Chapter 1. Introduction: The Other Protestants
1. John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book (New York, 2019), and Bart D. Ehrman, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, 4th ed. (New York, 2017) are two excellent guides to the current state of biblical scholarship. See also Konrad Schmid and Jens Schroter, The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Cambridge, MA, 2021).
2. See especially four excellent studies: Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York, 2019); Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, 2020); John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids, MI, 2018); and Sarah Posner, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (New York, 2020).
3. William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989) remains after more than three decades a valuable collection of scholarly studies of this wing of American Protestantism.
4. I have discussed these terminological issues in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013), xiii–xiv, and in Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017), 10–11.
5. This perspective has been developed by N. J. Demerath III, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34 (1995), 458–469. See also Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York, 2009), esp. 187–188.
6. This theory was advanced with the greatest notice by Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in the Sociology of Religion (New York, 1972).
7. Pew Research Center, “More White Americans Adopted Than Shed Evangelical Label during Trump Presidency, Especially His Supporters,” September 15, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/15/more-white-americans-adopted-than-shed-evangelical-label-during-trump-presidency-especially-his-supporters/. The findings of the Pew study are convincingly analyzed by political scientist Ryan Burge, “Why ‘Evangelical’ Is Becoming Another Word for ‘Republican,’ ” New York Times, October 31, 2021. 2
8. Craig Melvin, “ ‘Enlightenment Is on the Ballot’: Jon Meacham on Upcoming Elections,” MSNBC, June 22, 2020, https://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/-enlightenment-is-on-the-ballot-jon-meacham-on-upcoming-elections-85701701687.
9. “Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy,” Atlantic, November 15, 2020. Of the many other writers who have addressed this crisis, one of the most trenchant is Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Philadelphia, 2019).
10. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, DC, 2021) is one of many works exposing epistemic closure on the secular left as well as the religious right. See also John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black Americans (New York, 2021).
11. Mark Noll, quoted by Peter Wehner, “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart: Christians Must Reclaim Jesus from His Church,” Atlantic, October 24, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/. This essay by Wehner, a leading anti-Trump evangelical writer, exemplifies the common impulse to downplay, if not actually deny, the connection between evangelicalism’s history and its current appeal to pro-Trump Republicans.
12. “NIH Director: ‘Our Culture Wars Are Killing People,’ ” PBS, November 3, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/video/nih-director-our-culture-wars-are-killing-people-dpyfnx/.
13. For a judicious commentary on how the history of evangelical thought renders QAnon’s claims believable, see Christopher Douglas, “Revenge Is a Genre Best Served Old: Apocalypse in Christian Right Literature and Politics,” Religion 13 (2021).
14. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York, 2018), xiv.
15. W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays (London, 1879), 346.
Chapter 2. A Country Protestant on Steroids
1. David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011).
2. Writing in 1835, Tocqueville observed that “Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago, 2002), 280–281.
3. H. K. Carroll, ed., The Religious Forces of the United States (New York, 1896), 392.
4. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
5. The impact on Weber of his trip of 1904 is detailed in Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton, 2011).
6. Grover Cleveland as quoted in Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1: The Irony of It All, 1893–1919 (Chicago, 1986), 42.
7. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976).
8. Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, 1896).
9. US Department of Education, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, 1993), 65.
10. David Bebbington, “Evangelism and Secularization in Britain and America from the Eighteenth Century to the Present,” in David Hempton and Hugh McLeod, eds., Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (New York, 2017), 77.
11. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970), 177–179.
12. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1964), 118.
13. Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago, 2012), 12.
14. John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids, MI, 2018), 101, emphasis original.
Chapter 3. Jewish Immigrants versus Anglo-Protestant Hegemony
1. I have addressed this event more extensively in my Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996). See also my defense of the practice of openly recognizing the cultural impact of this non-Christian population, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Rather Than Avoided or Mystified,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004), 594–602.
2. Randolph Bourne, “The Jew and Transnational America,” Menorah Journal 2 (1916), 277–284, esp. 284; Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic 118 (1916), 86–97.
3. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (New York, 1909); Thorstein Veblen, “The Intellectual Preeminence of Jews in Modern Europe,” Political Science Quarterly 34 (1919), 33–42.
4. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York, 1916).
5. C. Luther Fry, ed., 1933 Year Book of the Churches (New York, 1933), 311–316, as cited by William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989), 17.
6. Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT, 1985), 326.
7. The results of the Carnegie study, which was designed by sociologist Martin Trow, are reported in Stephen Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education (New York, 1974).
8. Bruce Kuklick, From Churchmen to Philosophers (New Haven, CT, 1985), is the standard treatment of this development.
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902); Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (New York, 1913).
10. “Humanist Manifesto,” New Humanist, May 1933. The Protestant matrix for the manifesto is extensively explored by Stephen P. Weldon, The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism (Baltimore, 2020), 53–61.
11. Morris R. Cohen’s most important works were Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (New York, 1931) and Law and the Social Order: Essays in Legal Philosophy (New York, 1933). I have addressed his career in my Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1975).
12. “How Today’s Thinkers Serve Society,” National Observer, July 20, 1964, 18. This article was called to my attention by Laurie Shrage.
13. Walter Kaufmann, A Critique of Religion and Philosophy (New York, 1958), 302.
14. Christian Smith, “Introduction,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley, CA, 2003), 47.
15. Robert F. Goheen, “The Seminary and the University,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, July 1960, quoted in Clyde A. Holbrook, ed., Religion: A Humanistic Field (Princeton, 1963), 24. Born to missionary parents in India, Goheen as president of Princeton worked to diminish racial, religious, and gender prejudice at that institution. Under his leadership, women were admitted for the first time as undergraduates.
16. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988), 308–309, 313.
17. Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Pulpit and the Pews,” in William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989), 31.
18. Leslie A. Fiedler, “Master of Dreams: The Jew in a Gentile World,” Partisan Review, Summer 1967, as reprinted in Fiedler, To the Gentiles (New York, 1971), 183.
19. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), 6.
20. The percentage of Jews in many professions and institutions is documented in Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the American Scene (Cambridge, MA, 1995). Lipset and Raab note that of the American scientists who won a Nobel Prize before 1965, 27 percent were Jewish.
21. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, 1990).
22. Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York, 2018), 11. For a discerning discussion of the relative lack of Protestant feminists and attention to some important cases, see Anne Braude, “A Religious Feminist—Who Can Find Her? Historiographical Challenges from the National Organization of Women,” Journal of Religion 84 (2004), 555–572.
23. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in Religious Sociology (New York, 1955).
24. K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago, 2019).
25. Steinberg, Academic Melting Pot, 141.
26. A lucid account of the church-and-state suits brought by Pfeffer, and of the rulings of the US Supreme Court that followed, is found in David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (New Haven, CT, 2022).
27. Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York, 1990), 220.
28. “Billy Graham Responds to Lingering Anger over 1972 Remarks on Jews,” New York Times, March 17, 2002, reports on the National Archives’ release of tapes of this conversation of fifty years before and the ensuing controversy. Graham had vigorously denied having ever spoken about Jews, with Nixon or anyone else, except “in the most positive” terms.
29. Roy J. Harris, Jr., “The Best-Selling Record of All,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2009.
30. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York, 1993), 157.
31. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London, 1934).
Chapter 4. The Missionary Boomerang
1. C. Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott, 1865–1955 (Geneva, 1985), 665.
2. Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (New York, 1869), 493.
3. I have addressed this “boomerang effect” of Protestant foreign missions on American public life in my Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017).
4. Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicalism (New York, 2018), 46.
5. See, for example, Soojin Chung, Adopting for God: The Mission to Change America through Transracial Adoption (New York, 2021).
6. For an account of Kagawa’s role in the antiracist campaign of ecumenicals, see David P. King, “The West Looks East: The Influence of Tohohiko Kagawa on American Mainline Protestants,” Church History 80 (2011), 302–320.
7. Carl F. Bowman, Brethren Society: The Cultural Transformation of a “Peculiar People” (Baltimore, 1995), 388.
8. Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York, 1931). Will Rogers is quoted by Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 153. Paul Hutchinson, “Breeder of Life,” Christian Century, May 20, 1931, 683. For the comparison to Marco Polo, see James Claude Thomson Jr., “Pearl S. Buck and the American Quest for China,” in Elisabeth J. Lipscomb et al., eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium (Westport, CT, 1994), 14.
9. Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth (New York, 2010), 228–229.
10. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York, 1946).
11. Jeremy Treglown, Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima (New York, 2019), 136.
12. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941; Henry Wallace, The Century of the Common Man (New York, 1943).
13. In a typical flourish, Wallace concluded the speech of May 8, 1942, which became the basis for his book of 1943, in an entirely biblical voice. “No compromise with Satan is possible.… The People’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord.” Henry Wallace, “The Century of the Common Man,” in Prefaces to Peace (New York, 1943), 375.
14. Jane Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019).
15. Sherwood Moran, Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters Based on Work in the Field (First Marine Division, July 17, 1943).
16. Hugh Milford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York, 2013), 276, 288.
17. Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam (New York, 1944).
18. Daniel J. Fleming, Whither Missions (New York, 1925).
19. E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road (London, 1925); E. Stanley Jones, Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation (New York, 1948), 77.
20. Edmund D. Soper, The Religions of Mankind (New York, 1921). Other works in this tradition included Robert E. Hume, World Living Religions (New York, 1924), and Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Tradition (New York, 1958).
21. William Ernest Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York, 1932).
22. William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven, CT, 1912).
23. William Ernest Hocking, The Spirit of World Politics (New York, 1932), 8, as quoted by John Stuart, “Empire, Mission, Ecumenism, and Human Rights,” Church History 83 (2014), 119.
24. Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions, 65, 67, 70, 77, 246, 254.
25. Frederick Bohn Fisher, “Re-Thinking Missions,” Christian Century, December 12, 1932.
26. Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions, 29, 40, 44.
27. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929), 280.
28. Sherwood Eddy, “Church Union in India,” Christian Century, March 28, 1920, 13.
29. Henry P. Van Dusen, World Christianity: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (New York, 1947), 288.
Chapter 5. The Apotheosis of Liberal Protestantism
1. John C. Bennett, Christians and the State (New York, 1958), 5, 22, 187.
2. “Christian Amendment,” in Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, on S. J. Res 87, May 13 and 17, 1954, 78–79.
3. Michael G. Thompson, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2015); Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, 2017); Gene Zubovich, Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (Philadelphia, 2022).
4. While the Social Gospel was largely a middle-class movement, like the political Progressive movement with which it was closely allied, recent scholarship has established that much of the impetus for the Social Gospel came from working-class Americans, including craftsmen and trade unionists. See especially Heath Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York, 2015), and the symposium, “State of the Field of Social Gospel Studies,” Church History 84 (2015), 195–219.
5. James 2:18.
6. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), 4.
7. Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), is a helpful guide to the ways in which the fundamentalist movement was innovative, rather than a straightforward extension of nineteenth-century theological conservatism.
8. Sandra C. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan (Kent, OH, 1984).
9. See Kelley J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan (Lawrence, KS, 2011). For a helpful reminder that early fundamentalism had a large following in urban as well as rural and small-town America, see Wallace Best, “Battle for the Soul of a City: John Roach Straton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York, 1922–1935,” Church History 90 (2021), 367–397.
10. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1932).
11. Edmund D. Soper, quoted in Time, November 8, 1926.
12. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), has shown that fundamentalist preachers and laymen put money into far-right organizations and schools and often attacked the New Deal as “the anti-Christ,” reflecting the strong Manichean tendency of fundamentalists to treat their enemies as evil rather than rivals within a single community.
13. Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York, 2019), is a brilliant study of the connection between evangelical religion and antiregulation politics long before, as well as after, World War II.
14. Luke 10:25–37.
15. Dulles’s historic role as an ecumenical Protestant leader remains largely unrecognized, overshadowed by his later prominence as secretary of state. A helpful study is Bevan Sewell, “Pragmatism, Religion, and John Foster Dulles’ Embrace of Christian Internationalism in the 1930s,” Diplomatic History 41 (2017), 799–823.
16. “American Malvern,” Time, March 16, 1942.
17. Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2015), 148.
18. This included freedom from police brutality and mob violence, the right to employment, the right to join a labor union, the right to receive equal services, and the right to participate fully in government institutions, including the military. Gene Zubovich, “Human Rights Abroad, against Jim Crow at Home: The Political Mobilization of the American Ecumenical Protestants in the World War II Era,” Journal of American History 105 (2018), 267. See also Zubovich, Before the Religious Right.
19. Frederick Nolde, ed., Toward World-Wide Christianity (New York, 1946), 142.
20. Federal Council of Churches, The Church and Race Relations: An Official Statement Approved by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America at a Special Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, March 5–7, 1946 (New York, 1946).
21. The role of these African Americans in the ecumenical leadership is discerningly analyzed by David W. Willis, “An Enduring Distance: Black Americans and the Establishment,” in William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York, 1989), 168–192, and by Dennis C. Dickerson, “African American Religious Intellectuals and the Theological Foundations of the Civil Rights Movement, 1930–55,” Church History 74 (2005), 217–235.
22. Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christians, Nonviolence, and Modern American Democracy (New York, 2009), 204–208.
23. Virginia L. Brereton, “United and Slighted: Women as Subordinated Insiders,” in Hutchison, Between the Times, 155.
24. Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago, 1996), 247. The most comprehensive and discerning study of organized churchwomen is Margaret Bendroth, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920–1980 (New York, 2022).
25. Buell G. Gallagher, Color and Conscience: The Irrepressible Conflict (New York, 1946); Edmund D. Soper, Racism: A World Issue (New York, 1947).
26. Marty, Modern American Religion, 266.
27. Sara M. Evans, “Introduction,” in Evans, ed., Journeys That Opened Up the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–1975 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), 9.
28. M. Richard Shaull, Encounter with Revolution (New York, 1955).
29. Bennett, Christians and the State, 22.
30. Eisenhower’s statement of 1952 is often quoted out of context as an emblem for the apparent blandness of the era. But historian Patrick Henry has established that Eisenhower made this remark in the context of an antisectarian affirmation of the equality of all faiths; see Henry, “ ‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49 (1981), 35–49.
31. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), 174.
32. E.g., Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (New York, 2021), 221–224.
33. I have tried to clarify Niebuhr’s historical significance in my After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013), 211–225.
34. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York, 1959), 176.
35. Dochuk, Anointed with Oil, and Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York, 2015).
36. E. Earl Ellis, “Segregation and the Kingdom of God,” Christianity Today, March 18, 1957. The willingness of Carl Henry and other evangelical leaders involved in the launching of Christianity Today to make their peace with the Jim Crow regime of the South is copiously documented by Daniel Silliman, “An Evangelical Is Anyone Who Likes Billy Graham: Defining Evangelicalism with Carl Henry and Networks of Trust,” Church History 90 (2021), esp. 640–641.
37. Charles C. F. Henry, “Why Is the NCC Prestige Sagging?,” Christianity Today, February 2, 1959, 5. See also William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (New York, 2008), esp. 95–99.
38. Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 39. Wacker’s study of Graham is the best ever written, but by calling Graham “America’s Pastor” Wacker too nearly erases the America that Wacker himself acknowledges had no use for Graham. Moreover, Wacker refuses to hold Graham accountable for his role in licensing the anti-intellectualism and cultural complacency that profoundly affected the shape of American evangelicalism and, in turn, the “nation” of Wacker’s subtitle. For sharply contrasting critical assessments of this important book, see the reviews by Robert P. George, New York Times, December 21, 2014, and by myself, Christian Century, October 15, 2014. See also my “Billy Graham’s Missed Opportunities,” New York Times, February 18, 2018.
39. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Differing Views on Billy Graham: A Theologian Says Evangelist Is Simplifying Views on Life,” Life, July 1, 1957, 92.
40. Shaun A. Casey, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (New York, 2009), 184.
41. “Protestantism’s Third Phase,” Christian Century, January 18, 1961, 72.
42. Daniel Hummel shows how embedded evangelical support for Israel was in the notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition, which in the evangelical formulation embraced Zionism as a religious movement; see Hummel, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (Philadelphia, 2019).
Chapter 6. The 1960s and the Decline of the Mainline
1. William Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic (New York, 1964); Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (New York, 1961).
2. Ralph Dodge, The Unpopular Missionary (New York, 1964).
3. James Scherer, Missionary, Go Home! A Reappraisal of the Christian World Mission (New York, 1964).
4. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Christianity’s Third Great Challenge,” Christian Century, April 27, 1960, 505.
5. Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York, 1961); Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York, 1963); “The God Is Dead Movement,” Time, October 22, 1965.
6. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London, 1963), 66.
7. John C. Bennett, “A Most Welcome Event,” Christianity and Crisis, November 11, 1963, 202.
8. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York, 1965), 266, 268. A sampling of the animated discussion of Cox’s book was edited the following year by Daniel Callahan, The Secular City Debate (New York, 1966).
9. Cox, Secular City, 99.
10. The definitive study of this episode in progressive activism by ecumenical Protestant leaders is Jill K. Gill, Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left (DeKalb, IL, 2011).
11. Graham, quoted in Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2021), 34.
12. The ecumenical-evangelical divide on civil rights is extensively documented in Jesse Curtis, The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era (New York, 2021). For the often hidden connection between white supremacy and the theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy, see Stephen Young, “Biblical Inerrancy’s Long History as an Evangelical Activist for White Patriarchy,” Religion Dispatches, February 9, 2022.
13. This construction was popularized by Taylor Branch’s three-volume work, America in the King Years (New York, 1988–2006).
14. J. Edgar Hoover, “The Communist Menace: Red Goals and Christian Ideals,” Christianity Today, October 10, 1960, 3–5. Hoover’s later articles appeared in the issues following.
15. A book of 1969 brought into focus this developing but often ignored reality: Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches: A Sociologist Looks at the Widening Gap Between Clergy and Laymen (New York, 1969).
16. Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, 1994), 2.
17. General Social Survey, as cited by Ryan P. Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Minneapolis, 2021), 19. For the purpose of these surveys, demographers count seven major denominations as “mainline”: United Methodists, Evangelical (misleadingly named) Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Northern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ. A number of smaller confessions continued to have much in common with “the seven sisters,” including the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren, the Dutch Reformed, and—although not always considered Christian—the Unitarian-Universalists.
18. General Social Survey, “Social Change Report 26,” https://gss.norc.org/Documents/reports/social-change-reports/SC26.pdf.
19. Walter Lippmann, “The University,” New Republic, May 28, 1966, 17–20.
20. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, 1988), 162.
21. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Epilogue,” in Andrea Sterk, ed., Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects (Notre Dame, IN, 2002), 249, emphasis original. My own critique of the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education, in which I participated, is “Enough Already: American Universities Do Not Need More Christianity,” also included in Sterk, Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education, 40–49.
22. Dorothy Bass, “Revolutions, Quiet and Otherwise: Protestants and Higher Education during the 1960s,” in Parker J. Palmer, Barbara G. Wheeler, and James W. Fowler, eds., Caring for the Commonwealth: Education for Religious and Public Life (Atlanta, 1990), 209.
23. Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde, “The Demographic Imperative of Religious Change in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001), 468–500.
24. The latest studies show the continued aging of ecumenical churches. In 2019, the National Congregations Study found that 57 percent of members of ecumenical congregations were over sixty, while only 39 percent of evangelical church members were. Mark Chaves et al., Congregations in 21st Century America (Durham, NC, 2021), 42.
25. Kristy L. Slominski, Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States (New York, 2021), 3.
26. R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York, 2017).
27. Everyone who writes about the Southern Strategy is indebted to Rick Perlstein, “Lee Atwater’s Infamous Interview on the Southern Strategy,” Nation, November 13, 2012. The best study is Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (New York, 2021), which calls attention to the initial steps taken in the Republican Party circles of Barry Goldwater, prior even to Nixon and his advisors.
28. “The Religious States of America,” Washington Post, February 26, 2015.
Chapter 7. Ecumenical Democrats, Evangelical Republicans, and Post-Protestants
1. Josh Hawley, speech of 2017, as quoted in Katherine Stewart, “The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage,” New York Times, January 11, 2021. The popularity of this outlook in evangelical churches was a frequent theme of journalists in the wake of the 2020 election; see, for example, Stephanie McCrummen, “An American Kingdom,” Washington Post, July 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/11/mercy-culture-church/.
2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Christianity’s Third Great Challenge,” Christian Century, April 27, 1960, 505.
3. The scriptural warrant for this outlook is the vehemently sectarian imperative of 2 Corinthians 10:5, where the Apostle Paul demands that the disciples “cast down” all unfaithful impulses and “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
4. Randall Balmer, Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life (Lebanon, NH, 2021), 77.
5. A concise, accessible overview of the history of this issue is Garry Wills, “The Bishops Are Wrong about Biden—and Abortion,” New York Times, June 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/biden-bishops-communion-abortion.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Guest%20Essays.
6. Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions about Backlash,” Yale Law Journal 120 (2011).
7. Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2021), 83, 114.
8. George M. Marsden, “On Not Mistaking One Part for the Whole: The Future of American Evangelicalism in a Global Perspective,” in Mark Noll et al., eds., Evangelicals (Grand Rapids, 2019), 282. A trenchant critique of Marsden and the other chief contributors to Evangelicals is Christopher D. Cantwell, “How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture,” Religion Dispatches, March 4, 2021, https://religiondispatches.org/how-the-study-of-evangelicalism-has-blinded-us-to-the-problems-in-evangelical-culture/.
9. For a discussion of premillennial dispensationalism’s similarity to QAnon, see Andrew Gardner, “Why Are Christians so Susceptible to Conspiracy?,” Baptist News Global, August 31, 2020. See also Adam Williams, “QAnon Didn’t Just Spring Forth from the Void—It’s the Latest from a Familiar Movement,” Religion Dispatches, September 10, 2020, https://religiondispatches.org/qanon-didnt-just-spring-forth-from-the-void-its-the-latest-from-a-familiar-movement/.
10. Amanda Porterfield, “Bebbington’s Approach to Evangelical Christianity as a Pioneering Effort in Lived Religion,” in Noll et al., Evangelicals, 146. This volume also includes Bebbington’s own “The Nature of Evangelical Religion,” 31–55, and a roundtable discussion of Bebbington’s quadrilateral by six leading historians.
11. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, 2020), 3.
12. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York, 2010), 21–22, 26.
13. “White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in the Push for Vaccinations,” New York Times, April 5, 2021.
14. Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York, 2014), 261, and Molly Worthen, “The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society,” New York Times, April 13, 2017.
15. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), 56.
16. Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 2, 110.
17. Philip A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge, “A Conspiracy and the Heart of It: Religion and Q,” Religion in Public, November 6, 2020.
18. Alexander Theodoridis, quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “Trump True Believers Have Their Reasons,” New York Times, October 6, 2001.
19. Pat Robertson, 700 Club broadcast of November 17, 2020, linked by Crissy Stroop, “Why Do So Many Evangelicals Continue to Deny That Biden Won the Election,” Conversationalist, November 26, 2020, https://conversationalist.org/2020/11/26/many-evangelicals-continue-to-deny-that-biden-won-the-election/.
20. See the sympathetic study by David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia, 2014).
21. “Evangelical Lobbyist Resigns,” New York Times, December 12, 2008.
22. David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity (Louisville, KY, 2020). For Gushee’s brief discussion of the ecumenical tradition, see 114 and 169.
23. Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 222.
24. Gary North, quoted in Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York, 2019), 119.
25. The Kinzinger family letter was published in full in Reid J. Epstein, “Adam Kinzinger’s Lonely Mission,” New York Times, February 15, 2021.
26. John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids, MI, 2018), 113.
27. Pew Research Center, “Faith on the Hill,” February 4, 2021, https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/04/faith-on-the-hill-2021/.
28. Pew Research Center, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Record Pace” (October 17, 2019), https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/10/Trends-in-Religious-Identity-and-Attendance-FOR-WEB-1.pdf. Some other surveys, phrasing the question differently, generated even higher percentages of nonaffiliates. The Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2016 concluded that 31 percent of Americans had no religious affiliation. See Stephen Ansolabehere et al., “CCES Common Content, 2016,” https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910/DVN/GDF6Z0.
29. Gregory A. Smith, “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated” (Pew Research Center, December 14, 2021), https://www.pewforum.org/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/. See also Yonat Shimron, “More Americans Are Becoming Secular,” Washington Post, December 16, 2021.
30. That the greater social acceptance of nonaffiliation accelerated the numbers of nones is a major point of Ryan P. Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Minneapolis, 2021), esp. 42–46. For Burge’s analysis of the increase of African American nonaffiliates, see 89–91. An extensive analysis of the internal composition of the nonaffiliating population is found in David E. Campbell, Geoffrey C. Layman, and John C. Green, Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (New York, 2021).
31. For a useful summary of recent membership figures, see Ryan Burge, “Why It’s Unlikely US Mainline Protestants Outnumber Evangelicals,” Religion Unplugged, July 12, 2021, https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/7/12/why-its-unlikely-us-mainline-protestants-outnumber-evangelicals.
32. David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity (Louisville, 2020), 170.
33. Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York, 2006), 207.
34. Stephen Bullivant, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (New York, 2020).
35. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY, 2009).
36. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970), 264. Marty was also an early champion of the concept of “post-Protestant,” e.g., in Martin E. Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York, 1959), 32.
37. Charlotte Bunch, “Charlotte Bunch,” in Sara M. Evans, ed., Journeys That Opened Up the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955–1975 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), 139.
38. Langdon Gilkey, “The Christian Congregation as a Religious Community,” in James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds., American Congregations: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations (Chicago, 1994), 105. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, often thought of as an entirely secular thinker, was a churchgoing Episcopalian who fit easily into Gilkey’s description; see Elesha J. Coffman, Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith (New York, 2021).
39. N. J. Demerath III, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34 (1995), 458–460.
40. P. Mackenzie Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14 (2017), 153–185.
Chapter 8. Christianity’s American Fate: A Conservative Refuge?
1. Theo Hobson, “Not Liberal Enough,” Times Literary Supplement, September 7, 2012, 23.
2. There were a few gestures toward unification. The Congregationalists and the German Reformed combined in 1957 to create the United Church of Christ. Several Lutheran synods merged to create the misleadingly titled Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but in so doing they merely overcame ethnic divisions within a shared ancestry in Northwestern Europe. Other than small-group mergers here and there, that was it, except for the reuniting of demographically and theologically homogeneous groups that had been divided over slavery. The Methodists reunited in 1939 and the Presbyterians in 1983.
3. Keith Watkins, The American Church That Might Have Been: A History of the Consultation on Church Union (Eugene, OR, 2014), 114. This book is one of very few studies that explore the internal tensions and deep disappointments within the merger movement.
4. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York, 1937), 197.
5. For a remarkable artifact of ecumenical academia’s sense of importance and faith in the power of their inherited tools, see Charles Harvey Arnold, Near the Edge of Battle: A Short History of the Divinity School and the “Chicago School of Theology,” 1866–1966 (Chicago, 1966).
6. For a cogent account of Cone’s career, including the way his ideas changed over time, see Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (London, 2012), 396–411. See also Lilian Calles Barger, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (New York, 2018). An accessible popular treatment, emphasizing Cone’s insistence that the universality of the gospel was instantiated in its social particularization, is Brad East, “Jewish Jesus, Black Christ,” Christian Century, January 22, 2022.
7. Keller’s major works were Apocalypse New and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston, 1996) and Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London, 2003).
8. For Murray’s career, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York, 2017).
9. The German-centered tradition was perpetuated with distinction by Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Schubert Ogden, among others.
10. Gary Dorrien, “American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, Decline, Renewal, Ambiguity,” Cross Currents 55 (2006), 7, http://www.crosscurrents.org/dorrien200506.htm.
11. Keller, Face of the Deep, 229.
12. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville, 2006), 512.
13. For Daly’s career, see Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (University Park, PA, 2000).
14. Dorrien, “American Liberal Theology,” 7.
15. Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), esp. 6. This carefully documented study also demonstrates that ecumenical Protestants were often forceful and effective advocates for gay rights. White is one of few specialists in American religious history to argue that the progressive leaders of the ecumenical denominations “are perhaps the most influential of modern religious subjects” (8).
16. “Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.… They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die.” The meaning of this passage is highly contested. Some liberal theologians have accepted this passage as genuinely homophobic yet not problematic because it represents merely a feature of ancient Mediterranean culture that can be ignored today. Others have doubted Paul’s generalized homophobia and interpreted the passage as directed at particular groups of contemporaries. Yet others find fault with many of the translations of this passage (rendered here in the New Revised Standard Version) from the original Greek. An ambitious review of the issues is Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Minneapolis, 2007). Leviticus 20:13, however, unambiguously mandates death for homosexual acts among males.
17. An account of this incident can be found in Stephen Bates, A Church at War: Anglicans and Homosexuality (London, 2004), esp. 37.
18. Thus utterance of Paul’s is also a matter of dispute among biblical scholars, some of whom take it to be a later addition by some other author.
19. Judges 15:15 and 16:30.
20. Prominent among these were Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, the World Mission of the United Presbyterian Church, and the Global Ministries Program jointly operated by the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.
21. Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton, 2018), 366.
22. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd ed. (New York, 2011), 270, 273, 275.
23. Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Boundaries: A Global History of American Evangelicalism (New York, 2018).
24. I have addressed this dynamic at greater length in “The Global South, Christianity, and Secularization: Insider and Outsider Perspectives,” Modern Intellectual History 17 (2020), 889–901.
25. For an effort to make the public more aware of Barber, see Charles M. Blow, “Modern-Day Moses,” New York Times, March 9, 2022.
26. David Brooks, “The Good Faith,” New York Times, February 6, 2022.
27. Raphael Warnock, quoted in “In a Georgia Runoff, Raising Uncomfortable Truths,” New York Times, January 3, 2021, 12.
28. L. Harold DeWolf, A Theology of the Living Church (New York, 1953), 259, as quoted by Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville, 2006), 21.
29. Harvey Cox, “Afterword,” in Daniel Callahan, The Secular City Debate (New York, 1966), 188.
30. Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago, 1996), xxvi–xxvii.
31. Langdon Gilkey, “The Christian Congregation as a Religious Community,” in James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds., American Congregations: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations (Chicago, 1994), 107.
32. Spong’s most important book was directly inspired by Robinson: John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (New York, 1999). Another exception to the avoidance of forceful argument was Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco, 1994). Borg coauthored several books with a liberal Catholic colleague, John Dominic Crossan, e.g., The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem (San Francisco, 2006). Scottish scholar of the Hebrew Bible James Barr was also outspoken in several books that won attention in the United States, especially Escaping from Fundamentalism (London, 1984).
33. Tony Keddie, Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels (Oakland, CA, 2020). Keddie does not write as an ecumenical Protestant and identifies himself religiously only as a former Catholic (8).
34. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Reason, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York, 2005), 20–21.
35. Philip Kitcher, Life after Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism (New Haven, CT, 2014), 24.
36. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York, 2004); Home (New York, 2008); Lila (New York, 2014); Jack (New York, 2020); “Which Way to the City on a Hill?,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019.
37. Despite this persistence of church affiliation on the part of African Americans, departures in the first two decades of the twenty-first century were noticeable enough to generate extensive media attention, e.g., Dara T. Mathis, “The Church’s Black Exodus,” Atlantic, October 11, 2020. Black intellectuals, moreover, have been among the most outspoken of American secularists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Harold Cruse, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and John McWhorter. For a history of this neglected tradition, see Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Evanston, IL, 2019).
38. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, 2020), 6. See also Jesse Curtis, The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era (New York, 2021), 216–220.
39. Impressive documentation of how the United States was following the societies of Western Europe in a secularizing direction is in David Voas and Mark Chaves, “Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?,” American Journal of Sociology 121 (2016), 1517–1566. See also my “Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory,” in Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York, 2017), 280–303.
40. David Hempton, “Organizing Concepts and ‘Small Differences’ in the Comparative Secularization of Western Europe and the United States,” in David Hempton and Hugh McLeod, eds., Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (New York, 2017), 352.
41. Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (2018), 119.
42. Paul the Apostle described the followers of Jesus as “earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7, KJV); later translations refer to “clay pots.”
Chapter 9. Beyond the Paradox of a Religious Politics in a Secular Society
1. Pew Research Center, “Faith on the Hill,” February 4, 2021, https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/04/faith-on-the-hill-2021/.
2. Of the more than 34 million men who registered for the draft during World War II, only about one-tenth of one percent were classified as conscientious objectors by the Selective Service Administration and then determined to be physically fit for military service. Of them, 25,000 accepted noncombatant duty in the military, 12,000 worked in camps operated by the Civilian Public Service, and 6,000 chose to go to prison rather than to cooperate in any way with the government. Anne M. Yoder, “Conscientious Objection in America: Primary Sources for Research” (Swarthmore College Peace Collection, February 2003), https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobjection/co%20website/pages/HistoryNew.htm.
3. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in U.S. Law (Chicago, 2020), traces the process by which the US Supreme Court broadened the conscientious objector exemption beyond historically recognized faiths and accepted any sincere belief as “religious.” Sullivan argues the reluctance of the court to define what shall count as religion risks granting more and more sovereignty to anyone claiming to act religiously.
4. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 US 682 (2014).
5. Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 141 S.Ct. 1868 (2021).
6. Linda Greenhouse, “Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay,” New York Review of Books, July 1, 2021, 34.
7. The great power of this accusation—“you are hostile to religion!”—is revealed by the painstaking care with which the charge is refuted by Howard Gillman and Erwin Chemerinsky, The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (New York, 2020), 161–176.
8. A well-argued history of secular-religious dialogue in the United States speculates that “liberal secularists” may soon be forced to conclude that “the language of religious freedom has become antithetical to secular governance” and must be replaced as a priority by “the language of equality.” See David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (New Haven, CT, 2022), 265–266.
9. I have emphasized the significance of these two converging forces in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013), esp. 1–17.
10. John Dewey, The Middle Works (Carbondale, IL, 1982), 9:139.
11. Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus (New York, 2007), 27, 33.
12. Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York, 2006).
13. For a sensitive reminder that many persons who seek some kind of transcendence do so without abusing their fellow human beings, see Tim Crane, The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View (Cambridge, MA, 2017).