The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century by Matthew S. Hedstrom (review)

What is “liberal religion”? Because the term conjures diverse beliefs, practices, and sensibilities, this question looms over Hedstrom’s The Rise of Liberal Religion. Distilling both colloquial and scholarly conceptions of religious liberalism, Hedstrom identifies intellectual openness, mystical spirituality, personal religious experience, psychological curiosity, and cosmopolitan ethics as some of its priorities. Describing this liberal religion as nothing less than “popular religion and spirituality in modern America,” Hedstrom argues compellingly that the “popularization of religious liberalism happened largely in and through books” (4).

Taking up such varied themes as print culture, class, secularism, consumer culture, and pluralism, Hedstrom’s six chapters begin in the wake of World War I, as liberal Protestant leaders “grappled with their declining social influence, the increasing sway of consumer culture, and a pervasive postwar spiritual malaise” (22). Convinced that “a common set of widely accepted religious ideas, practices, and presuppositions would hold together a fragmenting culture,” Protestant leaders and publishing executives began building an “industry of cultural expertise” dedicated to promoting the buying and reading of religious books (7). In dialogue with Rubin and Radway, Hedstrom describes this framework for generating meaning as “religious middlebrow culture.”¹

Religious leaders, consumers, and publishers all found security in the “mediation of middlebrow culture” (83). While leaders secured their “privileged status in American religious discourse,” consumers embraced “the marketplace without trepidation,” transforming reading into a “fundamental middle-class religious practice” (7, 23). Assured that middlebrow mediation licensed them to pursue profit “with both entrepreneurial intent and clean consciences,” publishers pushed the boundaries of “religious” publishing (84). Increasingly printing books on such popular issues as psychology, mysticism, and self-improvement, publishers cultivated audiences outside faltering Depression-era churches.

With the advent of World War II, the war’s material, psychic, and spiritual demands compelled Americans to unite against “the existential threat posed by fascism abroad” (115). Casting “middlebrow reading values” as essential to “the American way of life,” book initiatives both during and after the war cultivated “the notion of a shared Judeo-Christian national identity” (142–143). By encouraging interaction and exchange between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the discourse of Judeo-Christianity ultimately blossomed into the cosmopolitan spirituality that led subsequent generations to appropriate religious practices and insights from Asian religious traditions.

Engaging theories of culture and religion with sophistication and judiciousness, Hedstrom’s complex narrative makes three key interventions. First, by devoting sustained attention to the history of religious books and reading in the twentieth century, Hedstrom not only augments a historiography of religious print culture that has focused on the nineteenth century but also invites complementary and comparative research. Complementary research might devote closer attention to the texture of religious readers’ experience; comparative research might explore how book culture has helped to circulate other popular religious sensibilities. Second, by demonstrating that “religious and spiritual life happens through commodities” and by ranking books among “the most significant of these religious commodities,” Hedstrom urges scholars to situate material and intellectual practice within contexts of consumption (4–5).

Finally, joining such historians as Hollinger, Hedstrom simultaneously illustrates how liberal religion flourished in the postwar period and explains why its success has escaped notice. Habituated to seeking inclusive, psychological, and mystical spiritualities in the marketplace, postwar Americans increasingly bestowed spiritual authority not on liberal Protestant leaders but rather on the objects of their literary consumption. Allied with consumer capitalism, liberal religion lost institutional strength but saturated American culture. Although Hedstrom’s emphasis on redressing American evangelicalism’s historiographical dominance keeps him from exploring how liberal religion’s ostensible opponents have served both as cultural critics and collaborators, Hedstrom’s answer to the opening question is clear. What is “liberal religion”? It is American religion.²