A History of the Religious Left 2.0: Victorious Invisibility
In the second episode from their 2019 series, Brad and Dan continue their discussion of the history of the Christian Religious Left. They try to figure out how Mainline Protestantism won massive cultural victories in the 20th century, only to decline rapidly in terms of membership and political visibility.
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Welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.
Dan Miller, I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and we are delighted to have everybody.
I was going to say everybody here, but everybody listening, wherever you are, we're glad that you've joined us.
So, Brad, our talk today, we're continuing on this theme of the religious left.
We introduced this in a prior episode.
If people have listened to that, great.
We're kind of picking up.
If not, I encourage you to go back, give it a listen.
But to kind of bring people up to speed, We sort of stopped that story, let's say mid-century, you know, maybe a little bit earlier, mid-20th century, a little bit earlier.
We had talked in a previous episode early in our first season about the controversy between the so-called modernists and fundamentalists—that is, those Christians who felt, the Protestants we should say, Who felt that they ought to kind of revise their understanding of Christianity in light of modern science and things like Darwin's social theory and social changes that were going on.
And you had the movement known as fundamentalists who held to a more stringent notion that the Bible had to be interpreted literally and that certain historic doctrines had to remain sort of unchanged and so forth, rejected things like evolution.
And we told the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which was this event in the 20s where basically fundamentals lost the culture war.
It was like this big battle.
They sort of lose it.
And so where we ended our story last time, modernists, that is what we would now call mainline Christians or the traditions that will develop into what sociologists and scholars of religion and others will call mainline Protestantism, they had sort of won the day.
They're more progressive socially.
They're more willing to moderate or revise traditional Christian doctrine.
They obviously use the Bible and appeal to it, but they tend to argue, for example, that its interpretation has to be sort of historically mediated or the parts of it might be metaphorical or allegorical or products of its time.
All of these things, they have won out denominationally.
They've taken control of most major Protestant denominations.
Most seminaries are under control of the modernists.
They are culturally ascendant.
There's a lot of sort of just cultural capital that they have broadly beyond the church.
And so the question we want to sort of get into today is like, what the hell happened?
In describing that, we're describing almost an entirely different social and religious reality to what anybody who looks around the contemporary American context would experience.
Certainly anybody who is born or Or has a living memory, as I do, post-1980, right, in the world of the religious right, in an ascendant evangelicalism.
So that's where we want to pick up.
We want to pick up with what was mainline Protestantism like then, and what happened to it?
Where did it seem to go?
And so I want to toss it over to you to get sort of a list of the achievements, the cultural achievements, the cultural gains that, again, what we're calling progressive or mainline Protestantism had achieved.
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