The esteemed American intellectual historian David A. Hollinger's newest book is a sort of extended essay pulling together his three most recent works – Protestants abroad: how missionaries tried to change the world but changed America (Princeton 2017), After cloven tongues of fire: Protestant liberalism in American history (Princeton 2013) and the personal memoir When this mask of flesh is broken: the story of an American Protestant family (Denver, Co 2019) – and marrying them to some excellent recent scholarship. For twentieth-century American religion, Hollinger wisely condenses the findings of Anthea Butler, Kristin Du Mez, Randall Balmer and other scholars who demonstrate the linkages between the form of Christianity practised by White American Evangelicals, their anti-Black racism and their ties to the Republican Party and its brand of macho white masculinity. Hollinger needs their findings to show how the White Evangelicals in his book, whom he sets at war with the Protestants he calls ecumenical, became politically powerful, which he attributes to the decline of ecumenical church membership. Hollinger argues that the essential story of American religion is this contest between the ecumenicals, usually referred to as ‘mainline’, who develop some sensitivity to non-Americans and ultimately civil rights by being missionaries or the children thereof – as Hollinger previously argued in Protestants abroad – and the Evangelicals who take over the mission field and ultimately win the cause of bigotry for the White House in 2016. His approach is historical, political and even theological all at once. How ecumenical leaders tried to meet the challenge of modernity ‘and how their more conservative Protestant contemporaries reacted to their initiatives’, Hollinger claims, ‘is the central dynamic in Christianity's relation to the public affairs of the United States during the past one hundred years’ (p. 67).
Hollinger aims for currency in his approach to a topic that has occupied his mind since the very beginning of his career, going so far as to capitalise not only Black but also White and, disappointingly, even Brown, which is not an ethno-racial group. Hollinger previously addressed multiculturalism as an idea in his controversial Postethnic America: beyond multiculturalism (New York 1995, new edn 2005), pointing out how the ‘ethno-racial pentagon’ constructed identity and how multiple identities and even identities of affiliation made good American sense. (One wonders what he would say about the likes of Rachel Dolezal.) Yet Black Evangelical Protestants appear in this book mainly as adjuncts to the main players, the White ecumenical Protestants, who finally started letting the descendants of slaves into the Y and meetings of the World Council of Churches some years after the Holocaust. Hollinger claims that in 1963 the Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake ‘was way out front on the matter of Jim Crow’ (p. 96). In front of whom?
Hollinger reprises his argument from Postethnic America between Randolph Bourne and Horace M. Kallen, whom Hollinger wrongly characterises as a strict pluralist while the fated Bourne plays the hero as a cosmopolitan. Yet the cosmopolitanism Hollinger attributes to his ecumenical Protestants is very different from that outlined in Postethnic America, where he says cosmopolitanism ‘favors voluntary affiliations’ and ‘promotes multiple identities’ while emphasising ‘the dynamic and changing character of many groups’ and being ‘responsive to the potential for creating new cultural combinations’ (pp. 3–4, tenth anniversary edn). In Hollinger's new book, cosmopolitan simply means foreign exposure through missionary work and a softened idea of what varieties of Christian practice might be acceptable, although his more truly pluralistic exponents, such as Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School, did move beyond conversion. Nevertheless, while Lutherans are so necessary to Hollinger's argumentation that he calls their synod ‘poorly named’ because it is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, it is only poorly named for his argument. The ELCA has missionaries spreading the good news abroad to this day and weathered a significant splinter movement around the turn of the last century when the leadership chose to get ecumenical with the Episcopals. Selected leaders do not always tell the whole story.
Hollinger's history focuses primarily on the second half of the twentieth century, with a wan William James passing a sort of freethinking baton to the ecumenical somehow. While the ecumenical movement may be said to have begun with the broad church movement in the Church of England in the early nineteenth century, the Atlantic does not get crossed in this book, nor does the nineteenth century. While in another recent work of Hollinger's, his contribution to an important anthology of American intellectual history published in 2017, he did dip into the nineteenth century – at least into David Sehat's excellent The myth of American religious freedom (2011) – in this one he looks away from the liberal Christians in New England who fostered an American version of the broad church idea and those who later sought to ‘unite religion against irreligion’ at the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, a project that was deeply related to the mission field. Indeed, there is no religious prehistory for the history told in Christianity's American fate because its principal reference point is eternal: the Christian Bible itself.
Rather than engaging with the fundamental conflict between democratic freedom in a pluralistic society and the creedal certainty of the Christ-committed, Hollinger is interested in how the Jewish-ecumenical coalition got built in the twentieth century through the promotion of a tri-faith America that included liberal Catholics and how this alienated Evangelicals. The book does contain Evangelicals such as Billy Graham, but it does not demonstrate their engagement with the liberal theologians such as Paul Tillich nor does it explain how the Supreme Court of the United States became full of Catholics. Instead, this master of his craft crisply and energetically lays out the ‘paradox of a religious politics in a secular society’ (p. 157) and the recent church history that fed into it.
