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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.

During the Gilded Age, a plethora of books and sermons provided portraits of heaven. Through their preaching and publications, urban revivalists, led by Dwight L. Moody, and prominent pastors, most notably Henry Ward Beecher, T. Dewitt Talmage, and Phillips Brooks, extolled the glories of the celestial realm and urged people to prepare properly for heaven. Theological liberalism, especially “Progressive Orthodoxy,” attracted many proponents who either repudiated or downplayed the conventional notion of hell and salvation. Religious leaders debated whether those who did not hear the gospel message on earth would have a chance to respond to it after death. Whether they were evangelicals or liberals, Gilded Age Christians emphasized the happiness, holiness, and love of heaven. They also accentuated, more than earlier generations, the concepts of vigorous and varied activities, progress, and personal growth, themes that became dominant in Progressive portraits of paradise.

This chapter explores how Karl Barth responded to the social crisis in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Barth’s experience as a pastor and professor early in the twentieth century led him to seek an alternative to nineteenth-century theological liberalism, which he had imbibed during his own education. Many of Barth’s critics, as well as his supporters, have mistakenly assumed that Barth’s rejection of theological liberalism entailed and included a matching rejection of political liberalism. This chapter argues that Barth supported democratic liberalism even while rejecting theological liberalism. Focusing primarily on his early lectures, the chapter examines how Barth’s vision of the legitimacy of modern politics was not in tension with his theological project; on the contrary his politics afforded him the theological freedom to work toward a renewal of dogmatic orthodoxy.

Benjamin Mays was a groundbreaking religious intellectual whose theological perspective was shaped by world travel. His work and travel in the 1930s show how the international roots of the civil rights movement were fed by various intellectual streams including theological liberalism, a radical tradition of black God-talk, and the “Howard School,” the extraordinary collection of intellectuals at Howard University during this period. His exposure to India and his later work with the international ecumenical movement revealed to Mays connections between American racism and the experiences of imperialism and colonialism. A Christian theologian, he outlined a justice-oriented black social Christianity, interested in and responsive to social realities. He also demonstrated that comparative religious studies would be an essential tool for American Christians who wanted to use liberative lessons from other cultures and religious traditions in the U.S. context.

This chapter describes the Stanton Street Baptist Church in downtown Manhattan, which had undergone physical moves as well as congregational transformations. From the early teens, it had stood for theological liberalism against the fundamentalist tide that swept over much American Protestantism in the 1920s. Its best-known minister had been Harry Emerson Fosdick, a remarkable preacher who became deeply embroiled in the modernist-fundamentalist controversies of that decade. Forced to resign from the First Presbyterian Church in New York, Fosdick was hired as the preaching minister by the Park Avenue Baptist Church, Riverside's immediate predecessor. He set conditions: first, no doctrinal or denominational barriers could be placed in the way of potential members; second, the congregation had to commit to a new building.

This chapter focuses on Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the most popular Nonconformist preacher of the reign of Queen Victoria and the strongest opponent of attempts to modify, explain away, or repudiate traditional Evangelical teaching on eternal punishment. For over thirty years, Spurgeon kept an eagle eye out for any of his fellow Dissenters who showed signs of straying from his own narrow brand of conservative Evangelicalism. By the end of 1870, he became increasingly worried by the growth of theological liberalism in the churches, and increasingly bellicose in his call to arms to stop the spread of its insidious influence.

This final chapter summarizes the book’s argument, namely that there is a long continuity in fundamentalist Christian engagement with US and world politics that goes back to the 1930s, that this political engagement emerged originally over faith-based opposition to the New Deal and was perpetuated in the Cold War era’s faith-based anticommunism. More significantly, it was Carl McIntire and his grassroots separatist fundamentalist followers rather than his more moderate and elite-oriented new evangelical rivals who forged a close alliance with Republican conservatives in the latter 1950s, an enduring alliance that fed directly into the 1970s emergence of the New Right and the New Christian Right.