Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century (review)

Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century. By Charles H. Lippy. (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. 2000. Pp. x, 250. $34.95.)

"The American century" looms large in Charles Lippy's tracing of the growth of pluralism in the United States, which he offers as a fruitful lens by which to view the whole of American religious history. Lippy's thesis is twofold. First, while diversity was indigenous to North America, peopled as it was by religiously variegated tribes of native Americans well before the arrival of the polyglot, multi-ethnic Jews, Catholics, and confessionally plural Protestants of the colonial period, pluralism did not "come into its own" until the twentieth century.

Second, pluralism in full twentieth-century bloom is not merely an extension of what Tocqueville described as "a multitude of sects." Rather, Lippy argues, "it is a different sort of pluralism" (p. 3), one marked by the proliferation of different, and often differing, theological schools, styles of worship, spiritual practices, and moral norms within religious communities. This internal pluralism the author judges to be the ultimate religious expression of the American character and its fundamental political virtue—the principled resistance to any and all forms of hegemony.

The first argument is debatable, the second intriguing, but underdeveloped. In order to preserve the special character of the twentieth century, Lippy feels compelled to insist that "pluralism in the nineteenth century came primarily to denote a multiplicity of Protestant denominations" (p. 9). Yet, as he acknowledges elsewhere, by the eve of the Civil War Roman Catholicism had already become the largest single "denomination" in the country, one that was giving Protestant workers and evangelists competitive fits. By the turn of the century African Americans were well on the way to refining their own distinctive forms of worship; new waves of Jewish immigrants had arrived, splintered, and regrouped. The World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, celebrated the advent of a global religious diversity on U.S. shores as a phenomenon continuous with the religiously plural American past.

This chronological quibble becomes more significant when we consider the second part of Lippy's thesis. Already by the late nineteenth century, internal pluralism was a fact of life not only for Protestants but for Jews, who had splintered into modernizing and antimodernist branches; and for Catholics, who were fighting over the meanings of Americanism and modernism, modes of evangelism and intellectual life eventually deemed heretical by the Holy See. More important than the dating of this development within most, if not all, of modern American religious bodies is the historian's assessment of it: internal pluralism had specific and complex, often ironic, consequences for the major religious communities of the United States. "The pluralistic environment was potentially dangerous to religious minorities groups," Lippy writes, "for it was harder to articulate a single theological perspective when so many others competed for allegiance" (p. 161). Strikingly, this could be said not only or even especially of religious minorities; a divisive and often embittering "competition for allegiance" gained intensity within the major, culturally dominant denominations as well.

Professor Lippy is known for his judiciously edited scholarly encyclopedias on American popular religion, religious periodicals, and other cultural topics. In Pluralism Comes of Age, he relies on the brisk reportorial style of that genre. While this approach is reader-friendly, it occasionally sacrifices the kind of nuanced discussion and elaboration that Lippy's dual-edged thesis deserves. Historians seeking new research leads and interpretive insights will be rewarded by a close reading of the book, but students desiring a fully developed account of the varieties, meanings, and unintended consequences of religious pluralism will be disappointed.