American Religious Liberalism

Afterword and Commentary: Religious Liberalism and Ecumenical Self-Interrogation

Afterword and Commentary Religious Liberalism and Ecumenical Self-­Interrogation Dav i d A . H o l l i n g e r The inability of the provincial Ameri­ can Chris­ tian to deal with the cosmopolitan confrontations of modern, urban life was a theme of The Secular City, a runaway bestseller of 1965 written by the liberal theologian Harvey Cox. This manifesto for a po­ liti­ cally engaged religion was organized around human responsibility for the destiny of a world wrongly assumed by so many Chris­ tian believers to be in God’s hands, as if popular songs about God (“He’s got the whole world in his hands”) were to be taken seriously. Cox celebrated “secularization ” as a liberation from “all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” Convinced of the virtues of “heterogeneity” and “the color and character lent by diversity,” Cox pressed the case for “pluralism and tolerance” through­ out the world, but especially in the United States, where the recent “emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and others” from “an enforced Protestant cultural religion ” bode well for further diversification. “Secularization” took place “only when the cosmopolitan confrontations of city living exposed the relativity of the myths and traditions” once thought to be “unquestionable.” While insisting that God was present through­ out secular domains as well as within what traditionalists called “religion,” Cox concluded iconoclastically that the very name of God was so misleading that it might be well to stop even mentioning God un­til our worldly experience gives us a new vocabulary. “Like Moses,” he 374 Afterword and Commentary 375 wrote in the book’s concluding sentence, let us be “confident that we will be granted a new name by events of the future,” but for now “we must simply take up the work of liberating the captives.”1 Cox’s book can now be seen as an artifact of a remarkable but insufficiently recognized historical episode in the history of Ameri­can Protestantism. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, ecumenical leaders vigorously interrogated themselves about their own traditions. The rise of evangelicalism dominates most scholarly and popular accounts of Ameri­ can Protestantism. It is well known that the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Christianity Today—three formidable institutions created between 1942 and 1956—defined evangelicalism against the socially and po­liti­cally prominent liberals. But too of­ten lost from view has been the voluntary renunciation by ecumenical intellectuals of many of the same ideas being consolidated in evangelical circles, in­clud­ing the notion that the United States was a Chris­tian nation. While the evangelicals were trying to build confidence in themselves and to hold firm to what they saw as the faith of their fathers, ecumenical leaders were excoriating themselves for their own provinciality and conservatism. William Stringfellow’s boldly titled My People Is the Enemy got the message across very directly. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Martin Marty, and dozens of other writers filled the pages of Chris­tian Century with efforts to move the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists , the North­ern Baptists, and other groups associated with the old “Protestant Establishment” yet farther from orthodoxy and into greater engagement with a diverse and contingent world.2 Hence Cox’s themes can flag for us several issues that invite attention in the wake of the persistently engaging and informative essays collected in this volume . One issue is the place, in the story of Ameri­ can religious liberalism, of the ecumenical Protestant leadership represented by the Federal and National Councils of Churches, the Chris­tian Century, and faculties at the greatest of the seminaries, especially Union, Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Boston, and Harvard. If a great virtue of this book is the broad construction it has offered of “religious liberalism,” consciously transcending the Buckham-­Hutchison-­Dorrien historiographical tradition and the larger hegemonic claims of the institutionalized Protestant establishment itself, one topic that has been addressed only indirectly and episodically is where even a historiographically downgraded Protestant establishment fits into the now enlarged history of religious liber- 376 David A. Hollinger alism. To be sure, the chapters by Sally Promey, Matt Hedstrom, and Yaakov Ariel give us some access to this question, but one of the things I want to do in this af­terword is to confront that question more directly. A sec­ ond and closely related issue that Cox can flag for us is the relation of...