Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/25/1941
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
http://history.berkeley.edu/people/david-hollinger; (510) 435-4199
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 84105028
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n84105028
HEADING: Hollinger, David A.
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PERSONAL
Born April 25, 1941, in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:La Verne College, B.A.; University of California Berkeley, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1970.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, academic. SUNY/Buffalo, lecturer to associate professor, 1969-77; University of Michigan, professor, 1977-92; University of California Berkeley, professor, Chancellor’s Professor, 1998-2001, Hotchkis Professor, 2001-13, Hotchkis Professor Emeritus, 2013–. Harmsworth Professor of American History, Oxford University, 2001-02. National Humanities Center, trustee; Institute For Advanced Study, trustee.
MEMBER:American Philosophical Society, Organization of American Historians (president, 2010-11), Society of American Historians.
AWARDS:Distinguished Service Award, Social Science Division, UC Berkeley; fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities (twice); Guggenheim Fellow; Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, University of Michigan; elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Has also been a distinguished lecturer at numerous colleges and universities.
WRITINGS
Contributor of numerous articles to journals and chapters to scholarly books.
SIDELIGHTS
The Hotchkis Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley, David A. Hollinger focuses his research and writing on American intellectual history as well as the legacy of mainstream or ecumenical Protestants. Among his publications are Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History; Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States; After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History; and Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America.
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity
In Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, Hollinger gathers seven essays that look at the decades from 1930 through the 1960s and the philosophers, historians, scientists, and social scientists who wrote and fought against religious biases that prevented Jews from full participation in the intellectual life of the United States. Among those whom Hollinger profiles in these essays are Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Richard Hofstadter, Robert K. Merton, Lionel Trilling, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Writing in the Journal of American History, Suzanne Klingenstein had high praise for this work, noting that this collection is “best compared to a string of pearls.” Klingenstein added: “Each of the … pieces is a self-contained gem of clear prose, meticulous scholarship, and ingenious conjecture.” Similarly, Modern Judaism reviewer Stephen J. Whitfield observed: “This collection of seven previously published essays, slightly revised, comes equipped with an introduction that makes the generalization that Jewish scientists and secularists, ensconced in the academy, helped to lower the public stature of Christianity as a cultural presence in the United States.” Virginia Quarterly Review critic Jack Fischel, also had praise, calling Hollinger “one of our leading intellectual historians,” and further noting that his “finely crafted essays make an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which secular minded American-Jewish intellectuals adapted the scientific credo of universalism to help shape a diverse American secular culture.”
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity is a further collection of essays and articles published between 2000 and 2005 in which the author contends that group solidarity is becoming a major challenge to societies in the twenty-first century. Race, ethnicity, and religion, as well as demographic migration and globalism are atomizing society in harmful ways. Writing in Journal of American Ethnic History, Philip Q. Yang noted: “This collection reaffirms Hollinger’s status as one of America’s premier scholars in intellectual history, with a broad interdisciplinary knowledge, cosmopolitan worldview, and sharp insights into some of the most contested issues of the twenty-first century. This is a book invaluable not just to historians but to sociologists, other social scientists, and humanists as well.”
After Cloven Tongues of Fire
In After Cloven Tongues of Fire, offers a series of essays that examine the role of ecumenical or more liberal strains of Protestantism in the history of the United States. As the author notes, this more liberal, mainline branch of Protestantism is often over-shadowed by more orthodox branches that question evolution, focus on narrowly defined family values, and demand that American be considered a Christian nation. In these essays, Hollinger examines how liberal Protestants gave ground to evangelicals as they strove to embrace modernity and a middle way in religious matters. However, there have been important gains, as New York Times Online contributor Jennifer Schuessler noted: “Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.”
Reviewing After Cloven Tongues of Fire in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Matthew S. Hedstrom noted: “The signal contribution of Hollinger’s essays is the clarity with which he presents complex ideas, often aided by new terms and elegant turns of phrase.” Hedstrom added: “[N]o scholar of American religion, American intellectual life, or American politics can afford to ignore After Cloven Tongues of Fire. More than a book on liberal Protestantism, the essays here reshape our understanding of the very nature of modernity in America and what makes it unique.” Similarly, Church History contributor John Lardas Modern commented: “Hollinger’s work is a substantial contribution to our understanding of ecumenical Protestantism in the twentieth century. This is a book by a master of the craft and one that must be reckoned with if one plans to engage the relationship between liberal religion and politics.” Catholic Historical Review writer Jeffrey Williams also had praise, noting: “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.” Likewise, History critic Howard Brick concluded: “In masterly writing aimed primarily at historians but accessible to general readers, Hollinger offers nuanced, compelling judgments … that make After Cloven Tongues a consummate achievement.”
Protestants Abroad
In his 2017 study, Protestants Abroad, Hollinger looks at the Protestant missionary movement to the non-European world between 1890 and the 1960s. While these missionaries were meant to change the ways of the people they met in foreign lands, Hollinger contends that the missionaries instead were changed by these experiences, becoming more critical of racism, narrow religious orthodoxy, and imperialism. Returning to America, they help bring these liberal values into mainstream American thinking. In a Times Higher Education interview with Kristen Ghodsee, Hollinger remarked on the books that inspired his interest in this topic, noting: “Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Buell Gallagher’s Color and Conscience. Reading these books led me to remember the missionaries on furlough whom I had met as a child in Idaho and Washington. Those remarkable men and women, carriers of cultural commodities from China and India and other distant lands, were the true giants of my parents’ world. I decided to try to understand why that was, and the consequences of the missionary presence in American life.”
Reviewing Protestants Abroad, a Publishers Weekly contributor commented: “Thoroughly researched and well crafted, this is a reminder of the influence that liberal, cosmopolitan Protestant intellectuals have had on American life.” Wall Street Journal Online reviewer John Kaag also had praise, noting: “Elegant and original. . . . Hollinger’s book is a comprehensive history of American Protestant missionaries abroad, but it is also the more important story of how a religious and cultural movement overcame its own provincialism.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Books & Culture, May-June, 2013, James T. Kloppenberg and Jon Butler, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, p. 6; January-February, 2014, George M. Marsden, “Whose Pluralism?,” p. 9.
Catholic Historical Review, summer, 2016,Jeffrey Williams, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 643.
Christian Century, July 11, 2012, Amy Frykholmm “Culture Changers”; June 12, 2013, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 41.
Church History, December, 2014, John Lardas Modern, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 1071.
Commonweal, February 9, 2018, John T. McGreevy, review of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, p. 28.
History, May, 2016, Howard Brick, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 70
Journal of American Ethnic History, fall, 2007, Philip Q. Yang, review of Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional
Affiliation in the United States, p. 116.
Journal of American History, March 1, 1997, Suzanne Klingenstein, review of Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History, p. 1462.
Journal of Religion, Vol. 95, no. 1, 2015, Elesha Coffman, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 159.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, December, 2015, Matthew W. Hedstrom, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 1165.
Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, Vol. 39, 2015-2016, Dan McKanan, review of After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 125.
Modern Judaism, February, 1998, Stephen J. Whitfield, review of Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, p. 83.
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 2017, review of Protestants Abroad. p. 61.
Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1997, Jack Fischel, review of Science, Jews & Secular Culture, p. 372.
ONLINE
Immanent Frame, https://tif.ssrc.org/ (February 13, 2018), “David A. Hollinger.”
New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/ (January 11, 2015), “David Hollinger.”
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 23, 2013), Jennifer Schuessler, “A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered.”
Religion in the News, http://religioninthenews.org/ (March 9, 2015), “David Hollinger on “Secularization and the Future of American Christianity”.”
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (November 2, 2017), Matthew Reisz, “Books Interview: David Hollinger.”
University of California Berkeley, Department of History Website, http://history.berkeley.edu/ (February 13, 2018), “David Hollinger.”
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (November 10, 2017), John Kaag, review of Protestants Abroad.
David Hollinger
Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus
(510) 435-4199
davidhol@berkeley.edu
Education:
B.A. 1963, La Verne College
Ph.D. 1970 UC Berkeley
Curriculum Vitae:
PDF icon hollinger_cv_may_2017.pdf
Research Interests:
America since 1607: intellectual
Recent Papers Available Electronically
"William James, Ecumenical Protestantism, and the Dynamics of Secularization" in Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Rasmussen, eds., William James and the Transatlantic Conversation.
"The Wedge Driving Academia's Two Families Apart," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2013.
"After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity"Journal of American History (June 2011), 21-48.
"The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted" Daedalus Winter 2012, 76-88.
"What is Our 'Canon'? How American Intellectual Historians Debate the Core of Their Field" Modern Intellectual History 9. 1 (2012), 185–200.
"The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions" Daedalus Winter 2011, 174-182.
"Being Really Good vs. Being Really Public: Is This Our Choice?" Townsend Center Newsletter, April/May 2010, 21-23
"Church People and Others" in James Banner and John Gillis, eds.Becoming Historians (Chicago,2009), 101- 121.
"Religious Ideas: Should They be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?" Representations #101 (2008), 144-154.
"Separation Anxiety," London Review of Books, January 24, 2008, 15-18. [Review of Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God].
"Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future" Callaloo 31.4 (2008), 1033-1037.
"Rethinking Diversity,"California Magazine (July/August 2006), 47-49.
"From Identity to Solidarity,"Daedalus (Fall 2006), 23-31.
"The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule," Daedalus (Winter 2005), 18-28.
"Damned for God’s Glory: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture," in Wayne Proudfoot, ed., Re-Experiencing Varieties: William James and a Science of Religion (New York, 2004), 9-30.
"Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review (December, 2003), 1363-1390.
Representative Publications:
Books
Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberlaism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)
The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War Two (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). [Edited for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
The American Intellectual Tradition: A Source Book (Oxford University Press, 6th ed., 2011) [co-edited with Charles Capper]
Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995; paperback edition, Basic Books, 1996; Fifth Anniversary Edition with "Postscript 2000," 2000, Japanese translation by Fumiko Fujita, (Akashi Press, Tokyo, 2002); Tenth Anniversary Edition with "Postscript 2005," 2006).
Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections (Berkeley, 2005) [co-edited with Cathryn Carson]
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1996; paperback edition 1999)
In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Indiana University Press, 1985, paperback edition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (MIT Press, 1975)
Recent (since 2011) Articles
"The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions,"Daedalus (Winter, 2011), 174-182.
"The MVHR, the JAH, and Intellectual History: From the Margins and the Mainstream," in Richard Kirkendall, ed., One Hundred Years of Scholarly Journals of the Organization of American Historians (New York, 2011), 146-154.
"The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States Between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review (2011), 211-230.
"After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity," Journal of American History (June 2011), 21-48.
"The Wrong Question! Please Change the Subject!" Fides et Historia (fall 2011), 34-37.
"What is Our Canon? How American Intellectual Historians Debate the Core of Their Field," Modern Intellectual History (April 2012), 185-200.
"The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment," Daedalus (winter 2012), 76-88.
"Religious Liberalism and Ecumenical Self-Interrogation," in Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey, eds., American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012), 374-387.
"William James, Ecumenical Protestantism, and the Dynamics of Secularization,” in Martin Halliwell, ed., William James and Religion (Oxford, 2014).
“Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory,” in Joel Isaac, et al., eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Profile
Member of American Philosophical Society and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor of the University of Oxford. Past President (2010-2011) Organization of American Historians.
Born April 25, 1941 (Chicago, Illinois)
David Hollinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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David Hollinger
Born April 25, 1941 (age 76)
Chicago
Academic background
Alma mater La Verne College,
University of California, Berkeley
Academic work
Discipline History
Sub-discipline Intellectual history
Institutions Organization of American Historians,
University of California, Berkeley
David Albert Hollinger (born April 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois) is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History, emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] His specialty is in American intellectual history. He is the author of six books, including Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995) (3rd edition, expanded, 2006) and After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism and Modern American History (2013).
Among his several edited or co-edited volumes is his 2-volume source book The American Intellectual Tradition (2006), co-edited with Charles Capper, which is among the most widely used textbooks in college undergraduate courses focusing on American intellectual history since the Civil War.
Contents
1 Life
2 Works
3 References
4 External links
Life
Hollinger earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from La Verne College in 1963, his Master of Arts degree in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1970, both from University of California, Berkeley. He has previously taught at the University at Buffalo and the University of Michigan, and was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 2001-2. He taught at Berkeley from 1992 to 2013, during which time he served as a PHD advisor.
Hollinger served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2010-11. He is an elected fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center and of The Institute For Advanced Study. His Influence on the study of American religious history was noted in a New York Times article from July 23, 2013, "A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered".
Works
Hollinger, David A.; Capper, Charles (1989). The American intellectual tradition: a sourcebook. 1620-1865. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195057744.
Hollinger, David A. (April 1989). In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas. JHU Press. ISBN 9780801838262.
Hollinger, David A. (2006-02-28). Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. Basic Books. ISBN 0465030653.
Hollinger, David A. (2006-03-06). Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299216634.
Hollinger, David A. (2013-04-21). After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1400845998.
Hollinger, David A. (2017-10-17). Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691158433.
References
http://history.berkeley.edu/people/david-hollinger
External links
U.C. Berkeley faculty page
"Battling Protestants - A Conversation with David Hollinger", Ideas Roadshow, 2015
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Cant-the-Sciencesthe/142239
Authority control
WorldCat Identities VIAF: 75039686 ISNI: 0000 0001 2139 8589 SUDOC: 035060328 BNF: cb125741647 (data) SNAC: w6qk1dgt
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Categories: Living peopleUniversity of California, Berkeley alumniUniversity of California, Berkeley facultyAmerican historiansGuggenheim FellowsFellows of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesTrustees of the Institute for Advanced Study1941 birthsHarold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American HistoryUniversity of Michigan facultyAmerican historian stubs
QUOTE:
Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Buell Gallagher’s Color and Conscience. Reading these books led me to remember the missionaries on furlough whom I had met as a child in Idaho and Washington. Those remarkable men and women, carriers of cultural commodities from China and India and other distant lands, were the true giants of my parents’ world. I decided to try to understand why that was, and the consequences of the missionary presence in American life.
Books interview: David Hollinger
The scholar of American history and author on the works of Pearl S. Buck, John Hersey and others that sparked his interest in the work of US missionaries and the role of religion in the US
November 2, 2017
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By Matthew Reisz
Twitter: @MatthewReiszTHE
David A. Hollinger
What sorts of books inspired you as a child?
Marie McSwigan’s Snow Treasure, a children’s tale of Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation, was the first book that really grabbed me in a way that stayed with me for many years. Then, when I was about 12 or 13 I read a lot about Native Americans, and when I was just a bit older, I was enthralled by Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Union armies in the American Civil War.
Kristen Ghodsee
Books interview: Kristen Ghodsee
READ MORE
Your new book, Protestants Abroad, explores the impact of missionaries on the US and the world beyond. Which books first piqued your interest in this topic?
Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Buell Gallagher’s Color and Conscience. Reading these books led me to remember the missionaries on furlough whom I had met as a child in Idaho and Washington. Those remarkable men and women, carriers of cultural commodities from China and India and other distant lands, were the true giants of my parents’ world. I decided to try to understand why that was, and the consequences of the missionary presence in American life.
Which books offer good general accounts, both sympathetic and critical, of the historical role of religion in the US?
There are very few such books. One is Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Another is Kevin Kruse’s One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. The field has too long been ignored by serious scholars. As a result, until recently, the field has been skewed by religious apologetics.
What books by the key figures you explore would you recommend as still offering valuable insights for us today?
China Hand, by John Paton Davies, Jr., is the most compelling and revealing of the memoirs written by missionary children. Davies was a diplomat purged during the McCarthy Era for his accurate but politically unwelcome reporting about China. His picture is on the dust jacket of Protestants Abroad, standing next to Mao Zedong. The Call, John Hersey’s epic novel covering the entire missionary saga from its innocent beginnings through to its devastating decline, is the finest piece of fiction about missionaries ever written in the English language.
What is the last book you gave as a gift, and to whom?
The HarperCollins Study Bible, to my colleague and friend Carol J. Clover, who shares my sense of the Bible’s importance for understanding modern American culture.
Which books do you have on your desk waiting to be read?
First, the published version of a great work I read in a much longer draft, Yuri Slezkine’s historical meditation on the Bolshevik project, The House of Government. Second, Daniel Sharfstein’s Thunder in the Mountains, a history of the Nez Perce war of 1877.
David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis professor of American history emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press).
RELATED ARTICLES
David Hollinger
UC Berkeley, author of After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (2013)
Comment
Published Jan 11, 2015 ShareThis
With the caveat that his administration is not yet finished, and two years is a long time, how will history judge Obama?
The first six years of Obama’s presidency provide a sound basis for regarding him as a figure of considerably greater historical significance than is recognized in the prevailing discourse of talking heads. Historians are much more conscious than lots of other folks seem to be of one huge reality: the power of inherited constraints on what a particular president can do under the specific circumstances he or she may face. It is a terrible mistake to treat as ideologically biased those pro-Obama assessments which emphasize how confining Obama’s inheritance is from the Bush years, especially in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan. Contemporary political discussions usually deny the power of the past, claim that any president who has been in office for a while “owns” whatever dilemmas he has somehow failed to solve to popular satisfaction, and drain empirical reality out of the claims and counterclaims offered every second on cable TV. (“It’s all politics” too many folks say; that’s not true.)
That said, the chief shortcoming of Obama’s first six years may turn out to be his failure to mobilize one formidable resource at his disposal: the record of the federal government as an agent of the public interest. He seems to have held back from this because of an accurate assessment of the leadership of the Democratic Party, which has shown itself afraid to defend “big government,” and therefore unwilling to support him. This goes all the way back to the stimulus, which Obama rightly understood should have been much larger. While it is demonstrably true that very few of the Democrats in the House and the Senate have been willing to defend the tradition that made them and that promised a strong future, the big question historians are likely to debate in future years is whether Obama could have brought these Democrats around on this issue had he pressed them more vigorously than he did. Within this uncertainly, the Affordable Care Act looks like a great triumph for the traditions of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society, the very tradition of a strong federal state that the Democrats have been so reluctant to vindicate and further advance.
Will future historians blame Obama for not getting more done in a climate of Republican obstructionism, or will he be given a pass for it? More generally, to what degree will his presidency be seen as “transformative” (the word he used to describe the Reagan administration)?
It is unlikely that future historians will have any trouble recognizing the obstructionist program of the Republican Party as a historically special episode, and a constraint on Obama’s presidency almost as formidable as the legacy of George W. Bush’s decisions to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, too, our political discourse invites us to treat as “mere politics” the assertion that the Republicans are behaving in radically different ways from either party in the relevant past. But what has been happening is simply not normal. This is an empirical fact. The tendency of journalists to drain the truth-value out of every claim and counterclaim makes it all the more important that historians speak up.
David A. Hollinger
David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His recent books include Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Postethnic America (Basic Books, 3rd edition, expanded, 2006), and The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, edited for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). His most relevant recent article is "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity" in the Journal of American History (June 2011). Read David A. Hollinger's contributions to Religion and the historical profession and Surveying religious knowledge.
David Hollinger on “Secularization and the Future of American Christianity”
hollinger speechby Andrew Walsh
For the last several decades, the United States looked like an outlier among industrial nations in the North Atlantic West, remaining a robustly religious country while its European peers moved into ever deeper secularization. But the recent trajectory of decline among those holding liberal religious beliefs strongly suggests that the long-term trend in the United States is toward pervasive secularism on the European model as well, the intellectual historian David A. Hollinger told audiences at Trinity College in Hartford this week.
Hollinger delivered a major address, “Secularization and the Future of American Christianity,” on March 4, while visiting Trinity as the 2015 Leonard E. Greenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
Each year, the Greenberg Distinguished Visiting Scholar visits Trinity for a week to give a major lecture on some important aspect of religion and public life, meets with students and faculty, visits other courses, and leads a faculty research seminar discussion on his or her work.
In the decades immediately after World War II, the “secularization thesis”—that religion is irreversibly losing its social force as scientific knowledge takes hold and educated people lose interest in religious belief and practice—was the almost universal view of social scientists and scholars of religion. But in the 1980s, the rise of the Religious Right in the United States, the revival of Islam in many places, and the continuing vitality of religion in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia led many to begin wondering whether secularization might be a local European phenomenon rather than a general characteristic of modernity.
Hollinger said that in the American case, it had become clear by the 2000s that the secularization thesis accurately predicted the weakening of religious identities, religious practice, and institutional strength among liberal Protestants and Catholics over the last decades of the 20th century. Religious liberals have always been the most willing to seek accommodations between the demands of inherited religious beliefs and modern, scientifically based ideas and values—an approach that seemed quite successful in America from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
But by the end of the 1960s, liberal Protestants and eventually Catholics and their institutions were either shrinking or moving beyond their control in the name of inclusion and diversity. Social survey research shows that mainline (or “ecumenical”) Protestants, almost half of the American population in 1960, now make up only about 10 percent of the population, and are disproportionately older than other groups.
This segment of the Protestant population had fewer children during this period and fewer of those they did have remained connected to that religious identity in adulthood. The lost children of mainline Protestantism often retained many of their religious values and identities but felt little need to hold on to institutional membership or identity. Many became “spiritual but not religious,” and their children and grandchildren are mostly secular.
Hollinger noted that the percentage of American adults who say they have no religious identity has jumped from about seven percent in the early 1990s to 20 percent today, which a much higher percentage of young adults claiming no religious identity. While the number of committed atheists remains small, Hollinger said he thinks the “spiritual but not religious” are moving inexorably toward secular identities.
Evangelical Protestants and Catholics have held their institutional vigor somewhat more successfully, but they increasingly look at American society from a minority point of view. And the work of social scientists like Christian Smith suggests that many younger evangelicals have a less conflictual relationship with modernity than their parents and regard the world in ways that are strikingly similar to those of the ecumenical Protestants of the mid-20th century.
Hollinger came to Trinity not merely to bury mainline Protestantism but also to praise its historical role. “After Cloven Tongues of Fire,” his 2011 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, was the first ever given on a religious topic in the history of the group, and sparked a lively lunchtime discussion with the author at the Center’s monthly Public Values seminar.
The address argues that liberal Protestantism was a major force in the rise of a more inclusive, cosmopolitan, tolerant, and diverse American society in the mid-20th century. The willingness of these ecumenical Protestants to give up the notion that Protestantism plays a special role in American life was a remarkable example of their capacity for self-critique—and it opened doors.
But Hollinger contends that this willingness to revise and criticize their own role set the stage for their subsequent loss of influence.
“Recognizing the role that ecumenical Protestantism played in diminishing Anglo-Protestant prejudice and embracing the varieties of humankind” can help illuminate “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestant increased theirs,” he writes. “Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists.”
Filed Under: Events, Mainline Protestantism, Secularization
QUOTE:
Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.
A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERJULY 23, 2013
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For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box.
But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing “spiritual but not religious” demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama — a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say.
After decades of work bringing evangelicals, Mormons and other long-neglected religious groups into the broader picture, these scholars contend, the historical profession is overdue for a “mainline moment.”
As one commenter put it on the blog Religion in American History, “It’s heartening that dead, white, powerful Protestants are getting another look.”
In the last year, some half-dozen books on the subject have been published; Princeton and Yale have held conferences dedicated to religious liberalism, and the recent annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Academy of Religion included panel discussions on the topic.
Photo
Historians like David A. Hollinger have studied the legacy and influence of mainline Protestants. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“We now have quite a lot of good stuff on evangelical Protestantism,” said David A. Hollinger, an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, who delivered a provocative presidential address to the Organization of American Historians in 2011, defending the legacy of what he called ecumenical Protestantism.
Continue reading the main story
“But we ought to be studying the evangelicals,” Mr. Holligner added, in “relation to the people they hated.”
Hated is certainly the word, and the feeling went both ways. In a 1926 editorial on the Scopes trial, The Christian Century, the de facto house magazine of mainline Protestantism, dismissed fundamentalism as “an event now passed,” a momentary diversion along the march to modern, rational faith.
But by the 1940s evangelicals were mobilizing against the United Nations and other causes endorsed by mainline leaders, many of whom were later denounced as Communists in Christianity Today, the magazine founded in 1956 by the Rev. Billy Graham. The Century shot back, running editorials denouncing Mr. Graham as a Madison Avenue-style huckster leading a “monstrous juggernaut” that threatened to “set back Protestant Christianity a half-century.”
Mr. Graham’s magazine won the immediate battle for readers, surging past The Century in circulation within a year — a sign, Elesha J. Coffman argues in her new book, “The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline,” that The Century’s editors, mostly trained at the same elite institutions, were never as representative of the Protestant majority as they claimed to be.
But other scholars take a markedly different view. In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.
Photo
Elesha J. Coffman, author of “The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline.” Credit Stephen Mally for The New York Times
Mr. Hollinger’s argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a “punctuation mark” on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom’s “Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century”; Jill K. Gill’s “Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left”; and David Burns’s “Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus.”
The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.
Some scholars say that frustration with the perceived cultural and political dominance of evangelicals in the Bush era gave the subject extra urgency.
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“At the end of the second Bush term, there was widespread interest in thinking about a religious left,” said Leigh E. Schmidt, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis, and the editor, with Sally M. Promey, of the recent book “American Religious Liberalism.” “The idea was, surely there is something besides simply a secular left.”
That something often does not look very churchlike. The Schmidt and Promey volume, which collects papers delivered at the Princeton and Yale conferences, includes essays on Bahaism among early-20th-century artists and “the metaphysical liberalism” of the U.F.O. obsessive and cult writer Charles Fort, among other far-flung subjects.
Conservative believers “may think this isn’t religion,” said Jon Butler, a Yale University scholar who is working on a history of religion in modern Manhattan. “But religion comes in an incredible number of forms.”
Photo
The Rev. Billy Graham in 1957. Credit Allyn Baum/The New York Times
The dizzying varieties of American religious experience, scholars say, has roots nearly as deep as old-time religion. At the University of Virginia Mr. Hedstrom teaches a popular class called “Spiritual but Not Religious,” which traces the evolution of American spirituality from the 19th-century Transcendentalists to Alcoholics Anonymous, yoga and “the gospel of Oprah.”
Today’s “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon, Mr. Hedstrom argues, owes a strong debt to midcentury liberal Protestantism. In his book “The Rise of Liberal Religion” he traces the role of religious book clubs — which helped turn titles like the liberal pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “On Being a Real Person” (1943) into best sellers — in creating a broad-based “middlebrow religious culture” that emphasized personal ethics and inner experience over theology.
“The focus on personal religious experience being at the heart of religious life, which does come out of liberal Christianity, seems to me alive and well,” Mr. Hedstrom said.
Some scholars with roots in more traditional churches caution against overstating the importance of liberal religion. The recent work on the subject is “a nice rebalancing of the historiographical ledgers,” said Mark Noll, a historian of religion at Notre Dame and a prominent evangelical intellectual. But for a tradition to have any continuing influence, he added, it needs committed bodies in the pews.
That point is seconded by Ms. Coffman, who worked as an editor at Christianity Today before entering academia. She currently teaches at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution where pastors in training, she said, are less likely to be savoring their broad cultural victories than debating which elements of evangelical worship they should adopt to attract a viable congregation.
“I teach at a mainline seminary, and we do not feel very triumphal,” Ms. Coffman said.
Correction: July 23, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the surname, on a later reference, one of the authors of “American Religious Liberalism” as “Smith.” It is Leigh E. Schmidt. And a photo caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the area studied by historians like David A. Hollinger. They have studied “the legacy and influence of mainline Protestants,” not the “surge and reach of 20th-century religious conservatives.”
Correction: July 25, 2013
An article on Wednesday about scholarship to reconsider the legacy of liberal Protestants misidentified, in one instance, the surname of a historian who was an editor of the recent book “American Religious Liberalism.” He is Leigh E. Schmidt, not Smith.
QUOTE:
Thoroughly researched and well crafted, this is a reminder of the influence that liberal, cosmopolitan
Protestant intellectuals have had on American life.
Print Marked Items
Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries
Tried to Change the World but Changed
America
Publishers Weekly.
264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p61+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America
David A. Hollinger. Princeton Univ., $35
(400p) ISBN 978-0-691-15843-3
Religious historian Hollinger (After Cloven Tongues of Fire) argues persuasively that "missionaryconnected,"
ecumenically-minded white Protestants shaped public life in America more profoundly than has
previously been recognized. Between the late 19th century and World War II, Hollinger states, ecumenical
Protestant denominations were particularly active in the Middle East and Asia. Having spent years in the
field, these faithful returned to the United States with personal stories and political perspectives that shaped
both cultural attitudes and public policy regarding regions of the world that most Americans would never
visit. Hollinger posits that ecumenical missionaries worked to shift their approach from conversion to
humanitarian efforts and focused on providing educational, medical, and other services to indigenous
populations. This generation of Protestant missionaries, Hollinger suggests, were eclipsed by younger
generations with more missionary zeal and turned to secular postmissionary service work in government,
education, and nongovernmental organizations, where they continued to be involved in humanitarian causes.
Thoroughly researched and well crafted, this is a reminder of the influence that liberal, cosmopolitan
Protestant intellectuals have had on American life. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America." Publishers
Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 61+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634961/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08a229a1.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505634961
Whose pluralism?
George M. Marsden
Books & Culture.
20.1 (January-February 2014): p9+.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text:
David Hollinger is a wonderfully insightful American intellectual historian who is probably best known in
evangelical intellectual circles as one of the most vocal and persistent opponents of the project of bringing
explicitly faith-informed scholarship into the mainstream academy. On that topic, Hollinger, who is usually
mild-mannered and generous, sometimes goes ballistic. So in his most recent book, After Cloven Tongues
of Fire, a collection of essays billed as about "Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," he
includes Iwo essays with the provocative titles: "Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More
Christianity" and "Religious Ideas: Should they be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?"
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
I should say at the outset that I consider David Hollinger a friend. We once spent a semester as visitors in
the same academic department, and I think we struck it off as kindred spirits in many respects. Even when
we discussed our wide differences regarding Christian scholarship, I think we always did so amicably. That
is in good part thanks to his being the amiable and generous person he is. Our affinities arise also from the
fact that we both had strongly Protestant upbringings and we study many of the same things. After Cloven
Tongues of Fire is not only autobiographical in the sense most history books are, but it also contains a
candid autobiographical essay. The volume's title suggest historical themes that parallel the
autobiographical. After the charismatic intensity of Pentecost has passed, liberal Protestantism and postProtestants
often still embrace a version of that early Christian ideal of one unified humanity. Like many
who have left the church, Hollinger is a champion of "love your neighbor as yourself' who would apply that
rule in ways that put many of us church people to shame.
Hollinger writes from an explicitly post-Protestant perspective, a viewpoint that fosters many acute insights
into the historical topics he discusses. American culture today, he argues, is best understood as postProtestant.
As late as 1960 anything big in America was likely to be run by someone of Protestant
background. In the mid-20th century mainline Protestants could till speak as though they had a proprietary
oversight of the culture as a whole. One of Hollinger's most important themes is that Protestantism had
succeeded in retaining its influence in mainstream culture by accommodating itself to the American
Enlightenment. Darwinism had threatened to disrupt that accommodation, but post-Darwinian Protestants
found various ways to preserve aspects of their heritage that could survive in the new scientific age. The
volume includes three illurninating, empathetic, but devastatingly critical essays on William James's
agonized efforts to reconcile the essence of religions experience with modem science. Reinhold Niebuhr,
who in turn made his own accommodations to modernity, was still widely applauded when he insisted that
themes drawn from the Christian, or at least Judeo-Christian, heritage were essential to a healthy public life.
In the meantime a brilliant cadre of Jewish intellectuals were arguing effectively that American life should
be grounded on more consistently secular and universal enlightened principles.
By the 1970s Niebuhr's world had largely disappeared. Mainline Protestantism's proprietary outlooks had
dramatically receded, and its denominations were declining numerically. The Religious Right tried to fill the
cultural vacuum by offering its own version of a Christianity-based America. Yet, even though mainline
Protestants have diminished numerically, institutionally, and in influence, Hollinger suggests that they have
in a sense "won" in that they have helped to shape a more tolerant, anti-racist anti-sexist, anti-imperialist,
supen*iaturalism-resisting American public culture. Hollinger admits this evaluation is hyperbolic; still, he
thinks "there is something to it."
But enough already about illuminating historical points--lees get to his polemics. Hollinger has been deadset
against the project that many readers of this magazine would endorse: the project of making mainstream
intellectual life more open to scholars who explicitly ask what difference traditional Christian theism or
other religious-intellectual traditions might make in understanding and relating to the rest of reality. After
Cloven Tongues of Fire not only reiterates that opposition, it also offers important insights for understanding
why such an honorable and clear-headed person would so strongly oppose what seems to many of us an
eminently reasonable proposal.
Hollinger's autobiographical essay, written to explain why he became an historian, provides a vivid account
of his conversion from a parochial to a cosmopolitan outlook. Born in 1941, he spent his earliest years in
Idaho, where his father served as a Church of the Brethren pastor. His family was deeply shaped by its
Pennsylvania Brethren and Mennonite heritage and, as is typical in pastors' families, David learned to
categorize people by whether or not they went to one of the "right" churches. The Hollingers had a
progressive social outlook and identified with ecumenical Protestantism. They moved to California and his
father left the pastorate but remained very active in the church. David's church-dominated upbringing
continued as he attended the denomination's local La Verne College in Southern California.
One especially formative experience took place in the fall of 1960, when he and some other La Verne
students were traveling from a national meeting of Brethren youth leaders in Ohio. Their car broke clown in
Oklahoma and their group was refused public accommodations because one of their number was black. At
La Verne itself, very few of the students shared David's intellectual interests. He was also exposed to
Southern California's politically conservative evangelical culture. He was shocked to find churchgoing
people who had never heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was also deeply put off by the emotionalism of
Southern Baptists whom he met. His mother, who had been raised in the Church of the Nazarene, had
warned him against such things.
The real turning point came, as one might well imagine, in his subsequent years as a graduate student at
Berkeley, Where he enrolled in the fall of 1963. When he arrived, he had never been to a social event where
wine was served, had never met an atheist or a communist, and had met so few Jews that he "had trouble
distinguishing them from persons of Italian extraction." He soon came to realize, as someone pointed out to
him, that as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant he was in a minority among his graduate student peers, most of
whom were Jewish. No other student had a church-permeated background anything like his own.
Hollinger became deeply fascinated with the theme of tensions between provincialism and
cosmopolitanism. He embraced cosmopolitanism and universalism. He wrote his dissertation on a Jewish
philosopher. He married a Jewish young woman. Some of his most important later writings have been on the
role of Jews in shaping secular culture, on getting beyond multiculturalism toward a "postethnic" America,
and on cosmopolitanism and human solidarity. One of the themes of the present book is that of how
"demographic diversification," or intimate contact with people of other backgrounds, challenged the
Protestant accommodation with the Enlightenment and led to increasing emphasis on cosmopolitan
Enlightenment themes at the expense of distinctly Protestant teachings. In his own case, he also sees his
commitment to universalism and to cultivating trans-ethnic human solidarity as related to a universalist
strain in the Brethren tradition. But like many post-Protestant, he found that the particularities of Protestant
theism too often stood in the way of true ecumenism.
It is easy to appreciate, then, why someone who has been a champion of such a socially universalist transethnic
outlook should view those of us who want to strengthen the public academic presence of particularist
faith-informed viewpoints as entirely misguided. That is especially so if our faith-tradition can be identified
as, even broadly speaking, "evangelical." As his characterizations of mainline Protestant long-term success
indicate, Hollinger evaluates religious outlooks largely on the basis of whether or not they have progressive
inclusivist political implications By such standards, evangelical Protestants, taken as a whole, get very low
marks. Especially when the Religious Right speaks of returning America to its Christian roots, a political
and intellectual universalist will see warning signs of a reversion to a Protestant-dominated America far
more pernicious than that of the tolerant ecumenism of mid-century. So when we Christian scholars argue
for more openness to our ideas in the academy, Hollinger sees that as playing into the hands of the Religious
Right.
Hollinger speaks for many secularists iii the academy, and we can learn from is perceptions and concerns.
He is correct that establishmentarian Christianity has difficulty providing social and political eqi iity in the
presence of demographic diversification. So the best response is to make clear that we stand for nonConstan-tinian
anti-establishment Christianity that favors equity in pluralistic settings but is not primarily
about politics or the social order. I know from experience that people like Hollinger are not reassured by
such declarations in the light of the long history of Christian establishmentarianism. Nonetheless, one might
hope that eventually our scholarship and our behavior might convince some such critics that more
thoughtful versions of traditional Christianity might be encouraged as an alternative to the less thoughtful
and more populist versions.
That being said, I find Hollinger's fears greatly overblown when he warns that more openness to various
explicitly religious viewpoints in the post-Protestant mainstream academy might threaten its freedom from
religious dominance. Hollinger sees mainstream academia as having won a bard-fought struggle to establish
critical distance from Christian hegemony and he fears that victory may be reversed. Outside the academy,
he warns, conservative Christian views are still largely the norm rather than the exception. So he fears that
more openness to explicitly Christian scholarship might somehow lead to a reversal of that valuable
historical development.
I can agree with Hollinger that the disestablishment of Protestant hegemony in mainstream universities in
the early 20th century was a necessary and desirable response to the demands of a more pluralistic public
culture. But that happened generations ago. Nobody younger than Hollinger or myself remembers even its
last stages. As Hollinger suggests, ecumenical Protestants and their many allies "won" in the past halfcentury
in establishing a more diverse and open public cul hire. The mainstream academy is not a place
where such openness could be reversed. But I also think that the disestablishment of Protestantism involved
an overcorrection that favored non-theistic outlooks and marginalized religious views more than was
necessary. So now a willingness to evaluate religiously-based outlooks on their merits, instead of as covert
efforts to regain lost political authority, would be a step toward a more healthy balance of various religious
and secular viewpoints.
The other historical force that Hollinger identifies, in addition to demographic diversification, as having
disrupted mainstream Protestantism's hegemonic accommodation to the Enlightenment, is "cognitive
demystification." In the face of modern scientific findings, many honest people have found it impossible to
credit the supernaturalist claims of traditional Christianity and biblical revelation. Hollinger speaks of this
demystification as though the issues involved were definitively settled long ago. So he says: "If Christianity
is basically right and its hold on the North Atlantic West is justified by its truth value, the logic of
mystification proceeds, then its decline among the intelligentsia must be the result of misunderstanding or
fraud." He goes on to observe that being more open to Christian viewpoints in the name of pluralism
typically "means accepting forms of evidence and reasoning that were once plausible within disciplinary
communities in the social sciences and the humanities but no longer are." He sees the good reasons for the
academy to set up its secular epistemic boundaries as "too obvious in the intellectual history of the last three
hundred years to bear repeating here." He also repeatedly applies the term "Christian survivalist" to those
who are committed "to the survival of Christianity amid the influences that appear to be diminishing. it in
the North Atlantic West."
I find these arguments to be astonishing, coming as they do from such a sophisticated intellectual historian.
They seem to assume a simple progressive history of modem human thought, where the more advanced
dominant beliefs of one era, particularly those bolstered by the authority of modern science, replace the
more primitive views of earlier eras. The latter will struggle to survive for a time but eventually will have to
succumb to the advance of a consensus of collective human truth. That is a view that was common when
Hollinger and I came on the intellectual scene in the mid-20th century. C.S. Lewis, who was no slouch as an
intellectual historian himself, referred to it at the time as "chronological snobbery." Particularly Lewis was
referringto the supposed demystification of reality based on generalizing from the practical successes of the
naturalistic scientific method. Lots of mid-century people agreed with Rudolph Bultmann when he said. it
was impossible to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles in the age of "the electric light
and the wireless." it turns out that Lewis was right and Bultmann was wrong. Just as an empirical fact, a
great many 21st-century people, including many Christian intellectuals, do find it possible to believe in such
things in the age of modern science. Hollinger and others may think they are benightedly wrong-headed in
doing so, and he may want to argue with Christian philosophers about what are legitimate warrants for their
beliefs. But it is not a good argument to claim that there is a consensus among the educated that these issues
have been settled.
One might also take into account the 21st-century version of demographic diversification. Multifaceted
ethnic and religious diversity does indeed undermine claims for Christian cultural and political hegemony.
But rather than exclusively reinforcing demystification, as it tended to do in the first half of the 20th century,
it can also reinforce openness to "mystification." Demystification is still strong in much of the North Mantic
West, but the North Atlantic West is not the center of civilization. Around the world, highly supernaturalist
religions--including many varieties of Christianity--are doing a lot more than surviving. Furthermore, as
21st-century America is becoming more diversified, it is not always becoming more secularized. Rather, the
waves of new immigration have included many highly religious people representing every world faith.
Some of these believers are highly educated. So, it seems strangely dated and parochially Western to speak
of the intellectual and cultural triumph of secularism as though it were a settled matter. That is not to engage
in the chronological snobbery of saying the later is necessarily better. It is just to say that in these days it
will not do to act as though non-theistic views should get an epistemic pass any more than should Christian
views.
So how are we to deal with the question of religion in American public life in this new circumstance?
Hollinger holds on to the idea of a more consistent privatization in public life. When he asks whether
religious ideas should "be critically engaged or given a pass," he is speaking directly only of politics. He
makes the reasonable point that politicians who declare religious bases for their views should not be
immune from having those views critically examined. He also quotes approvingly a campaign statement in
which Barack Obama said that when people are motivated by their religion to bring certain views into
public life they need to explain them in terms that will fit with principles shared by people of many faiths or
no religious faith. That makes sense as simple practical politics. It does not, however, necessarily entail
greater privatization. It might be a formula for more public acceptance of frank identification of various
religious motives and beliefs, in addition to offering arguments that look for shared common grounds. It also
seems to me to be an argument for more explicit discussions of our various religious and secular viewpoints
in the academy. Politics is not a suitable place for serious discussions or debates about anything, let alone
religion. But the public academy can provide just such a forum. It should be a model for dealing with issues
of diversity, including religiously based diversity, in public life. For instance, a secularist such as Hollinger
strongly holds a number of beliefs about human rationality and moral principles. The public academy
provides the best place where there might be debate about whether non-theistic assumptions provide
adequate grounds for such views or whether some sort of theism might provide better grounds. Those issues
are not going to be easily settled, of course, but universities are the best places where such civil discussions
should continue to take place and be encouraged.
After Cloven Tongues of Fire
Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History
DAVID A. HOLLINGER * PRIKETON UNIV. PRESS, 2013 * 248 PP. * $28.95
George M. Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre
Dame. He is the author most recently of The Twilight of the American Enlight- enment: The 1950s and the
Crisis of Liberal Belief (Basic Books).
Marsden, George M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Marsden, George M. "Whose pluralism?" Books & Culture, Jan.-Feb. 2014, p. 9+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A355867642/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c907265a.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A355867642
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant
Liberalism in Modern American History
The Christian Century.
130.12 (June 12, 2013): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2013 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
After Cloven Tongues of Fire:
Protestant Liberalism in
Modern American History
By David A. Hollinger
Princeton University Press, 244 pp., $29.95
After Cloven Tongues of Fire is a collection of historian David Hollinger's writings on 20th-century
American Protestantism. Hollinger is interested both in pinpointing ecumenical Protestant influence on the
United States and in tracking signs of its decline. He chronicles the tensions between denominational
leadership and people in the pew, between expansive visions and everyday realities. In Hollinger's view,
"liberalizing Protestants" were too successful in their pursuit of a more equitable and unified American
society: they reformed themselves almost out of existence. He does not have a problem with that, since
maintaining a form of ecumenical Protestantism for the 21st century is not his concern. Instead, he wants us
to better understand the influence of Protestantism.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History." The Christian Century,
12 June 2013, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A336489264/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a9539ac. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A336489264
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant
Liberalism in Modern American History
James T. Kloppenberg and Jon Butler
Books & Culture.
19.3 (May-June 2013): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text:
"Hollinger's book will take its place as one of the most important works in modern American intellectual
history published in recent decades. It shows this exemplary scholar practicing his craft at the highest level
of scholarly excellence and deliberately and self-critically reflecting on his practice."
--James T Kloppenberg, Harvard University
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"A splendid book. Hollinger's trenchant, sweeping, and at times jolting essays pose critical questions about
central issues in American religion, philosophy, and history with depth, insight, and understanding. After
Cloven Tongues of Fire will attract a wide spectrum of readers."
--Jon Butler, Yale University
Cloth $29.95 978-0-691-15842.6
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
See our E-Books at press.princeton.edu
Hollinger, David A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kloppenberg, James T., and Jon Butler. "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern
American History." Books & Culture, May-June 2013, p. 6. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A329303427/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb73d059.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A329303427
McGreevy, John T. Commonweal. 2/9/2018, Vol. 145 Issue 3, p28-30. 3p. 1 Black and White Photograph.
Subjects: PROTESTANTS -- United States; NONFICTION; PROTESTANTS Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America (Book); HOLLINGER, David A.
Section:
BOOKS
Protestants Abroad
How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America David Hollinger Princeton University Press, $35, 400 pp.
Little did the historian David Hollinger know that the missionaries his parents occasionally invited to their home for dinner in rural 1950s Idaho would occupy him in his retirement.
But so they have. Hollinger’s latest book, Protestants Abroad, traces the lives and activities of thousands of mainline American Protestant missionaries and, importantly, their children, from the early twentieth century into the 1960s. In its deft interweaving of personal stories and historical argument, it is the most accomplished piece of prose yet written by an exceptionally accomplished scholar. Time magazine founder Henry Luce, best-selling novelist and Nobel Prize–winner Pearl Buck, John Service (a State Department official alleged to have “lost” China during the anti-Communist fervor of the early 1950s), and Margaret Landon, the author of the book that inspired the Broadway musical The King and I, come to life in a new context, as “mish kids,” determined to broaden American exposure to the world. So, too, do former missionaries founding area studies programs in the universities, organizing the Peace Corps, and pioneering the practice of interracial adoption. In a term that for Hollinger is the highest praise, these men and women became “missionary cosmopolitans.”
In an era when academics of all ethnic backgrounds emerge from a worrisomely homogenous set of undergraduate institutions, Hollinger’s own journey from Idaho to La Verne College, a Church of the Brethren institution located outside Los Angeles, is also something of a provincial to cosmopolitan narrative. As a boy, Hollinger studied each issue of National Geographic, carefully preserving maps that suggested the wider world he would encounter as a professional historian. He eventually abandoned his religious faith, but he never left behind his interest in the intertwined history of religion and secularization. He found his way to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where for the first time, he wryly notes, he was offered a glass of wine at a social occasion. (The Brethren practiced abstinence.) There he also witnessed some of the most tumultuous free-speech and anti-Vietnam war protests. He then obtained a faculty position at Michigan, before returning to Berkeley.
Hollinger’s preoccupations over five decades as an historian exhibit an unusual consistency. Beginning with a study of the early twentieth-century philosopher Morris Cohen and then with a series of influential articles, he sketched a world, the American university and its environs, from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Hollinger’s professors and writers moved from a narrow, constrained set of human possibilities to a wider more capacious understanding of difference and commonality. He especially admired the practitioners and defenders of modern science with its principle of verifiability across cultures.
Not everyone agreed with Hollinger’s assessment. To their critics, when academics and intellectuals of this era said “Man” they really meant men, not humankind. Science itself rested on specific cultural practices, not a universal technique. And the search for commonalities across cultures threatened to substitute a bland, even insidious, white, Anglo-Protestant norm for ethnic difference. The most influential book in this vein, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), outlined how British and French scholars constructed an imagined East to further imperial agendas. Disciples of Said sallied forth in various directions, finding imperialism, for example, in the same back issues of National Geographic that had once so enraptured the young Hollinger.
Hollinger did not deny the blinders worn by his subjects. And he recognized that provincialism of a different sort lurked beneath arguments made in learned journals. But he urged a second look at intellectuals who, for all their faults, advocated a universalism that encompassed humanity more generously than its predecessors. He told a measured but nonetheless triumphant tale of the research university throwing off the shackles of its Anglo-Protestant heritage and welcoming Jews, especially, in the 1940s and 1950s, and how those Jews in turn accelerated intellectual progress across the arts and sciences. And he charted a public culture steadily more welcoming to those once understood as outsiders. Danger lay within the very term “multiculturalism” too, and Hollinger distanced himself from the crudest efforts to cast ethnic categories in support of policy goals such as affirmative action. Or to lock individuals into ethnic categories not of their own choosing. Instead he admired the “generous disposition toward the varieties of humankind” displayed by his cosmopolitan subjects.
Enter Protestant missionaries. The subtitle—how missionaries tried to change the world but changed America—summarizes the argument. Most of Protestants Abroad is a detailed discussion of how the experience of living abroad in Asia and the Middle East distinguished missionaries from almost all of their fellow citizens. Hollinger urges his readers to see past the cliché of missionaries unthinkingly imposing Western mores on recalcitrant natives.
Instead he highlights how the missionary experience cultivated a respect for distant cultures (including language training) and encouraged the development of programs to support further study of, say, Japan or Turkey.
Hollinger underplays the ability of Christian missionaries to convert indigenous peoples, neglecting Africa, and relatively, Latin America, where, admittedly, fewer American Protestant missionaries ventured, but where the missionary enterprise (Protestant and Catholic) changed the face of global Christianity. He is at some pains, in fact, to suggest that the growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa is independent of missionary effort, an odd claim that may reflect Hollinger’s own nervous understanding of modernity more than that of contemporary Chinese or Nigerian Christians. He wonders, remarkably, if Christianity in the Global South is “really part of a single community of faith with the Protestants of the North Atlantic West.”
How missionaries “changed America” is more comfortable terrain. Prominent figures such as Edmund Sopher, a child of Methodist missionaries in Japan, favored dismantling Jim Crow, when such a view held little sway within major political parties or corporate America. Sopher also defined racism as a “world issue” with repercussions in colonial systems around the globe. Another Methodist returning missionary, Ruth Harris, segued from work as a teacher in China to a leadership role in civil-rights marches. Other missionaries fought to legalize interracial marriage.
Two poignant undercurrents run through Protestants Abroad. The first is a loss of faith among many of Hollinger’s protagonists. This often began with a recognition that denominational differences between Methodism and Presbyterianism that loomed large in, for example, Indianapolis, proved irrelevant in Indonesia. Unsurprisingly, then, and Hollinger demonstrates this beautifully, missionaries led many of the ecumenical movements sprouting in the North Atlantic in the early twentieth century. Catholics stood outside this consensus, rejected as overly dogmatic and tied to Rome, and themselves hesitant to venture beyond the familiar precincts of the Catholic subculture. So, too, did Protestant Evangelicals still focused on conversion and a personal decision for Christ.
A more capacious understanding of Protestantism often led to doubts about Christianity itself. Given his occasionally polemical posture—one of his essays about religion in the university is titled “Enough Already: Universities do not need more Christianity”—Hollinger’s treatment of men and women struggling to redefine their religious beliefs is sensitive and compelling. Sometimes, missionary children such as Pearl Buck angrily rejected a Christianity they saw as trapping their parents in a meaningless effort at conversion. More often respect for indigenous culture morphed into a sense that Christianity was dispensable. Delegates to the World Council of Churches meeting in Sweden in 1968—including a onetime Methodist seminarian and future Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern— congratulated themselves for replacing the term “mission” with the term “service.” But service did not require Christianity. No empirical data tell us whether missionaries were disproportionately likely to become “post-Protestant,” but Hollinger’s insight is to see Mainline Protestant missionaries shaping American culture even as the churches that nurtured missionaries declined. The human-rights movement of the 1970s, Hollinger points out, had many sources, but among them was the transmutation of religious desires into secular goals.
The second undercurrent is political. Already committed to an ideal of respect for diverse cultures, the missionaries felt the sting of the American underwriting of South Vietnam (inherited as a colony from the French) more deeply than many of their secular contemporaries. Even more profoundly than in the persistence of Jim Crow, here lay unhappy proof of the United States as a colonial force in a decolonizing world. An early generation of missionary children such as Henry Luce could write of “The American Century” as one quite different from its European imperial predecessor, and Luce carried this support for the U.S. role in the world into support for the effort in Vietnam. A later generation of missionaries, formed in the cauldron of the 1960s, took a more polemical stance. These more jaundiced Protestant observers despaired at their inability to alter military strategies developed, in their eyes, by a corrupt foreign-policy establishment. The distance traveled in a generation—from patriotic scions of the mainline Protestant establishment such as Presbyterian John Foster Dulles serving as secretary of state, to missionaries and development workers coordinating protests against Vietnam policy published in the New York Times—was striking. The topic is outside Hollinger’s remit, but the story of the several thousand American Catholic missionaries in Latin America in the 1960s is similar, with many returning to the United States after work in Peru, Bolivia, and El Salvador, and leading agitation against American governmental policy in the region.
Hollinger lauds his missionary subjects in the final lines of Protestants Abroad for grasping the “profundity of the problem of solidarity.” The compliment is well earned. And Hollinger himself demonstrates a kind of solidarity, or empathy, with his missionary protagonists. One might wish for Hollinger to cast his historical eye on other religious groups, if only to temper the implicit claim that recognition of a distant person’s humanity depends upon porous boundaries in one’s own religious community. What dispositions did the African-American Christian civil-rights activists possess in the South that allowed them to see the humanity of their oppressors? Or Polish Catholic trade-union members negotiating with Communist leaders, in a union actually named “Solidarity”? Hollinger sees developing a wider sense of solidarity as the problem for the twenty-first century, notably in response to the ecological crisis. In earlier writings he lauded a civic solidarity that in the mid-twentieth century enabled Americans to better take responsibility for their most vulnerable fellow citizens. Just how to develop such solidarities does seem a vital question. After all, we in the United States are beginning to understand how solidarities once won can also be lost.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Pearl S. Buck with Chinese-American children placed with families through her Welcome House. The daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her childhood in China.
Culture changers. By: Frykholm, Amy, Christian Century, 00095281, 7/11/2012, Vol. 129, Issue 14
David Hollinger on what the mainline achieved
IN HIS PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS to the 2011 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, David Hollinger focused on the contributions and successes of ecumenical Protestants in their mid-20th-century encounter with diversity. Hollinger, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, specializes in American intellectual history. His survey The American Intellectual Tradition is a widely used textbook. Among his other books are Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.
In your account of mid-20th-century Protestantism, you use the term ecumenical Protestant instead of mainline, mainstream or liberal. Why do you make this choice?
I use ecumenical because it is much more specific historically and analytically than mainstream or liberal. Mainstream is a term that is too general and can cover almost anything. Liberal, too, is a term that you can apply to culture or politics as well as theology.
Ecumenical refers to a specific, vital and largely defining impulse within the groups I am describing. It also provides a more specific and appropriate contrast to evangelical. The term evangelical came into currency in the midcentury to refer to a combination of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, followers of holiness churches and others; ecumenical refers to the consolidation of the ecumenical point of view in the big conferences of 1942 and 1945.
We've become so accustomed to the narrative of "mainline decline" that it is difficult to get our minds around a more nuanced version of this story. How do you tell this story?
The ecumenical leaders achieved much more than they and their successors give them credit for. They led millions of American Protestants in directions demanded by the changing circumstances of the times and by their own theological tradition. These ecumenical leaders took a series of risks, asking their constituency to follow them in antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist and multicultural directions that were understandably resisted by large segments of the white public, especially in the Protestant-intensive southern states.
It is true that the so-called mainstream lost numbers to churches that stood apart from or even opposed these initiatives, and ecumenical leaders simultaneously failed to persuade many of their own progeny that churches remained essential institutions in the advancement of these values.
But the fact remains that the public life of the United States moved farther in the directions advocated in 1960 by the Christian Century than in the directions then advocated by Christianity Today. It might be hyperbolic to say that ecumenists experienced a cultural victory and an organizational defeat, but there is something to that view. Ecumenists yielded much of the symbolic capital of Christianity to evangelicals, which is a significant loss. But ecumenists won much of the U.S. There are trade-offs.
We usually say, "The victors write history," but here you seem to be saying, "The victors refuse to claim victory." Why is that?
The victors are slow to claim victory because they too often assume that numbers of church members are what counts most. If they had a more capacious understanding of the ways in which religion can function in society, they might be able to feel more pride in what happened. The great Anglican archbishop William Temple used to say that any church aware of its deepest missions would be willing to cease to exist if it advanced its ultimate goals.
The press and many spokespersons for evangelicalism dominate the conversation about American religion by trumpeting the numerical flourishing of evangelical fellowships of many kinds, and ecumenical Protestants have often accepted the terms of the conversation set by the evangelicals and the predictably numbers-first press.
What role did ecumenical Protestants play in shaping contemporary culture that are perhaps too easily forgotten today?
Ecumenical Protestants were way ahead of the evangelicals in accepting a role for sex beyond procreation and in supporting an expanded role for women in society. The ecumenical Protestants understood full well that the Jim Crow system could not be overturned without the application of state power, rejecting the standard line of Billy Graham and many other evangelicals that racism was an individual sin rather than a civil evil. The ecumenical Protestants developed a capacity for empathic identification with foreign peoples that led them to revise their foreign missionary project, diminishing its culturally imperialist aspects--and that led them, further, to the forefront of ethnoracially pluralist and egalitarian initiatives as carried out by white Americans. The ecumenical Protestants resoundingly renounced the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, while countless evangelical leaders continue to espouse this deeply parochial idea.
What were the not quite fatal flaws of ecumenical Protestantism in the 20th century?
This question is a bit difficult for me to address since I am not an ecumenical Protestant. Taking this question from the point of view of the mainstream churches, one could argue that they would be a lot better off today, and might have retained a more prominent role in American life, had they developed styles of ecumenism that had more respect for the role of denominational communions and local congregations in providing a sense of belonging and intimacy. The sweepingly antidenominational pronouncements of ecumenical leader Eugene Carson Blake and Episcopal bishop James A. Pike, for example, and perhaps even the priorities of the Consultation on Church Union, could easily be seen as aloof from the lives of parishioners.
Blake and Pike, for example, advocated the elimination of all denominational distinctions. One reason was that they were so afraid of the Catholics. Catholic unity was something they wanted to counter with Protestant unity. But a lot of people in small congregations felt dismissed by these kinds of pronouncements.
Reading Union Theological Seminary's Henry Pitney Van Dusen today, you wonder how he could proceed while seeing so little of the world immediately around him. He got the globe better than he got the Methodists and the Presbyterians.
Do yon see the line between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants dissolving or growing more distinct?
Do you know Fosdick's 1922 sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" published in the Christian Century? I am advocating a kind of re-creation of a Fosdickian mentality.
The ongoing accommodation between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants may well continue, but if it does, I fear that it will be at the cost of an opposite accommodation that deserves more attention than it has received. Perhaps voices like that of the Christian Century and the intellectual leaders of the ecumenical seminaries and denominations should more aggressively criticize the religious ideas proclaimed by the most visible of the evangelicals in American life today.
To be sure, secular intellectuals and journalists comment on these ideas in the New Yorker and now and then on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, but believing Protestants have an authority with the faith-affirming public that the rest of us do not have.
A more vigorous attack on obscurantist versions of the faith, a more insistent discussion of the latest in biblical scholarship, a yet more widespread commentary on the tendency of many of today's evangelical leaders to focus on tiny segments of scripture--this might be a valuable service. And might it cement an accommodation not with the evangelicals, but with secular intellectuals? That might be a good thing. The salient sclidarity today may not be with the community of faith but among those who accept Enlightenment-generated standards for cognitive plausibility.
After reading your work, I've taken to calling Barack Obama the leading ecumenical Protestant in the world today. Am I on to something there?
Barack Obama is a standard-issue ecumenical Protestant. His positions on church and state are a great example of that.
What's the future of conservative evangelicalism in light of the trajectory you chart?
The chances of the contemporary form of evangelical Protestantism surviving and flourishing for quite some time are maximized by the odd constitutional structure of American politics, which assigns considerable authority to the so-called red states. Much of the governing of the country and the electoral college depend on people outside urban centers. We don't have one-person, one-vote; we have this enormous, weighted power in the hands of states. That is a structural consideration that can yield a continuing flourishing of conservative Protestantism.
Another consideration is the reluctance of liberal Protestants to vigorously criticize the leading ideas of evangelical Protestants. As long as this continues, there is a discursive vacuum which means the press will continue to treat these family values folks as the voice of American religion. Only if faith-affirming voices get into the conversation more vigorously is that likely to change. Secular voices do not have as much pull in that conversation.
You have called ecumenical Protestantism a halfway house, if not an actual slippery slope, to secularism. Are you saying American culture is fated to be post-Protestant?
I don't think the future is clear. I am not saying that everyone who comes out of the ecumenical tradition is doomed to be post-Protestant. I am saying that if that happens to a significant number of people, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing. You could argue that a lot of post-Protestants are closer to the ecumenical tradition than the highly visible evangelical Protestants in the United States.
What does it mean to be post-Protestant? If it means that you are advancing in culture and politics a series of values for which ecumenical Protestantism has been a historical vehicle -- well, there are a lot more vehicles than there used to be. Ecumenical Protestantism can reconstitute itself as a prophetic minority rather than measuring itself in terms of how many Americans sign up.
I am speaking from a secular perspective that has a lot of respect for religious believers. I don't think that all religion is headed for history's dustbin. But it is not for me to say.
How did you get interested in this subject? How did it lead from your earlier work?
I have been frustrated by the gaps in our scholarship on American religion in the 20th century, which has seemed to me to be dominated by the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. While I was writing my book on multiculturalism, I became aware that many of the precursors of what came to be called multiculturalism, many of the early formulators, were ecumenical Protestants. Socalled liberal Protestants had provided a facilitating function for the development of culture for many Americans.
THE LONG VIEW: Hollinger suggests mainline churches won a cultural victory while suffering an organizational defeat.
~~~~~~~~
By Amy Frykholm
QUOTE:
The signal contribution of Hollinger’s essays is the clarity with which he presents
complex ideas, often aided by new terms and elegant turns of phrase.
no scholar of American
religion, American intellectual life, or American politics can afford to ignore
After Cloven Tongues of Fire. More than a book on liberal Protestantism, the
essays here reshape our understanding of the very nature of modernity in
America and what makes it unique.
Hedstrom, Matthew S. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Dec2015, Vol. 83 Issue 4, p1165-1168. 4p
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American
History. By David A. Hollinger. Princeton University Press, 2015. 248
pages. $22.95.
“The United States really is different,” declares Berkeley historian emeritus
David A. Hollinger in the opening pages of his essay collection After Cloven
Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. And,
Book Reviews 1165
he continues provocatively, in our moment of globalization, “Never was the
United States a more special case than it is today” (5). The kind of American
difference—of American exceptionalism—that Hollinger identifies stems from
the way the grand intellectual drama of the modern West, the interplay of
Enlightenment reason and Christian faith, has played out in the United States. In
the United States, unlike in Europe, accommodation rather than conflict has
been the rule, and Hollinger uses the essays collected here to listen closely for the
dissonances and harmonies of this drama as it reverberated across the twentieth
century. The central actors in Hollinger’s account of accommodation have been
liberal Protestants and post-Protestants, and the result of listening so carefully to
their stories is the most important body of scholarship written on Protestant liberalism
in the last generation.
The signal contribution of Hollinger’s essays is the clarity with which he presents
complex ideas, often aided by new terms and elegant turns of phrase. The
most important of these ideas—the ideas that bind the entire collection of essays
together, in fact—are “Christian survivalism” and “post-Protestantism.” Though
these essays were originally published across a span of many years—the oldest
dates from 1989, though most appeared between 2008 and 2012—these core concepts
provide a remarkable degree of coherence. “Christian survivalism” is the
term Hollinger uses to describe the normative framework that he thinks distorts
much historical thinking in the study of American religion. The field, he contends,
is still dominated by those committed to Christian beliefs and rooting for the
survival and wellbeing of Christian churches, which results in modes of historical
evaluation that lament Christian decline rather than neutrally assess and understand
religious change. “A clear understanding of the place of Protestantism in modern
American history,” Hollinger writes, “has been impeded by ‘Christian survivalism.’”
We cannot accurately understand this history, he argues, when “the significance of
this or that religious event is measured not according to its function in the society as
a whole but rather by what role it plays in strengthening Christianity” (19).
Hollinger’s polemics against Christian survivalism may strike some as
prickly ( perhaps one reason the term has not caught on in the field), yet the
notion is sound, even necessary. Hollinger’s crusade against Christian survivalism,
after all, is not a partisan intervention in a culture war—and certainly not an
attack on Christianity itself—but rather a vitally important reminder about basic
historical professionalism. To the best of our abilities, we must not let our ideological
commitments, whether political or theological, blind us to facts or distort
our interpretations. Christian survivalism, Hollinger argues, hinders the good
and important task of writing accurate religious history, and therefore has no
place in secular history or religious studies.
One of the basic realities that Christian survivalism and other ideological
blinders might obscure is what Hollinger calls post-Protestantism. This term
ably captures the myriad influences of Protestantism both on individual lives
(William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty are all persuasively described as
“post-Protestant”) and on the culture as a whole. Here Hollinger is fighting a
two-front war. The “post” in “post-Protestantism” reminds Christian survivalists
1166 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
and others that the dominance of Protestant Christianity in American society,
culture, and especially intellectual life can no longer be taken for granted, and
certainly is not what it was before the middle of the twentieth century. Yet the
“Protestant” in “post-Protestant” puts the brakes on secularist and multiculturalist
victory dances, and underscores the continuing influence of Protestant sensibilities
and values even after the secularization of much of American public life
(again, most especially universities) and the religious disaffiliation of many
American elites. Religious liberals—those Americans who sought religious accommodation
to intellectual and scientific modernity, on the one hand, and to
increasing religious and ethnic diversity, on the other—are the main actors in the
crafting of post-Protestantism, whether they intended such a result or not. “The
Protestantism these liberalizers developed, maintained, and critically revised
from generation to generation,” Hollinger notes, “served as a halfway house to a
post-Protestant secularism for many Americans,” though he recognizes as well
that for others Protestant liberalism remains “a viable, enduring spiritual home”
(xi). Nevertheless, as a scholar interested in broad social, political, and intellectual
change more than the fate of churches, Hollinger is most eager to look for the
influences of Protestant and post-Protestant liberalism in the culture at large.
Hollinger advances these intellectual aims through the ten essays reproduced
in this volume and an original preface and conclusion; he has also written a head
note at the start of each essay that not only details the circumstances of its original
publication but also outlines its main contributions. The essays cluster into
three interrelated, broad groups: the first three essays concern the role of ecumenical
(or liberal) Protestants in creating a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan
America in the twentieth century; the next three turn to intellectual history more
narrowly, focusing on the accommodation of American Christianity to modern
science, and especially the decisive legacy of William James; and the final three
ponder the place of religion in academic life. (The remaining essay, chapter 7,
looks at “American Jewish History in an Increasingly Post-Jewish Era,” in the
words of the subtitle, and most closely follow the themes developed in the essays
on ecumenical Protestantism.)
The title essay, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire,” is the centerpiece of the
cluster on ecumenical Protestants and social change in the mid-twentieth
century. Here, Hollinger argues persuasively that the leaders of ecumenical
Protestantism, through the Federal and National Council of Churches, through
denominations, and through congregations, raced ahead of their laity in embracing
liberal theology and multicultural, sometimes even universalist, values. The
result was paradoxical: the cultural advancement of those values, the decline of
ecumenical Protestantism in formal influence and numbers, and the opening of
new opportunities for evangelicals to seize the cultural and political capital
of historic Christianity, which they eagerly did. A second essay in this portion of
the book discusses the broader intellectual and social context of these transformations
(Hollinger gives us the terms “cognitive demystification” and “demographic
diversification” to describe these shifts) while a third outlines key events
of the 1940s, a moment that Hollinger sees as pivotal in the course of both ecumenical
and evangelical Protestantism.
Book Reviews 1167
Hollinger is most well known for his seminal contributions to American intellectual
history, and the middle section of the book examines more closely the
encounter of religious and scientific thought, especially through the life and work
of the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James. In these essays,
Hollinger provides yet another term, “the intellectual gospel”—a parallel to the
social gospel that emphasized the scientific method, or “justification by verification”—as
well as a close reading of James’ masterpiece, The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), in which Hollinger argues that James was more conflicted and
ambiguous than other scholars have thought. While many read Varieties as an
effort to preserve the intellectual viability of religious belief in a modern, scientific
era, Hollinger sees a kind of intellectual anxiety, as James fears the logical implications
of his own scientific commitments. “James rendered religion so general that
it had a much better chance of being accepted” by intellectual moderns, Hollinger
observers, while simultaneously working to make “science more commodious”
(135). This project succeeded in many respects, as James became, according to
Hollinger, “the most creative and conspicuous case” of the “radical liberalization
of Protestantism” (135). Yet James understood, as Hollinger poignantly notes,
that following such a course might lead to intellectual enlightenment but spiritual
ruin. “Are you willing to be damned for God’s glory?” James asked rhetorically in
the concluding pages to Pragmatism, echoing his Puritan ancestors. In other
words, are you willing to risk everything, including your deepest spiritual
bedrock, to follow bravely wherever the truth may lead?
Hollinger often writes with great sensitivity about religious and spiritual struggles
such as this, even as he openly acknowledges his personal disavowal of the
Protestantism of his upbringing. Nevertheless, he pulls no punches in the final
essays of the collection, essays about the place of religious commitment in modern
academic life. These ruminations stem from Hollinger’s participation in a series of
meetings funded by the Lilly Endowment that pondered the question, “Have
American colleges and universities moved too far from the Protestant cultural
frame that long defined so many of them?” (190). Not surprisingly in an essay
called “Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity,” Hollinger
argues the negative, asserting rather that “universities have reason to be proud” of
having created institutions “in which ideas identified as Christian are not implicitly
privileged” (191). In defending this proposition, Hollinger yet again tackles the
largest questions about the place of religion in modern American public life.
The erudition, insight, range, and quality of these essays cannot be captured
in brief summary, but the contribution can. Simply put, no scholar of American
religion, American intellectual life, or American politics can afford to ignore
After Cloven Tongues of Fire. More than a book on liberal Protestantism, the
essays here reshape our understanding of the very nature of modernity in
America and what makes it unique.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfv083 Matthew S. Hedstrom
QUOTE:
Hollinger’s work is a substantial contribution to our
understanding of ecumenical protestantism in the twentieth century. This is a
book by a master of the craft and one that must be reckoned with if one
plans to engage the relationship between liberal religion and politics.
Modern, John Lardas. Church History. Dec2014, Vol. 83 Issue 4, p1071-1074. 4p.
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern
American History. By David A. Hollinger. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2013. xiv + 230 pp. $29.95 cloth.
In After Cloven Tongues of Fire David Hollinger makes an important argument
about particular protestant groupings, their accommodations, and their making
of an American modernity. The gist of Hollinger’s story, told in a series of
previously published essays, is about the recent fate of liberal protestantism
in America, what Hollinger labels “ecumenical Protestantism.” Wary of
instantiating an unsubtle narrative of liberal vs. conservative piety, Hollinger
seeks to achieve more analytic purchase on the complexities of protestant
history. In contrast to what Hollinger sees as an “obscurantist” (one of his
favorite words) position of “Christian survivalists;” i.e., evangelicals,
ecumenical protestantism refers to those groups and individuals open to
“sympathetic exploration of wider worlds” (21). In contrast to the former, the
latter were integral to reducing “Anglo-Protestant prejudice” in the twentieth
century and fomenting its embrace of “the varieties of humankind.” And this
is the victory whose mechanics Hollinger explores in the trajectories of
protestants who were politically engaged, scientifically rigorous, and
committed to a vision of progressive humanism. And it is a victory,
Hollinger argues, that comes at a loss, specifically, a loss of “organizational
hegemony” (46) and political capital.
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 1071
But there is a silver lining. As Hollinger writes, “Our narrative of modern
American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that
ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to offer the United
States than did its evangelical revival. Much of what ecumenical
Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been
slow to see it” (48–49).
For despite the emptying of the “vast sanctuaries built by the Methodists and
Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the center of almost all American cities
and towns,” the spirit of ecumenicism still circulates. The mark of ecumenical
protestantism is both present and absent in Hollinger’s rendering of “postProtestant”
domains.” Hollinger employs what he calls a dispersionist
approach to illuminate protestant influence “beyond the churches” (160).
And for the most part, this influence has been positive and democratically
constructive. There is a sense here (at least for this reader) of a Hegelian
process of Protestantism emptying itself out in the world, recognizing itself,
and its true calling, in the so-called secular world of politics, activism, and
science. This version of protestantism is not merely liberal or ecumenical. It
is progressive by definition.
The formal nature of the collected essay complements the dispersionist
approach as Hollinger circles the intellectual complex of ecumenical
protestantism in the long twentieth century. He takes its measure from
different angles, from close and counter-intuitive readings of figures like
Reinhold Niebuhr and William James to current debates about religion in
higher education to the ecumenical protestant presence in mid-century
foreign policy circles.
Hollinger pits his dispersionist approach against “prominent communalists”
like “Mark Noll, George Marsden, D.G. Hart, Richard Bushman, Grant
Wacker, and Harry Stout, all of whom study the institutions and ideologies
of professing Protestants with special attention to the adhesives that make for
the preservation of Protestant communities” (161). Hollinger sees himself as
non-apologetic in making a case for a style of protestantism into which he
was born but has since “left” and become a thoughtful critic from the postprotestant
space of beyond. Having grown up within an ecumenical and
“intensely Protestant atmosphere,” Hollinger writes “from a secular
perspective,” adding that he is “no longer Protestant.” (170). Whereas a Noll
or a Hatch might feel the need to tell a story that conserves an identifiable
religious community, Hollinger sees his essays as serving the project of
diffusion, the ironic legacy of ecumenical protestantism—the more it
dissipates the more influential it becomes.
Hollinger urges historians to see the different threads and fates of liberal
protestant thought so as to better see the invisible legacy of ecumenical
protestantism. He charts, for example, the division of a nineteenth-century
1072 CHURCH HISTORY
protestant heritage into social and intellectual gospels. As the latter became less
cognitively plausible in the twentieth century, it did not so much wane as lose
touch with the figure of Christ and talk about him. “Science-admiring deChristianized
elites” diminished the moral authority of Christianity even as
they maintained many of its virtues in the service of secular truth.
Hollinger’s is a sophisticated rendering of a classic secularization narrative—
big science being “an updated version of earlier religious callings” (83).
Hollinger notes the messiness of a situation in which “much of American
Protestant thought has been reactive to the scientific enterprise” even while
“much of that enterprise has been propelled by cognitive and moral energies
drawn from the Protestant religious tradition.” This is an essential point that
cannot be made too often or too forcefully for it demands an incredible
degree of interpretive reflexivity if one is to follow through on it. Indeed, it
has led some even to question the celebrated differences between science
and religion, reason and faith, particularly as both have been practiced over
the past few centuries, which is not to say that there is no differences at all
but to question the mythology that such differences are fundamental and not
epiphenomenal to processes of discursive formation. It would be fascinating,
then, to pair Hollinger’s analysis with an exploration of the complexities or
constructedness of the science with which self-conscious renderings of
religion are struggling. As the rich body of science studies have shown over
the past few decades, scientific objectivity has its history and one that is
integral to the liberal and erstwhile protestants Hollinger so deftly chronicles.
Hollinger is onto something profound here in mapping the contours of what
he calls a “post-Protestant secularism”—a way for many Americans to live in
and through their modernities without excessive tension or acknowledged
allegiance to the religious history that has allowed them to arrive at this
point in history. Spiritual-but-not-religious, indeed. One outcome of
Hollinger’s narrative frame is that he tends to undervalue the ways in which
liberal protestantism undergirds less palpable and less easily admired
formations than cosmopolitanism and civil rights. The Bigness of technoscientific
advances, neo-liberal economic policies, and therapeutic styles (of
which spiritual-but-not-religious is but one)—but more importantly, their
dispersion, expanse and swath are also part of any story about liberal/
ecumenical protestantism in the twentieth century. Hollinger, for example,
cites Norman Vincent Peale as a kind of ecumenical turncoat for failing to
live up to his liberal theologizing. But the therapeutic turn—a most
significant process over the past 60 years and one spearheaded by Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking—is one anchored in liberal theology, in
general, and its particular approaches to the psyche. But the so-called
triumph of the therapeutic is strangely absent in a book that tackles the death
and dispersion of liberal theology.
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 1073
A kind of Protestant exceptionalism simmers throughout the book—neither
an apology nor plea but a familiar set of assumptions about what constitutes the
civic sphere and politics within it, how that sphere and those actions are
prerequisite for agency and ethical action. For example, the very notions of
ecumenicism and accommodation that drive Hollinger’s analysis are,
themselves, historical, emerging from a particular set of concerns and
valuations and strategies. They are, in other words, part of a liberal selfunderstanding
whose boundless energy for expressing humanist pathos and
advertising their capacity for searing self-critique is part of the history that
Hollinger (and others) do not engage as historical so much as self-evident.
Might there be something left out of any universal humanism? Is there a
history of exclusion that is part and parcel to the dispersion of ecumenism?
Or more precisely, what kinds of humanities or ways of thinking about the
human have not been invited to the ecumenical table or worse, been
banished from the get-go as outside the fold of political transparency and
common sense epistemology?
Despite this parsing, Hollinger’s work is a substantial contribution to our
understanding of ecumenical protestantism in the twentieth century. This is a
book by a master of the craft and one that must be reckoned with if one
plans to engage the relationship between liberal religion and politics.
John Lardas Modern
Franklin & Marshall College
COFFMAN, ELESHA. Journal of Religion. 2015, Vol. 95 Issue 1, p149-151. 3p.
HOLLINGER, DAVID A. After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern
American History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 244 pp. $29.95
ðclothÞ.
The key word in the title of David A. Hollinger’s essay collection, he writes in the
preface, is “after.” The rest of the title refers to Pentecost, the event at which, according
to Acts 2:1–11, the Holy Spirit descended on a motley crowd of early Christians.
But it is not the momentum of the early church that interests Hollinger, the Preston
Hotchkiss Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He
aims, rather, to transform what is commonly narrated as the decline of liberal Protestantism
into an energetic story of post-Protestant flourishing in a diverse America.
Book Reviews
149
The title essay attends to what happened after the heyday of America’s liberal
Protestant establishment. First delivered as the presidential address to the 2011
annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, the essay puts forth
Hollinger’s central argument ðfollowing sociologist N. J. Demerath IIIÞ that liberal
Protestants in the 1960s and subsequent decades lost the churches but won the
culture. This process seemed like decline to observers who looked only at mainline
institutions, where membership plummeted and laypeople revolted against progressive
clergy. Looking outside the churches, Hollinger contends, yields a very different
picture. “Countless individuals who inherited the tradition of ecumenical Protestantism
put their energies into an imposing collection of secular agencies, including the
human rights organizations that flourished during the 1970s and after,” he writes.
“These post-Protestant endeavors are a major feature of modern American life, yet
our recognition of them has been obscured by a survivalist bias, by which I mean a
preference for if not a commitment to the survival of Christianity in general and of
the institutions of ecumenical Protestantism in particular” ð45Þ.
Christian survivalism is a sentiment Hollinger wishes he could write “after,” if only
it would go away. In “Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity”—one
of the more polemical of these frequently feisty essays—Hollinger expresses
frustration with fellow members of a Lilly-funded seminar who complained
of the academy’s hostility toward Christianity. Precisely because the rest of the
United States is so Christian, Hollinger counters, the academy should preserve its
critical distance from religious claims. Furthermore, as he stresses in the following
chapter, sloppy recourse to faith-based thinking runs rampant in politics; either
religious ideas should be scrubbed from discussion of public policy, or they should
be tested just like any other ideas.
Hollinger’s entire story takes place after the Enlightenment, and he shares that
movement’s emphasis on science and the secular. Chapters 4–6 dwell on the turn of
the twentieth century, at which point science took from religion pride of place in
American intellectual life. The main figure in these chapters is William James, who,
after long struggle, urged people of faith to do what Hollinger counsels: to test
belief empirically, “bringing in evidence of the sort that might actually stand up in
the structure of plausibility that counted in the modern, North Atlantic West” ð133Þ.
Hollinger’s story also takes place after American Protestantism’s encounter with
diversity, especially its engagement with Jewish intellectuals after World War II.
Chapter 7 muses on the similarities between post-Jewish and post-Protestant history.
One more “after” animates these essays, especially the autobiographical “Church
People and Others.” Hollinger’s career as a historian, he recounts, began after he
left provincial Idaho for cosmopolitan California and after he left his Protestant
upbringing for a secular identity. The post-Protestant trajectory, then, reflects his
own trajectory. In the spirit of Hollinger’s call for religious ðor, in this case, postreligiousÞ
ideas to be subjected to the same scrutiny as any others, I will suggest that
his personal investment in the story he tells gives a bitter edge to his denunciations
of Christian survivalism while producing a wistfulness in his description of Marilynne
Robinson’s novel Gilead. That book, he writes, functions as an emblem of the
parts of Protestantism—decency, humility, and self-interrogation—that educated
post-Protestants can still appreciate ð162Þ.
Hollinger also seems to speak more for himself than for his subject in an epilogue
on Reinhold Niebuhr, the only portion of the book not previously published elsewhere.
There he raises the question, “Might Niebuhr have always retained, at some
level of his being, this suspicion that the Christian project could only do so much for
humankind?” ð222Þ. This speculation does not fit with Niebuhr’s refusal, described
a few pages earlier, to leave Union Seminary for a position at Harvard, but it does fit
The Journal of Religion
150
with the post-Protestant arc of the book. At any rate, Hollinger does not press the
question, concluding, “Whatever else Niebuhr may or may not have been, he was a
great reconciler, another in the imposing tradition of Protestant liberalizers—exemplified
by William Ellery Channing, Horace Bushnell, and Walter Rauschenbusch—who
have drawn selectively from the cultural inventory of Protestant Christianity
in order to speak as directly as they thought possible to the challenges of one’s
historical moment” ð222Þ.
The liberalizers dominate this book. Although Hollinger argues that the best
label for them is “ecumenical,” the bridges they built within Christianity matter far
less to his narrative than the bridges they built to post-Protestantism. Conservative
Protestants, by contrast, appear only as antagonists, and, unfortunately, Hollinger
gets parts of their story wrong. The Evangelical publication Christianity Today did not
“rapidly outdistance” the mainline Christian Century in the era of the Moral Majority,
as he suggests on page 42; rather, through a combination of subsidized circulation
and a broader readership, Christianity Today from its 1956 launch onward always had
a higher circulation than the Century. Similarly, the National Council of Churches
did not serve as “the public face of Protestantism” until the 1970s, as stated on page
23, because Billy Graham had become Protestantism’s most recognizable face years
earlier. Readers who look to After Cloven Tongues of Fire primarily for its “conceptualization
and style” ð183Þ, the qualities Hollinger most admired in the historians he
had read as a graduate student, will not mind these errors, but the errors do detract
from a forcefully and creatively argued book.
ELESHA COFFMAN, University of Dubuque Theological Seminary
QUOTE:
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.
WILLIAMS, JEFFREY. Catholic Historical Review. Summer2016, Vol. 102 Issue 3, p643-644. 2p.
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. By
David A. Hollinger. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2013. Pp. xvi,
228. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-691-15842-6.)
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
BOOK REVIEWS 643
. . . 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.
Brite Divinity School JEFFREY WILLIAMS
QUOTE:
In masterly writing
aimed primarily at historians but
accessible to general readers, Hollinger
offers nuanced, compelling judgments
that
make After Cloven Tongues a consummate
achievement.
Brick, Howard. History: Reviews of New Books. May2016, Vol. 44 Issue 3, p70-71.
Hollinger, David A.
After Cloven Tongues of Fire:
Protestant Liberalism in Modern
American History
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press
248 pp., $29.95,
ISBN 978-0691158426
Publication Date: May 2013
The “cloven tongues” in this essay
collection’s title refer to the biblical
passage describing Pentecost, when
the fire of the Holy Spirit descended to
an assembly gathered “out of every
nation under heaven” around Jesus’s
apostles; then, “the multitude came
together, and were confounded,
because that every man heard them
speak in his own language” (Authorized
King James Version, Acts 2:5–
6). What to some Pentecostal and
holiness churches authorizes
speaking in tongues conveys, in David
Hollinger’s distinctly ecumenist interpretation
of the passage, the Christian
principle of human universality,
expressed in and through human diversity.
That theme provides Hollinger
with the clue to the late-twentieth-century
fate of American Protestantism’s
two great camps: the ecumenist (associated
with the liberal National Council
of Churches, including
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists,
Congregationalists, and Northern
Baptists) and the evangelical (represented
by the National Association of
Evangelicals, or NAE, including
Assemblies of God, Church of the
Nazarene, conservative Baptists, and
more). He aims to explain the recent
loss of cultural hegemony suffered by
the former camp—a decline in numbers
of congregants and in the centrality
that this group’s church leaders
once enjoyed in American political,
economic, and cultural institutions—
compared to the growing weight of the
latter. Adding the preposition to the
scriptural phrase—after “cloven
tongues of fire”—poses the key question
of this book: what remained of the
ecumenist project beyond the midtwentieth
century, once the Christian
principles of universality in diversity
and the advocacy of human dignity for
all had triumphed among its liberal
American adherents? In answer, Hollinger
argues that the mid-century ecumenist
program marked the
culmination of a long, historic
“accommodation with the
Enlightenment” (14), and, thereby,
mainline Protestant denominations
undercut their own raison-d’^etre.
Meanwhile, the other camp, composed
of those he calls survivalists, still
strives to sustain ideas of a definitively
Christian America formerly taken for
granted but now surrendered by the
liberals.
In a striking essay on “the realistpacifist
summit meeting of March
1942” (56–81), Hollinger describes
the reunification of Protestant liberals,
divided just yesterday over intervention
in World War II, around a
left-leaning program of Christian
brotherhood aimed at defeating racism,
imperialism, poverty, and inequality in
the postwar world and the presentation
of Christian belief in terms (dispelling
literalist conviction in miracles)
consistent with the “structure of
plausibility” (105) maintained by modern
scientific culture. The ecumenist
leaders, thus, went far out in front of
the “people in the pew” (33), yet the
subsequent decline of their church
membership and the growth of the
evangelicals (organized in the NAE
during the same year as the liberal
“summit”) did not stem simply from a
flight of congregants to the latter
camp. Rather, as distance grew
between ecumenist leaders and more
conventional white American Christians,
mobile members of evangelical
churches ceased to graduate into the
mainline churches as their social status
rose, and children of liberal Protestants
saw less reason to remain church
members, insofar as a liberal and rational
ethic of benevolence could be
practiced perfectly well without faith,
in secular life. Hollinger comes very
close to describing Protestant liberalism
as what the evangelicals claim it
is—a way-station to godless secularism—though
he prefers to invert the
valence of that accusation and credit
the “formidable universalist strain in
Christianity” (186) with providing a
“sturdy conduit” (222) to modernism.
For Hollinger, whose autobiography
(beautifully told here in “Church People
and Others”) entailed an intellectual
journey out of a devout (though
liberal) Christian upbringing to a secular
outlook and a professional
“preoccupation with religion’s relation
to science” (117), the general history
related here appears as an epochal
“transition from Protestantism to postProtestantism”
(118).
Following the presentation of that
overarching argument, Hollinger
frames the rest of the book with exceptionally
skillful essays on William
James and Reinhold Niebuhr. James’s
famed “Will to Believe,” he finds, caricatured
the Victorian scientism James
sought to rebut by (ambivalently) proposing
a separate sphere of truth
claims for matters of faith; by the time
he wrote his 1907 Pragmatism, however,
James had moved to affirm a unitary
standard of belief founded on the
scientific “structure of plausibility.”
For Hollinger, James began the last
stage in liberal Protestantism’s accommodation
with modernity; the book’s
epilogue suggests that Reinhold Niebuhr
stood at the end of the road,
offering the last great statement of the
particularist conviction that Christian
faith gave something essential to modern
American life even as (Hollinger
suspects) Niebuhr himself knew that
“Protestant cultural hegemony was
gone” (222). In masterly writing
aimed primarily at historians but
accessible to general readers, Hollinger
offers nuanced, compelling judgments
(excepting, in my view, a
misconstruction of post-sixties identity
politics and multiculturalism) that
make After Cloven Tongues a consummate
achievement.
HOWARD BRICK
University of Michigan
Copyright 2016 Taylor & Francis
MCKANAN, DAN. Journal of Unitarian Universalist History. 2015/2016, Vol. 39, p125-128. 4p.
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern
American History. David A. Hollinger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2013. 228 pp. $45.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper).
$13.49 (Kindle).
After Cloven Tongues of Fire is a collection of previously-published essays,
most of them concerned with the evolution of liberal Protestantism
during the twentieth century. The essay that will be of most interest to
readers of this journal shares the first part of its title with the book as
a whole. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism
and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity," Hollinger seeks
to explain "the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants
lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs" (21) while
simultaneously making a vigorous case for the centrality of ecumenical
Protestantism to the cultural transformation of American society as a
whole. (Though Hollinger's definition of "ecumenical Protestantism"
limits it to denominations affiliated with the National Council of
Churches, both parts of his argument apply at least equally well to the
Unitarian Universalist experience.)
Hollinger explains ecumenical Protestantism's numerical
decline primarily in terms of demographics: they reproduced at below
replacement levels even during the height of the baby boom, and
failed to retain the religious loyalty of their youth because they actively
encouraged those youth to explore diverse cultures and worldviews.
126 Book Reviews
Secondarily, Hollinger argues, ecumenical Protestantism lost the support
of some long-term members (including a disproportionate share of its
biggest donors) by taking strong stands in favor of racial and economic
justice — stands that were favored much more by the clergy than the
laity. In so doing, however, ecumenical Protestants won the culture
wars: beginning with the energetic campus ministries of the 1940s and
1950s, they created "an environment in which many Americans found
themselves able to engage sympathetically a panorama of ethnoracial,
sexual, religious, and cultural varieties of humankind" (46). This set in
motion the cultural changes that would make possible the end of Jim
Crow segregation, the election of Barack Obama, and the embrace of
marriage equality. In short, "ecumenical Protestantism actually advanced
some of its central goals even while its organizational hegemony
disappeared" (46).
From my perspective as a Unitarian Universalist, the central
lesson to be derived from this narrative is that institutional decline is
sometimes a consequence of fidelity to core values. Unitarian Universalists
often assume that if our churches are not growing it is because we are
failing to welcome visitors or because we are too racially, economically,
and educationally homogeneous. These are legitimate concerns that we
would want to address even if (as was the case in the 1950s) our churches
were growing vigorously. Hollinger challenges us to acknowledge that
core liberal values may also lead to the decline of liberal institutions. If
we have fewer children (perhaps for environmental reasons or because
we value deep emotional attachments with each individual child) and
encourage those children to explore the world, we can expect to see fewer
cradle Unitarian Universalists in the churches of the future. If we stand
on the side of love even when it makes people angry, we can expect that
some of those angry people will walk out of our congregations. To tire
extent that we decline for these reasons, it may be worth it.
Hollinger draws a slightly different lesson, one that reflects his
own identity as someone who has happily (albeit appreciatively) left his
Protestant roots behind. Too many histories of ecumenical Protestantism,
he complains, are written from a "survivalist bias" (47). That is, the
authors (many of them funded by tire Lilly Endowment) ascribe intrinsic
value to the survival of Christianity in general and of ecumenical
Protestantism in particular. They analyze the causes of ecumenical
Book Reviews 127
Protestant decline in order to identify strategies for reversing that
decline. Hollinger, by contrast takes the nation rather than the churches
as his primary subject, and is thus able to tell a hopeful story about how
institutionally declining churches contributed to the diversification of
national culture. Drawing an analogy with Lyndon Johnson's comment
that the Democratic Party "lost the South for a generation" (42), Hollinger
suggests that while liberalism may have lost its hold on institutional
Protestantism, it (like the Democratic Party) gained the support of an
increasingly diverse nation.
Here Hollinger acknowledges a crucial difference: the Democratic
Party continues to thrive (more or less) because political liberals
still need political parties to achieve their ends. Religious liberals, by
contrast, may not need "any kind of Protestantism whatsoever" to
achieve their "captive-liberating and supernaturalism-rejecting projects"
(43). Hollinger isn't bothered by the fact that millions of Americans still
find value in Protestant congregations, but neither is he bothered by the
increasing numbers of people for whom ecumenical Protestantism was
simply a waystation en route to diversity-loving secularism. Herein lies
a crucial question for Unitarian Universalists: like Hollinger, we may be
relatively unconcerned about whether Protestantism grows or shrinks.
But most of us would still insist that religious congregations have a vital
role to play, both in walking with people through life passages and in
mobilizing collective action for justice. We might draw a different lesson
about the current status of the Democratic Party: even though it espouses
a set of values shared by a majority of Americans, it frequently loses
elections (especially non-presidential elections) because its supporters
are less likely to vote. The difference in political participation between
conservatives and liberals may be a consequence of the difference in
congregational participation, especially since the skills one learns in the
context of a congregation (such as compromising to achieve common
values) translate readily into the political arena. If this is so, it behooves
us to have a "survivalist bias" regarding religious institutions, even if
we don't have such a bias regarding Christianity.
Hollinger's critique of Christian survivalism runs parallel to the
argument he develops in his essay on "Communalist and Dispersionist
Approaches to American Jewish History." Addressing a group of
historians of Judaism, he faults that guild for paying too much attention
128 Book Reviews
to "communalist" history (that is, the history of groups and individuals
who emphasize their Jewish identity) and too little to the "dispersionist"
story of "persons with an ancestry in the Jewish diaspora, regardless of
their degree of involvement with communal Jewry and no matter what
their extent of declared or ascribed Jewishness" (141). A communalist
history of Jewish feminism, for example, would focus on the ordination
of women to the rabbinate, while a dispersionist history would take
account of the fact that nearly all of the leading figures in second wave
feminism were Jewish. As this example illustrates, a fully developed
dispersionist history would clarify the profound importance of the Jewish
story to American history as a whole.
This essay is relevant for Unitarian Universalist historians in two
ways. First, Unitarian Universalism is a significant site for dispersionist
Jewish history, since persons of Jewish descent have been prominent in
our leadership and appear to be better represented in our congregations
than in the nation as a whole. Second, Unitarian Universalism has
its own dispersionist history: persons affiliated with Unitarianism or
Universalism, sometimes only for brief periods, are overrepresented
in a great many sectors of American history. These are the people who
dominate the lists of "Famous Unitarians" that sometimes embarrass
thoughtful Unitarian Universalist historians. Flollinger's concept of
dispersionist history offers us a helpful framework for actually telling
those stories, not as an exercise of denominational self-aggrandizement,
but of genuine historical understanding.
These are just two of the ten essays in this wide-ranging book.
Others deal with William James, with the ways scientists claimed moral
authority at the turn of the twentieth century, with interactions between
pacifists and Christian realists in shaping ecumenical Protestantism, with
the role of religion in university life, and with Hollinger's own biography.
Together, they provide a fascinating introduction to one of the most
influential scholarly interpreters of religious liberalism active today.
Dan McKanan
Emerson UUA Senior Lecturer
Harvard Divinity School
QUOTE:
one of our leading intellectual historians,
Hollinger's finely crafted essays make an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which secular minded American-Jewish intellectuals adapted the scientific credo of universalism to help shape a diverse American secular culture.
Fischel, Jack. Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring97, Vol. 73 Issue 2, p372-376.
Science, Jews & Secular Culture: Studies in Mid 20th Century American Intellectual History
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History By David A. Hollinger. Princeton. $24.95.
Any study of Jewish life in America must take into account the division between universalist and particularist Jews. Whereas the Gentile world often views Jews as a homogeneous ethno-religious group, the reality is far different. Perhaps no group embraced the promises of the Enlightenment more than did those Jews who distanced themselves from the religion of their fathers and assimilated themselves into the new faith of reason and the scientific method. The promises of the Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which preached the universality of all men, appealed to a people who for centuries had been the victims of religious prejudices. Both in Europe and in the United States a proportion of Jews were attracted to the secularist universalism of the Left. Other Jews sought the constitutional protections guaranteed in democratic societies and still others maintained the parochialism of their religious belief system or the ideology of Zionism.
David Hollinger, one of our leading intellectual historians, recognizes the divisions that have existed among Jews since their emancipation from the Ghetto more than 100 years ago. Among other subjects included in the essays in this slim volume is the influence of secular-minded Jews on American culture from roughly 1930 to the 1960's. It is during this period that the country moved from a predominately Anglo-Protestant culture, which discriminated against Jews in general and their place in the nation's intellectual life in particular, to a more cosmopolitan one in which science and the scientific method begat a secularism that helped overcome the notion of a "Christian America."
From about 1880 to 1924 millions of non-Protestant immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Jews, entered the United States and were greeted suspiciously as threats to the hegemony of the majority culture. During the first decade of the 20th century, the Dillingham Commission, appointed by Congress to assess the nation's immigration policy, recommended that Congress should institute laws which would preserve the Anglo-Protestant composition of American life. In the decade following World War I, Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924 which created quotas on the number of immigrants that could enter the country from Eastern and Southern Europe and, in 1930, capped the number of immigrants entering the country to 150,000 with 120,000 slots allocated to Northern and Western Europe. Those who wrote the immigration laws feared that should massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continue, it would undermine the influence of Anglo-Protestantism over American cultural life.
One way in which the Protestant establishment protected itself against the perceived Jewish threat was in higher education where they introduced quotas that capped Jewish enrollments in schools such as Yale. As Hollinger tells us:
At issue was more than religion. Jews were suspect in academia partly because many Anglo-Protestants thought them socially crude and aggressive, and politically radical .... The barriers to Jews in business, engineering, medicine and law where technical skills rather than responsibility ... for transferring culture were central--were not as high nor as entrenched. Intellectually ambitious Jewish undergraduates of the teens, twenties, and thirties were routinely counseled to give up on the idea of becoming philosophers or historians ....
This fear that secular-minded Jews would contaminate American culture is, perhaps, best summarized by T.S. Eliot in a remark he made at the University of Virginia in 1934 at a time when Hitler was purging the German universities of their Jewish faculties; "Any large number of free-thinking Jews is undesirable if one wants to maintain or develop a society in which a Christian tradition can flourish."
The truth was that many of the Jewish intellectuals of the pre-World War II period were secularists and with notable exceptions, such as Felix Frankfurter, did not identify with Judaism, the Jewish community, or the parochial issues that attended concerns about maintaining Jewish identity in America. More typical was the response of Harold Laski, who told his Orthodox father, "I am English, not Polish; an agnostic, not a Jew." Eliot's fear that free-thinking Jews were the enemies of "Christian" culture was characteristic of the type of academic elitists who raised the anti-Semitic barriers that prevented the employment of Jews in higher education, especially in the humanities and the social sciences. Not a single Jew held a tenured appointment in any department within Yale college until 1946. In Columbia's English department, the appointment of Lionel. Trilling, as assistant professor in 1939, remains a landmark event in overcoming anti-Semitism in higher education. Today, although Jews constitute about 3 percent of the population, they account for 17 percent of the combined faculties of the 17 most highly ranked universities.
Hollinger attributes this turnaround to three factors; the integration of Jews into liberal arts faculties followed in large part from the discrediting of anti-Semitism as a result of the Holocaust. Opinion polls showed that anti-Semitism, which remained high during the war years, declined sharply in the years immediately after the war. Secondly, precisely at the time anti-Semitism was in decline, academic jobs in unprecedented numbers became available as a result of The Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 or "GI Bill." The convergence of these two developments led to the entrance of Jews into American academia in large numbers. Finally, Hollinger argues that the ideological nature of the Cold War mitigated against a resurgence of anti-Semitism; "world leadership outside the Soviet orbit had been transferred ... to the United States, a power that defined itself with Enlightenment universalist abstractions."
The Cold War also elevated the scientist to a key role in the straggle against the Soviets. The increasing importance of scientific culture in American life exacerbated the decline of "Protestant culture" although Hollinger insists that Christianity remains an important force in American life. In one of his many insights, Hollinger writes, "The relative slowness and limited extent of de-Christianization in modern American history even down to the present is an event of the same order as the failure of the American Left to develop social democratic movements comparable to those of Great Britain, France and Germany." Nevertheless, Hollinger attributes the emergence of a pluralistic culture to the influence of the scientific credo which stresses the universalistic norms of science. Hollinger argues that the formulation of a scientific creed, which ignores race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities in the pursuit of knowledge, fostered the acceptance of diversity in the postwar years. It was in this atmosphere of universalism that Jews thrived throughout American society and within academia in particular.
Given their early history, the massive entry of Jewish intellectuals into the academy from the late 1940's through the 1960's was a great achievement. Jews were entering communities of discourse on "universal" terms proclaimed by these communities themselves. Observing the success of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and J.D. Salinger, Leslie Fiedler could hail "the great take-over by Jewish-American writers ... of a task inherited from certain Gentile predecessors, urban Anglo-Saxons... of dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole of the American people." But, as Hollinger points out, to make this type of claim risks falling into the "booster-bigot trap." By this Hollinger means the temptation to choose between the uncritical celebration of "Jewish contributions" and the complaints of "Jewish influence." Lionel Trilling declared that he would take offense if people found either "faults or virtues" in his work as a writer and critic that they called "Jewish." Trilling and many of his colleagues found the celebration of Jewish accomplishments chauvinistic and parochial. The best way to avoid both boosterism and bigotry, they concluded, was, and is, to avoid talking about Jews.
Hollinger finds this solution anomalous in our own time when many groups stress their contribution to the development of American culture. In an age of multiculturalism, Hollinger finds that many scholars are too willing to accept the risks of appearing akin to the booster than the risks of appearing akin to the bigot. Yet, as Hollinger argues, no ethno-religious group is ever a cultural monolith nor defined by timeless dispositions. It is a mistake, he contends, to argue that a group possesses an enduring cultural essence grounded in blood and history. Rather, it is the internal diversity of the groups that makes it unique and it is this that should be emphasized. Hollinger urges that the study of American Jews be undertaken in this "anti-essentualist" mode and he prescribes approaches it should take; the emphasis on the geographical diversity of the Jewish emigration from Europe and the different directions to Jewish ethnicity and religion that characterized their generation. In addition, regardless as to how one felt about Jewish identity, a new Ph.D., beginning a career as an assistant professor in virtually any academic field, could not help but bring to that career a "Jewish" experience of American society far different from that brought by a counterpart of 20 years before. Finally,
Jewish intellectuals absorbed greatly different amounts of the prevailing culture ... that owed much to Protestant Christianity .... Assimilation and resistance to assimilation took many forms and these forms varied, in turn, from decade to decade. If Jews affected the culture of the United States in some respects, America also changed Jews. The study of the coming of Jewish intellectuals into American intellectual and academic life is the tracing of a dialectical process; it is not the mapping of a one way street.
Hollinger's finely crafted essays make an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which secular minded American-Jewish intellectuals adapted the scientific credo of universalism to help shape a diverse American secular culture.
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By JACK FISCHEL
QUOTE:
This collection reaffirms
Hollinger's status as one of America's premier scholars in intellectual history,
with a broad interdisciplinary knowledge, cosmopolitan worldview, and sharp
insights into some ofthe most contested issues ofthe twenty-first century. This is
a book invaluable not just to historians but to sociologists, other social scientists,
and humanists as well.
Yang, Philip Q. Journal of American Ethnic History. Fall2007, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p116-117. 2p.
Subjects: COSMOPOLITANISM; NONFICTION; COSMOPOLITANISM & Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious & Professional Affiliation in the United States (Book); HOLLINGER, David
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional
Affiliation in the United States. By David Hollinger. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. xxv + 213 pp. Photo, notes, and index.
$29.95 (cloth).
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity consists of nine articles published between
2000 and 2005 in various joumals and edited volumes. Hollinger first presented
some as the Merle Curtis Lectures at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in
2000 and others were commissioned by various editors. Drawing upon his earlier
books, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995) and Science,
Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century Intellectual History
(Princeton, NJ, 1996), this collection sets out to address "the global problem of
solidarity" (p. ix) and to explore cosmopolitanism as a possible solution in the U.S.
context.
The first two articles examine the relationships between ethnoraeial mixture
(i.e., amalgamation) and hypodescent racialization of African Americans to the
one-drop and the one-hate rules (i.e., treating all non-black minorities according to
the same rules established for black victims of white racism). Hollinger's analyses
are informative and at times provocative. However, his assertion that amalgamation
is a greater reality than the melting pot may be hyperbolic, because interracial
blending is still quite limited. For example, the 2000 Census reported that only
6.8 million, or about 3 percent, of Americans claimed mixed racial backgrounds.
His complaint about the one-hate rule, although not wholly unwarranted, draws
solely from historical discrimination with little consideration for ongoing forms
of ethnoracial inequalities.
The third essay situates US. history as part of world history, claiming that such
an approach is not anachronistic because the United States is a formidable player
Reviews 117
in global history. The next piece voices legitimate concerns that the growing commercialization
of universities is eroding the solidarity of faculty to defend academic
freedoms. The fifth paper rightly argues that universities do not need more
Christianity and that academics better serve society by sticking to the rules of
secular inquiry. Essay six weighs the legacy ofthe Enlightenment in contemporary
intellectual movements such as modernism, postmodernism, and cosmopolitanism,
particularly in the U.S. context.
The subsequent two essays engagingly address the preeminence of Jews in science
and scholarship. Hollinger reminds us that Jewish demographic overrepresentation
occurs not just in the sciences and scholarship, but also in arts, business, politics,
and many other professions. He compellingly argues that this prominence needs to
be explained to counter speculation concerning Jewish genetic superiority. I found
credible his explanation that the Jewish diaspora impelled Jews to develop a higher
degree of distinctive intellectual and business skills conducive for survival and prosperity.
Hollinger's last article assesses the intellectual history ofthe cultural relativist
movement within and beyond the field of anthropology, noting its developments,
debates, contributions, and challenges. Here, Hollinger demonstrates his incisive
grasp of cultural relativism as related to professional community associations and
cosmopolitanism. His distinction between methodological and ideological dimensions
of cultural relativism helps unravel the controversies over this divisive issue.
With essays written for different purposes, sponsors, and occasions that are kept
intact here except for errors, it is too much to expect even a renowned author like
Hollinger to develop cohesive themes for Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity. Nevertheless,
this collection of essays loosely coheres around the problems of ethnoracial
descent, religion, professional identities or affiliations, and how cosmopolitanism
intersects with each. The headings for each article help readers fathom its context
and argument and draw out some linkages among the essays. This collection reaffirms
Hollinger's status as one of America's premier scholars in intellectual history,
with a broad interdisciplinary knowledge, cosmopolitan worldview, and sharp
insights into some ofthe most contested issues ofthe twenty-first century. This is
a book invaluable not just to historians but to sociologists, other social scientists,
and humanists as well.
Philip Q.Yang
Texas Woman's University
Wall Street Journal Online
https://www.wsj.com/
Protestants Abroad
November 10, 2017
QUOTE:
This collection of seven previously published essays, slightly revised, comes equipped with an introduction that makes the generalization that Jewish scientists and secularists, ensconced in the academy, helped to lower the public stature of Christianity as a cultural presence in the United States.
Modern Judaism
Volume 18, Number 1, February 1998
pp. 83-87
Stephen J Whitfield
review of Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History
Reviewed by
Stephen J Whitfield (bio)
David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), xi + 178 pp.
This collection of seven previously published essays, slightly revised, comes equipped with an introduction that makes the generalization that Jewish scientists and secularists, ensconced in the academy, helped to lower the public stature of Christianity as a cultural presence in the United States. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the character of universities was transformed by Jewish immigrants and their sons, many of whom “were conspicuous in their devotion to science and to the building of a culture liberated from the Christian biases that barred Jews and other non-Christians from full participation in American life” (p. x). The hopes that T. S. Eliot had enunciated in 1933 for an authentically Christian society were therefore dashed; a “large number of free-thinking Jews,” incorporated into the American professoriat, proved to be agents of desacralization after all. David A. Hollinger’s volume can be read as a benign gloss on a situation Eliot deemed “undesirable.”
Readers of this journal, however, are not intended to be the epistemic community that this book addresses. When a 1931 paper entitled “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” published by a Soviet theorist named B. Hessen, is hailed as “now legendary” (p. 94), or when Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the “context of justification” and the “context of discovery” is called “famous” (p. 104), it can be safely assumed that only devotees of the history (and perhaps sociology) of science are “in the loop.” Still, this volume marks no radical discontinuity for the author, who has made valuable contributions to American Jewish studies, beginning with his 1975 intellectual biography of the Lower East Side hero Morris Raphael Cohen—the philosopher as free-thinking [End Page 83] Jew. Hollinger’s analysis of the cosmopolitanism that shaped Cohen’s contemporaries, men such as Horace M. Kallen, Walter Lippmann, and Felix Frankfurter, is among the essays included in his In the American Province (1985); this study of “ethnic diversity” is entrenched in the historiography of the American Jewish intelligentsia. His Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995) is also a sensible and persuasive effort to sort out exigent minority claims in order that diversity be respected without sabotaging the national ideal of comity.
In assessing the triumphs of secularism and positivism in the citadels of higher learning, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture does not examine in any depth the Jewish allegiances—however vestigial—of the thinkers and researchers who helped to doom an explicitly Protestant program. One chapter, for example, illumines a 1942 paper by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, who attached the democratic faith—then engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the Axis—to scientific pursuit (to which he attributed four norms: “universalism,” “disinterestedness,” “communism,” and “organized skepticism”). Here as elsewhere Hollinger exhibits an admirable flair for contextualization, for locating the thrust of an argument, for catching its implications and its omissions. This chapter shows how Merton’s influential elucidation of the scientific ethos can be made historically accessible, and a prefatory statement also mentions that the Columbia University savant had begun life as Meyer H. Schkolnick. But nothing is made of Merton’s origins; perhaps little can be made. Perhaps because Merton’s entire intellectual career is not summarized, Hollinger felt no obligation to tease out what role, if any, his Jewish background played in determining his interests and orientation. Nor is Thomas S. Kuhn’s legacy approached from a Jewish angle. The difficulty of such an interpretive task should not be underestimated, but an opportunity to contribute more fully to American and Jewish cultural history is forfeited here.
That is why Science, Jews, and Secular Culture is one book that can be judged by its cover. On the dust jacket is a photo depicting the three great scientist-administrators of mid-century America. J. Robert Oppenheimer is not at the center, but on the left, as he stands with James B. Conant and Vannevar Bush; and even Oppenheimer, Hollinger notes, was a product of the Ethical Culture Society, not Judaism. The...
QUOTE:
best compared to a string of pearls. Each of the eight pieces is a self-contained gem of clear prose, meticulous scholarship, and ingenious conjecture.
Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 4, 1 March 1997, Pages 1462
Suzanne Klingenstein
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History
"David Hollinger's new collection of essays is best compared to a string of pearls. Each of the eight pieces is a self-contained gem of clear prose, meticulous scholarship, and ingenious conjecture. Yet all are strung along a single thread, aptly indicated by the book's title, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture.... This is a smart, timely, and thoroughly enjoyable book."--Suzanne Klingenstein, The Journal of American History
QUOTE:
"Elegant and original. . . . Hollinger's book is a comprehensive history of American Protestant missionaries abroad, but it is also the more important story of how a religious and cultural movement overcame its own provincialism."
"Elegant and original. . . . Hollinger's book is a comprehensive history of American Protestant missionaries abroad, but it is also the more important story of how a religious and cultural movement overcame its own provincialism."--John Kaag, Wall Street Journal