American Religious Liberalism

Foreword

F o r e w o r d In this new book on Ameri­ can religious liberalism, Leigh Schmidt, Sally Promey, and their coauthors have set themselves a daunting task. To define, dictionaries tell us, is to delimit—to draw a line around what is being defined so that we know clearly what it is and what it is not. Definitions are boundary guards to keep out objects that are not un­ der scrutiny and to mark unmistakably the objects that are. Given this police work, what do scholars do when they need to define an important phenomenon that they and others know is real but that evades easy—and even rigorous—attempts to mark it? How do they find the precision on which definitions depend when their “object” spreads amoeba-­ like outside its holders and blends into a middle ground that is complex and thick with related and unrelated forms? To say this another way, religious liberalism, in its Ameri­ can context (and probably elsewhere, too) is messy. Scholars who seek meticulous nomenclature and characterization will, perforce, go home defeated in their encounter with liberalism. To complicate matters further, editors and authors are grappling here not simply with definition in a steady-­ state world but instead with the fluid and developmental character of a historically contingent category. Add to this the fact that the story of religious history in America is no longer narrowly confined to what might be called classic or traditional theological, spiritual , and devotional categories. What is therefore so impressive in this new book is the progress Schmidt, Promey, and their coauthors have made in surveying and untangling strands of the liberal phenomenon in religion as it has appeared from the late ninevii viii Foreword teenth century on. The essays in this volume document the expanding breadth of the Ameri­can religious narrative and the exploding variety of issues that fall within its purview. They offer rich and nuanced descriptions of the many cases they document, and Schmidt and Promey’s categorizations are both descriptive and persuasive. Furthermore, whereas fifty years ago Ameri­ can religious history was being written primarily by scholars in Protestant seminaries and twenty years ago with the noticeable addition of those in religious studies departments , the assortment of professional locations of the contributors to this volume is striking. In our judgment, their varied and multidisciplinary backgrounds are strongly positive measures of the expansion of the subject area and of the expertise of those engaged with it. As Leigh Schmidt explains in his reflective introduction, the volume is divided into three large sections. Their titles and contents help to pin down the elusive liberal category. Part 1, “The Spiritual in Art,” juxtaposes essays draw­ ing on Walt Whitman and his poetry as foci for religious seekers, Harriet Beecher Stowe and a nice (and banal) Jesus, and liberal visual culture ranging from Horace Bushnell to Paul Tillich. Further contributions look to Juliet Thompson’s artistry and her pilgrimage into the Bahá’í religion, and to the paintings of Agnes Pelton, with their Ameri­can Indian and Theosophical themes. What is especially noteworthy in this section are the ways that Ameri­can religious liberalism seems to merge with forms of metaphysical religiosity, a phenomenon of which Leigh Schmidt is well aware and with which he deals fruitfully as he argues for the integrity of the liberal category. Part 2, entitled “The Piety and Politics of Liberal Ecumenism,” leaves aesthetic concerns to explore the action orientation of liberalism and liberals in sacred and secular venues. Here the succession of essays moves from an account of the religious and, especially, the ritual position of the liberal Bell Street Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island, to a study of Ameri­ can suffragist Clara Colby, who combined New Thought ideas and the metaphysicalizing views of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in her feminist synthesis. Here, too, we find discussions of the racial and religious views held by writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance, especially George Schuyler and Langston Hughes, and the impact of liberal book culture in the middle twentieth century evident in Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s bestseller Peace of Mind (1946). Part 2 also includes an essay that focuses on the strange obsession of Charles Fort, whose search for the unexplained led him to pore endlessly over newspapers Foreword ix and other printed material to unearth oddities that nudge the reader strongly toward metaphysical explanations. At the other...