Liberalism without Illusions: Renewing an American Christian Tradition

5. Did Liberalism Win?

 99 Did Liberalism Win? Five The twentieth century represented a time when theological liberalism flourished in America. Far from dying out after World War I, liberalism entered new creative periods of critical reflection and development that gave birth to innovative incarnations of theology. By 1960 liberalism not only was represented by a range of theological traditions, but its influence extended into social movements beyond the parameters of institutional Christianity. At the same time, what often bonded diverse groups of liberals together was not predicated by theological concerns, but a sense that liberalism was at the cultural center of the country, epitomized by the stature of the Protestant mainline. Yet by the end of the 1960s, these mainline denominations found themselves in chaos. Caught up in the social and cultural upheavals of the decade, many denominations began a membership hemorrhage that has continued into the twenty-first century. At the same time, a number of other Protestant churches associated with anti-liberal theologies were growing, setting the stage for what many Americans labeled as a resurgence of evangelical theology. However, this emergence of what many saw as a “new evangelicalism” was in reality the latest phase in the development of a lengthy historical tradition of popular Christianity in America. For many religion scholars at midcentury , there was widespread belief that conservative evangelicalism would wither away in significance, surviving mostly as part of marginalized subcultures .1 Increasingly, however, the larger history of twentieth-century American Christianity raises the specter of whether it is liberalism, as opposed to evangelicalism, that is in danger of disappearing in the twenty-first century. 100 Liberalism without Illusions Did the Fundamentalists Win? In 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached the most well-known, and most controversial, sermon of his career, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The conflicts between conservatives and liberals that began with the David Swing case in the 1870s had now reached what later historians would see as a galvanic battle over the future theological destiny of American Protestantism. Fosdick’s journey toward liberalism began at Colgate University, where he had the opportunity to study with one of the pioneers of liberal theology, William Newton Clarke, and later at Union Seminary, New York, where he later spent several decades as a professor of homiletics.2 Although an ordained Baptist minister, by the early 1920s Fosdick had settled into a successful preaching ministry at the First Presbyterian Church in New York, where he became the target of conservative ire for his liberal-modernist views. When Fosdick preached his sermon against fundamentalism, as he later noted in his autobiography, he hoped it would be received as a plea for theological tolerance.3 Despite what Fosdick considered to be the irenic tone of the sermon, he left little doubt about his theological loyalties. I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed. Nobody’s intolerance can contribute anything to the situation which we have described. . . . The present world situation smells to heaven! And now, in the presence of colossal problems, which must be solved in Christ’s name and for Christ’s sake, the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly.4 The tone of the sermon reflected the extent to which American Protestantism had been drawn into two competing camps, “fundamentalists ,” intent on preserving long-standing tenets of theological orthodoxy, and “modernists,” liberals intent on adapting theology to the contours of modern life. In many ways, the use of the terms “fundamentalist”and “modernist” does not reflect the diverse array of theological commitments that characterized the representatives of both groups, nor the way that for many years both groups had found avenues to combine their efforts in ministry and evangelism.5 Yet these terms do accentuate the fact that, by the 1920s, American Protestantism could no longer hold conservatives and liberals together under a “big tent” of a shared theological canopy. The usual historical angle toward understanding what happened in the 1920s is that the modernists (i.e., liberals) won a decisive battle in terms of determining the future direction of American Protestantism, Did Liberalism Win? 101 and in a sense they did. By the early 1930s, most of the northern denominations at the center of battle in the theological controversies that had been waged in one form or another for several decades (in particular...