to see how modernity has been influenced by fundamentalism. This chapter argues that liberal and moderate Christians have often let the fundamentalists define their agenda, so that it is they who are acting out their discontents with the fundamentalists. In other words, it deals with religious liberalism—the non-fundamentalist constituency in mainstream or old-line churches that makes up a significant majority of the ways in which people define their faith. The chapter tries to answer three issues: whether and in what manner liberals have let fundamentalists define their agendas for them, the cultural forces that may keep fundamentalists going in the future, and what the possibilities may be for liberals (and moderates) to seize the initiative.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of great upheaval in American life. The politics of gender, sexuality, and family changed, transformed by new reproductive technologies and a resurgent feminist movement. The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal eroded Americans' confidence in political institutions. This period also saw a remarkable intellectual ferment of American religious liberalism, which assumed that religion had to adapt to a changing culture and that social and political reform were necessary imperatives for committed people of faith. This chapter presents the following documents: John F. Kennedy's “Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association” (1960), Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Jerry Falwell's “Ministers and Marches” (1965), Abraham Heschel's “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam” (1967), and Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father (1973).

The conclusion offers some suggestions for the broader implications of studying the German missionary enterprise in China. It argues that the German Protestant and Catholic models of missionary work, with the stress on individual conversion, devoid of direct social and political critique, look remarkably similar to the type of Christianity driving religious conversion in China today. The debates between liberal and conservative approaches to indigenization within the German missionary enterprise in the 1920s also continue to exist within the global Christian community. The chapter concludes by comparing the trajectories of two individual German missionaries, one Catholic and one Protestant, as a way to illuminate the broader arguments in the book.

In the mid-1850s, Kelso was a successful schoolteacher and preacher, reading through a college curriculum in his off hours and, intellectually, pushing past the boundaries of Methodist orthodoxy. But his married life was miserable. His wife Adelia was so depressed he feared for her sanity, and he discovered she had been aborting her pregnancies. By the time she confessed she didn’t love him and they agreed to divorce, he had fallen in love with one of his nineteen-year-old students. His marital troubles, however, scandalized his church and the congregation denounced him. Publicly renouncing Methodism, he became “a wifeless, homeless, churchless . . . and moneyless wanderer upon the earth.” Feeling reckless, he crossed thin ice on the Missouri River, fell through, and nearly drowned.

Turning fifty, Kelso planned to enlist “in the invincible little army of Liberalism” by lecturing across the country and publishing his books. A report he published from the road tried to explain desert mirages. In New York City, he met with other freethinkers and arranged to have some of his books printed. In Rochester, New York, he met with reformers and spiritualists. But his health would not permit him to be a public lecturer. For months, the disappointment nearly paralyzed him. On a train trip he saw another mirage and reflected that the weary desert traveler who leaves the true path to pursue a phantom lake was like people “who have left the paths of reason, science, and common-sense to follow the phantoms” of religion. Yet he himself soon converted to spiritualism, convinced that the spirits of his dead children hovered about to comfort him.