Us liberals
A reevaluation of liberal Protestantism and its real but sometimes overstated decline is being conducted by American historians like David Hollinger (whose work has been featured in the Century), Elesha Coffman and Matthew Hedstrom (whose book on liberal religion is reviewed here). The scholarly discussion merited an article last month in the New York Times.
The primary question is posed by Hollinger: Did liberal (or “mainline”) Protestants of the mid 20th-century win the culture war of their era against conservatives and fundamentalists even as their own membership numbers began to decline? Did liberal religious ideas of tolerance, social justice, racial equality, interfaith dialogue and interdenominational cooperation triumph at the cost of eroding liberal Christian institutions? It’s a fascinating question, and one that raises at once the complicated question of how winning and losing is to be defined.
What often gets lost in discussions of winners and losers, however, is just how much both liberal and conservative Protestants have changed internally over the past 60 years in response to each other and in response to larger cultural and intellectual shifts. The same labels get used, but the products beneath the labels have shifted.
