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September/October 2007 Historically Speaking 15 American Liberal Protestantism and the Concept of Progress, 1870-1930 Jon H. Roberts For too long, students of American religious thought have tended to interpret the views of liberal Protestants with regard to human nature, human history, and the prospects of realizing the Kingdom of God from the perspective of some of liberalism's harshest critics. During the late 1920s and 1930s partisans of neo-orthodoxy chastised liberal Protestantism for its naive view of human nature , its uncritical embrace of the reigning culture, and its shallow, overly optimistic view of progress. Since that time, numerous historians have echoed that view. To be sure, some have attempted to provide a more balanced perspective . In 1963, for example, William R. Hutchison demonstrated the existence of "a vital and articulate tradition of liberal self-criticism" throughout the period after World War I, and he urged readers to approach liberal Protestants "with a minimum of preconceptions about what these people are supposed to have believed." For the most part, however, historians have tended to ignore Hutchison's cautionary admonitions in favor of castigating American liberal Protestants as naive partisans of a facile culture-religion. TJ. Jackson Lears, for example, has asserted that liberal Protestantism "signalled the submergence of religion in secular modes of thought." Protestant liberalism, Lears contends , was characterized by a "pattern of evasive banality " that "came to terms with modernity by denying its darker side."' James R. Moore has concluded that liberals "adulterated Darwinism with the concept of inevitable material, social, and spiritual progress."ยท Eugene McCarraher has written dismissively of the "bland Esperanto of liberal Protestantism ."' And Gary Dorrien, the author of a well-received three-volume study of the history of American liberal Protestantism, has suggested that "the rationale for not taking sin realistically was built into liberal rhetoric about it from the beginning." Liberals, Dorrien declares "only belatedly" called into question "whether they had granted too much authority to modern culture."' There is no question that liberal Protestants in the United States adopted more positive and optimistic views of human nature and human society than did the more theologically conservative Christians with whom they were contending. This does not mean, however, that they were endorsing an undiscriminating program of cultural assimilation. As a number of historians have discerned, one way of approaching the question of whether American liberal Protestants provided a perspective on the human condition that differed not only from that of conservatives but also from that of more secular thinkers is to examine how they thought about die concept of progress and the meanings and the qualifications that they imposed on that concept. There was litde in the inception of the liberal Protestant theology that emerged in the United There is no question that liberal Protestants in the United States adopted morepositive and optimistic views of human nature and human society than did the more theologically conservative Christians with whom they were contending. States during the course of the 1 870s that suggested either a jaunty self-confidence or a commitment to secular perspectives. It is true that partisans of the "New Theology" were sufficiendy confident about contemporary developments and their relation to Christianity to dissent from traditional formulations of Christian theology. Much of the intellectual energy galvanizing their work, however, was generated by a concern that advances in humanity's understanding of the natural world and human history posed a serious challenge to the credibility of Christianity . Convinced that "a full adjustment between reason and Christianity is steadily to be sought," and that "the total thought of an age ought to have the greatest possible unity," partisans of the New Theology took the position that dieological reconstruction to bring Christian doctrinal formulations in line with the conclusions of modern science and historical scholarship was imperative.' In turn, their conviction that theological change was needed in their own day lent credence to the idea that Christians must continually be prepared to alter doctrines in response to the broader experience of humanity. That idea became a defining motif of American liberal theology in the period after 1 870. The conviction that it is necessary to integrate Christian theology within the broader confines of...

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