Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with David A. Hollinger

• Published in: Historically speaking Vol. 14; no. 5; pp. 11 - 13
• Main Author: Stephens, Randall J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.11.2013
• Subjects: American culture; American history; Christianity; Essays; Evangelicalism; Historians; Liberalism; Missionaries; Political parties; Religion; Scholars; Secularism; United States > US
• ISSN: 1941-4188; 1944-6438; 1944-6438
• DOI: 10.1353/hsp.2013.0059

Hollinger has authored a variety of books on American intellectual history, including Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995) and Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1998). Hollinger: The leaders of the classical denominations of the old "Protestant Establishment"-especially the Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Northern Presbyterians, Northern Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ-pushed their constituencies in a variety of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-imperialist directions that have come increasingly to characterize American culture outside the Republican Party. The part of After Cloven Tongues of Fire to which you refer here tries to expose the dangers of the current practice of giving religious ideas a pass-not actually interrogating them the way we do ideas about gender, the economy, race, etc.-as if they were private, even while their public character is being trumpeted by a great range of political actors. Many of the missionary-connected Americans of the mid-century decades are in some compelling respects the Anglo-Protestant equivalents of the cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals that I wrote about in several earlier books, especially Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal.