Christianity's American Fate
How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular
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- £13.99
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
Tracing the rise of evangelicalism and the decline of mainline Protestantism in American religious and cultural life
How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This sweeping work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life. In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps—conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism. A Protestant evangelicalism that was comfortable with patriarchy and white supremacy soon became the country’s dominant Christian cultural force.
Hollinger explains the origins of what he calls Protestantism’s “two-party system” in the United States, finding its roots in America’s religious culture of dissent, as established by seventeenth-century colonists who broke away from Europe’s religious traditions; the constitutional separation of church and state, which enabled religious diversity; and the constant influx of immigrants, who found solidarity in churches. Hollinger argues that the United States became not only overwhelmingly Protestant but Protestant on steroids. By the 1960s, Jews and other non-Christians had diversified the nation ethnoreligiously, inspiring more inclusive notions of community. But by embracing a socially diverse and scientifically engaged modernity, Hollinger tells us, ecumenical Protestants also set the terms by which evangelicals became reactionary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This cogent and comprehensive chronicle by historian Hollinger (Protestants Abroad) outlines how Protestant America's "two-party system" came to be. Divided between progressive, cosmopolitan "ecumenicals" on the one hand and conservative evangelicals on the other, this system, Hollinger contends, has shaped U.S. politics for centuries, and the "destiny of the United States as a whole remains significantly determined by individuals and groups who claim the authority to speak for Christianity." The author details how "Protestant cultural hegemony" formed in the country's earliest years and was disrupted in the 20th century by the assimilation of Jewish immigrants and the dissent of Protestant missionaries critical of Protestantism's "religious parochialism." The 1960s saw the split between ecumenicals and evangelicals grow as the latter resisted calls to engage in the civil rights movement while the former agitated for racial justice. Hollinger describes the decline of ecumenical churches, which lost a third of their congregants amid growing secularization by the 21st century, leaving evangelicals with a larger relative share of "Christianity's hollowed-out remnant." The history is thorough and often surprising, demonstrating how contemporary political fissures have been shaped by internecine conflicts within Protestantism. This is superlative religious history.
