A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jennifer Schuessler

The Rev. Billy Graham in 1957.

PUBLISHING---For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing “spiritual but not religious” demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama — a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say. [link]

New for the Christian Bookshelf:

• Elesha J. Coffman's, “The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline” 
• David A. Hollinger's “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History” 
• Matthew S. Hedstrom’s “Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century”
• Jill K. Gill’s “Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left”;
• David Burns’s “Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus”
• Leigh E. Schmidt, the editor, with Sally M. Promey, of “American Religious Liberalism”