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THE RECOVERY OF AMERICAN LIBERAL RELIGION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

MOLLY WORTHEN
MOLLY WORTHEN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

For the past three decades, conservative Christian Americans have enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention. Historians have produced rich accounts of the evangelical conquest of early America, the twentieth-century rise of the Christian Right, and the advent of the culture wars. They have gleefully overturned the consensus historians’ confidence in America's unifying liberal impulse. They have refuted the prophets of secularization who once foretold the demise of organized religion. In the process, they all but abandoned the archives of mainline denominations—where generations of their colleagues once toiled in order to trace the histories of the mainline Protestant establishment—for the missions, ministries, and megachurches of ascendant evangelicals. The study of liberal religion has come to seem like the brittle great-aunt of American religious historiography, wheezing at the margins as her younger and more boisterous relations take center stage. She is still alive, barely—but some whisper that in her old age she has become rather boring.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 2014 , pp. 505 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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