After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History by David A. Hollinger (review)

Intellectual historian David Hollinger gathers together his previously published essays on Protestant liberalism in the twentieth century to fashion After Cloven Tongues of Fire. Whereas declining membership roles, dwindling financial resources, and diminishing social authority often become the fodder for assessing the liberal Protestant movement that once held sway over large swaths of the nation’s faithful and enjoyed even greater cultural capital in the mid-twentieth century, Hollinger offers a more nuanced picture. He simultaneously recognizes that “liberalizers did lose the institutional control of Protestantism they once had, but in return they furthered the causes in the national arena to which they were the most deeply connected,” particularly pluralism, tolerance, civil rights, and rational inquiry (pp. xii, 14).

Although the term liberalism carries a set of contested definitions in relation to Protestantism, Hollinger identifies it most closely with “ecumenical” as evident in the movement’s creation of trans-denominational partnerships such as the World Council of Churches and in championing theological pluralism and social activism (p. xiii). Some of Hollinger’s most intriguing analysis appears in the middle chapters devoted first to the Realist-Pacifist summit meeting in 1942 in which these two competing groups allied with a confidence in their capacity and cultural authority to articulate a public agenda for the postwar years deeply rooted in their own liberalizing understanding of Christian principles. The cultural influence reflected in this meeting manifests itself in a very different form in the following chapter as Hollinger identifies a deeply Protestant “mentality” among the champions of science in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Hollinger then digs more deeply into the important relation between Protestant liberalism and science with two chapters that give prominent attention to William James’s shift from seeking more delimited domains for science and religion to a commitment to weigh religious belief more strictly within the bounds of scientific inquiry (p. 103).

The interplay between Protestant liberalism and American culture that looms large in the book takes a more current turn in the final chapters. Hollinger’s epilogue, the only new content other than introductions to each of the chapters, offers an analysis of Reinhold Niebuhr as a way “to explore some of the complexities of … secularization” (p. xii) that liberal Protestants face in the “post-Protestant” period that characterizes the United States since the second half of the twentieth century. What follows ties much of the final few chapters of the book together, particularly Hollinger’s reflections on the role of religion in the public sphere. Hollinger takes to task those who at once assert the right to insert religious ideas into the public sphere and then claim that those ideas are exempt from the same analytical and critical scrutiny that applies to nonreligious ideas. Hollinger relies upon a distinction between motive and warrant to accept that religious adherents’ public proposals might arise out of a religious conviction but the public warrant justifying them must be open to critique. Hollinger finds his model for such an approach in a quotation from President Barack Obama and nod to Abraham Lincoln that, although insightful, misses an opportunity to engage more recent and sophisticated treatments of religion’s constructive place in public life by scholars such as Linell Cady, Jeffrey Stout, and David Tracy.

Despite this relatively minor matter of how best to critique and construct religion’s participation in public life, After Cloven Tongues of Fire succeeds in offering a nuanced and compelling interpretation of liberal Protestantism’s engagement with the increasingly complex and diverse cultural and intellectual climate of the twentieth century. Hollinger’s work offers much to historians and students of this era as well as to the study of Protestantism in the United States.