Eldon J. Eisenach has long written on issues of religion, politics, and political thought. His most recent work, Sacred Discourse and American Nationality, continues this focus, examining Progressive religion, political ideology, and national identity in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. Yet the work embodies much more than just the era of American Progressivism. It encapsulates much of Eisenach's previous corpus in a brief, wide-ranging analysis, from the constitutive role of religion in American politics to the development of interest group liberalism and multiculturalism. Important reminders appear, such as evangelical and Republican contributions to Progressive ideology (9, 42, 47), and surprising parallels emerge, as between Progressivism and modern conservatism (12, 105). Parts thus merit multiple readings. Eisenach's basic thrust, though, is this: the religious structure of Progressive ideology shaped a narrative of national purpose that infused the institutions of the American state it helped create. The result was a distinct regime in American political history: “a progressive-liberal establishment prevailed in American politics and intellectual culture from the Progressive Era through the 1970s” (72).

Unpacking the argument begins with “the Progressive alliance of liberal religion and liberal politics” (29). “Liberal” in both cases entailed meaning and movement in history, the unfolding of a historical process toward the fulfillment of a national project, both religious and political.

The religious side involved a resurgent evangelical Protestantism often termed the “social gospel” or “social Christianity.” Famed names included Walter Rauschenbusch, though Eisenach prefers Lyman Abbot, editor of the Christian weekly Outlook to which leading Progressives Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Riis, and Richard T. Ely contributed. Abbott melded religion and progress through seven editions of The Evolution of Christianity (1892–1926). His point, widely shared, was not simply that evangelical Protestantism contributed to social progress, but that religion itself was an evolving product of progressive valuations of history's unfolding meaning. Its truths were not inherited because God's revelation and kingdom were immanent, manifest through emerging forms of democratic consciousness. Abbot thus described democracy not as a form of government, but “the goal which we are to reach by means of government,” a project for which, Eisenach explains, Abbot “coined and popularized the term ‘industrial democracy’” (32–35, 86).

The political side similarly pursued the meaning in history through progressive valuations of democratic industrialism. Important figures included John Dewey (“Christianity and Democracy,” 1894) and Herbert Croly (Progressive Democracy, 1914), though Eisenach also considers Albion Small and Simon Patten. They represented the academic vanguard of the new social sciences—sociology, social psychology, and political economy—within the emerging research universities, German trained and inspired. Patten taught at the new Wharton School of Business where he prepared progressive leaders in public finance and management called “Patten Men.” He was a founder of the American Economic Association whose principles he coauthored with Ely, affirming “the state as an agency … of human progress.” Ely elaborated in Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society (1903). Small was a sociologist at the University of Chicago, founder of the American Sociological Society, and editor of the American Journal of Sociology to which activists Jane Addams and Florence Kelly contributed. He trained female doctoral students for the emerging profession of social work (86–91).

The new social scientists promoted a historicist narrative of liberal nationalism. They tracked changes in social and economic conditions to discern the movement of history, with information organized into professional bodies of knowledge to indicate history's direction and help guide the process forward. The scientists' historicism, Eisenach explains, “was grounded in Protestant evangelical theology and Hegelian philosophy, seeing the structural changes in American social and economic life as signs of an emerging morality and spirit” (88). The spirit was transforming America, making it a world leader comprised “not merely of political rights” but, in Patten's words, of “economic rights, freely recognized and universally granted to each man by his fellow citizens” (92). Economic rights reflected democracy's evolution, consciousness of which defined education and knowledge. Progressives were able “to link the systematic pursuit of social knowledge to political reform and thereby to tie higher education and the learned professions to the cause of national democracy” (101).

The progressive narrative infused the American state it helped create. By “state,” Eisenach means institutions that mobilized opinion and talent. This included the universities, its academics, their professional organizations and publications, and their disciples in social work, journalism, and the corporate and financial sectors. Government counted too, as Progressives “created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state” (84), insisting that “regulation by the power of the state,” in Ely's words, “is an essential condition of freedom” (91).The key was national unison as Progressives sought “durable patterns of cooperation between the universities, the national government, large business corporations, and, later, national charitable foundations, labor unions, and the military” (102).

The nexus of cooperating institutions promoting the same narrative was the progressive-liberal establishment through the 1970s. Eisenach identifies it as a “distinct regime” in American history whose founding predated interest-group liberalism: “the long-lived New Deal coalition … thrived under a national-consensual canopy that was not of its own making,” a “‘liberal establishment’ of institutional elites first constructed by Republican Progressives” (9).

Though the precise dating of the regime's fall might vary, Eisenach's concern is the role of religion in making and unmaking regimes. He comments: sacred discourse is “the means by which constitutional and philosophical principles can become reinterpreted and relegitimated, first by discrediting their attachment to extant powers and interests and then by inviting new values, new powers, and new interests to interpret their purposes.” Progressives had used religious narrative to reorient American politics, “not unlike,” Eisenach suggests, “neoconservative intellectuals” of the 1970s (12).

In this, Eisenach incorporates recent scholarship on the “return of religion,” not just as personal identity or means of mobilization, but as informing the meaning and purpose of politics, constitutive of the political realm itself. He refers to Charles Taylor (60–70) to suggest that Progressives created a distinct American secularism embedded in religious meaning, undone in the 1970s through “increasing confidence that [liberals] could disavow and suppress ‘contingent’ sacred narrative” (73).

Sacred Discourse and American Nationality is a compilation of articles, a bit disjointed and repetitive. The introduction offers a thematic overview, though somewhat abstractly. Yet the work yields significant dividends for the attentive reader. Its occasional density embodies serious reflection on the organizing themes of political life, leaving aside the details of elections, administrations, and policies. The need for narrative in a multicultural age is strongly suggested, though an ominous element appears in “the appeal of Progressivism.” The Progressive “ideal of citizenship was to serve the country first,” Eisenach explains. “This national service could be performed in every site of American life: family; church or school; town, city, or state government; profession, workplace, or union. Through a nationalist ideal, one's daily life would be connected to all of one's fellow citizens, and thereby gain a sense of significance” (82).

Coordinating “every site of American life” to serve a national purpose hardly encourages a free civil society; deriving significance in one's daily life from one's connection to the nation hardly fosters an independent citizenry. Concern with the potential fragmentation of multiculturalism is certainly reasonable. The unanswered question that the historical alliance between liberal politics and liberal religion raises is whether narrative can accommodate civic independence or requires the coordination of American life across political, economic, legal, labor, educational, and journalistic sectors in the name of freedom and progress.