Swamis and Fundamentalists

Liberal Protestantism, until recently, stood squarely at the center of American religious historiography. Its claim to the moral and historical high ground seemed unassailable in the days of Sidney Mead, Robert Handy, and Sydney Ahlstrom. No longer. Richard Fox’s biography of Reinhold Niebuhr (1985) was its last big statement and since then it has gone quite out of fashion. Richard Seager’s World’s Parliament of Religions and D. G. Hart’s Defending the Faith both portray it as intellectually weak and morally compromised, already turning from mainstream to backwater at the turn of the century. They add to a growing literature which promotes the ideas of liberal Protestantism’s critics and challengers. These two books are not much alike but they both help to knock the shine off church history’s old favorites while adding a little polish to reputations which used to lack any luster.

The World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in the summer of 1893 to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the European settlement of the Americas and to celebrate the city’s recovery since the fire of 1871. Its grand “White City” buildings were a complacent mix of classicism, Christianity, and patriotism, as were the declarations of its promoters. They stood in vivid contrast to the adjacent Midway Plaisance, which featured a clutter of streets, villages, and camps representing the cultures of the rest of the world. The “colonies” furthest from the White City were the most “primitive,” hailing from places like central Africa, Lapland, and Samoa. Those closest to the White City depicted less benighted zones such as Ireland and Germany, while people from the Middle East and India occupied the middle distance.

In part the Exposition was just a big show, full of dancing, fireworks, and patriotic bombast, but twenty-one groups of intellectuals gathered in its shadow to give it some extra gravity; among them the World’s Parliament of Religions. The Parliament mirrored the layout of the Exposition. Its organizers, Charles Bonney and John Henry Barrows, were as white as the White City: Anglo-Saxon Protestants who saw themselves as the inheritors of all the best in civilization. They invited delegates from the world’s ten leading religions, aiming for the same kind of inclusiveness as visitors could find on the Midway Plaisance while keeping the exotics subordinate to the big plurality of Protestants. Never before had Christians, Jews, Moslems, Confucians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Shintoists, and Taoists all met in the same place. For seventeen days they discussed the nature of their religions, their ideas about each other, and their potential for unity or brotherhood. It was an exhaustingly wordy affair, with nearly all contributors talking past one another and the Asian delegates in particular providing a few unsettling surprises.

The Parliament’s declared goal was “to unite all Religion against irreligion” and to show “the substantial unity of the many religions in the good deeds of the religious life” (p. 47). At first all went well. American liberal Catholics, led by Bishop John Keane, rector of the Catholic University of America, and American liberal Jews like Reform Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, made irenic speeches about the unity of mankind, each concluding politely that his own branch of the great tradition came out on top. This was the kind of thing the organizers had had in mind. Not all Western contributors were so cooperative. Conservative Protestants saw these Catholics and Jews as atavistic remnants destined for, and deserving, oblivion, and they took it for granted that they, as evangelical Christians, could learn nothing at all from the “false religions” and “cultured heathenism” of the rest of the world. Francis Clark of the American Christian Endeavor Society had just toured the world and he told delegates...