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A MAINLINE MOMENT: THE AMERICAN PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT REVISITED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

DAVID SEHAT
DAVID SEHAT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Georgia State University E-mail: [email protected]
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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
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 735 - 747
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Hutchison, William R., ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989), viiiGoogle Scholar.

2 Schultz, Kevin M., Tri-faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York, 2011), 10Google Scholar.

3 Hutchison, Between the Times, ix.

4 Ibid., ix–xv.

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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).