American Religious Liberalism

Nine: Reading across the Divide of Faith: Liberal Protestant Book Culture and Interfaith Encounters in Print, 1921–1948

n i n e Reading across the Divide of Faith Liberal Protestant Book Culture and Interfaith Encounters in Print, 1921–1948 Mat t h e w S . H e d s t r o m When Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman published his num­ber-­one bestseller Peace of Mind in 1946, he fulfilled, in many ways, a long-­ standing dream of liberal Protestantism. Generations of Protestant and post-­Protestant intellectuals, af­ ter all, had sought a means of disentangling the spiritual heart of Christianity from its religious carapace, and of conveying that heart in words that would move the masses. In addition to countless liberal Protestant clergy and seminary professors, pub­lic figures from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing to William James and John Dewey had searched for the vocabulary to convey liberal religious sensibilities to the widest possible Ameri­ can audience . How­ever, for all their cultural and intellectual influence, these earlier figures of­ten remained esoteric as writers, incapable of finding a voice that would speak to the burgeoning mass market for religious books. In the wake of World War II, an Ameri­ can Jew found that voice. Though hardly the first liberal religious bestseller, Peace of Mind achieved unprecedentedcommercialsuccess,andsoonbecamethebest-­sellingnon-­fiction religious book of the twentieth century to that point. Some of this success surely stemmed from Liebman’s popularity as a lecturer and radio preacher. Before Peace of Mind he was already known across New England for his weekly radio sermons broadcast from Boston’s Temple Israel, which by the mid-­1940s commanded audiences of between one and two million, 70 to 80 per­ cent of whom 207 208 Matthew S. Hedstrom were Christians.1 Only thirty-­ nine years old when the book appeared, Liebman was quickly becoming a celebrity (his meteoric rise was tragically cut short byafatalheartattackjusttwoyearslater).Furthermore,Simonand Schus­ ter, Liebman’s publisher, advertised Peace of Mind widely. Still, the book’s astonishing sales surpassed all expectations. The book’s popularity probably stemmed, more than anything, from word-­of-­mouth praise, and from enthusiastic coverage in newspapers and popular magazines such as Life, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan.2 The Look piece, for example, included a digest of Liebman’s chapter on grief, perhaps the portion most directly relevant to a postwar audience.3 In venues such as these, Liebman’s message reached a vast public. Liebman was well aware of the book’s success in reaching across divides of faith, and was deeply moved that his religious teachings on matters such as grief offered solace to Ameri­cans from many backgrounds. The Boston Post ran a story on Liebman un­ der the banner headline “Writer of Clean Best-­ Seller Presents His Views,” in which Liebman remarked on his place as a Jewish counselor to an overwhelmingly Chris­ tian nation. Liebman told the Post reporter of the survivors of a deadly fire in Georgia who requested autographed copies of his book. The reporter recounted, “His eyes moistened, his shoulders sagged a little, as he told about it the other day. ‘They are Chris­ tian men and women,’ he stated softly. ‘Here I am, a rabbi and a Jew.’”4 Such receptivity by Chris­ tian readers to the ministering of a rabbi was undoubtedly aided by the war­time climate of unity, and by media attention to the suffering of the Jews of Europe. The term “Judeo-­Christian,” as Mark Silk reminds us, began to gain meaningful usage in the 1930s in response to fascist appropriations of the label “Christian ,” and in the wake of the war it emerged as a part of common parlance.5 A Jewish writer surely commanded newfound spiritual authority in the wake of the Nazi atrocities. But the Liebman phenomenon, and indeed an entire postwar culture of tradition-­ crossing religious exploration, of which his book was but the most celebrated example, had deeper roots in Ameri­ can religious liberalism, particularly in liberal Protestant book culture. Indeed, the success of Peace of Mind in reaching such a large interfaith audience marks the culmination of decades of developments in the culture of religious liberalism, and indicates the way those developments played out in the religious book business. Most specifically , Peace of Mind testifies to the inroads made by the ecumenical movement Reading across the Divide of Faith 209 within liberal Protestantism, a movement that institutionalized the liberal mission to decenter doctrine and focus the faith more...