Embattled Ecumenism, by Jill K. Gill

In her remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and, especially, the National Council of Churches during the 1960s and 1970s, historian Jill Gill refuses to advance a singular cause, but no argument is more persuasive than a couple of lines she drops quietly on page 322: “One might assume that church leaders would have adopted a moral approach from the beginning,” she writes. “But they did not.” That strategic failure may have been responsible more than anything else for the rupture between the leaders of mainline Protestantism and the people in the pews.

The larger narrative of Gill’s Embattled Ecumenism, rendered in excruciating detail, begins with the Federal Council of Churches and intensifies after World War II with the formation of the National Council of Churches during a snowstorm in Cleveland in 1950. After an initial false step—she traces the liberal-evangelical divide in American Protestantism to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s rather than to divergent responses to social changes late in the 19th century—Gill quickly regains her footing.

She writes about John Foster Dulles, the future secretary of state, who chaired the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace for the Federal Council of Churches in 1940, but whose capitulation to the containment ideology of the cold war put him increasingly at odds with Protestant ecumenists—a foreshadowing of larger divisions to come.