3 - The Industrial Age: 1865–1945

Summary

A broad evangelical consensus dominated American Protestantism in the first half of the 1800s, but the social and intellectual changes of the decades after the American Civil War began to fracture this consensus, creating debate over how to achieve the still agreed-upon goal of Protestantizing the nation. Social shifts included industrialization, urbanization, and immigration from non-Protestant areas of the globe; meanwhile, women’s educational and professional opportunities expanded while the civil rights of African Americans contracted. Intellectual shifts included the popularization of Darwinian evolution and a new “higher critical” approach to interpreting the Bible. The Civil War had also raised hermeneutical questions: Northern and Southern white Protestants had reached polar-opposite conclusions on the morality of slavery. Yet even though subsequent economic, social, and political crises like the world wars and the Great Depression further strained Protestant unity, American Protestants largely retained their cultural dominance throughout this era.