Marginalia

The history of Protestantism since the 1970s has been hard on Liberalism. As Evangelicals increased, Liberals decreased. It has become difficult to write about American Liberalism without becoming either a critic or an apologist. Hollinger is neither.

He succeeds in transcending the internecine character of the debate by assessing Liberal Protestantism by its success in realizing its values in the broader culture, rather than by its demography or institutional strength. By this measure, he persuasively argues, Liberal Protestantism has been a success story. “The United States today, even with the prominence of politically conservative evangelical Protestants, looks much more like the country ecumenical leaders of the 1960s hoped it would become than the one their evangelical rivals sought to create.” A compelling truth, one that changes subtly but powerfully how we construe the “secularity” of contemporary America; in many ways, it is the fruit of one vision of Christianity.