The history of American Christianity has many fine studies of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, but few of mainline protestantism. Recently, scholars such as Elesha Coffman, Matthew Hedstrom, Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey have begun to correct this gap, and Margaret Bendroth joins the effort. The Last Puritans convincingly demonstrates that historical discussion, debate, and memorialization played a crucial role in the making of modern Congregationalism. Unable to come together over shared doctrine, Congregationalists unified by identifying themselves as the heirs of the pilgrims and puritans (whom they seldom differentiated). Such an identity surprisingly enabled them to avoid sectarian, theological battles.
Yet as Bendroth also shows, an identity defined by history could induce its own interpretive battles. Trinitarian Congregationalists, for example, argued that remaining true to puritanism meant remaining faithful to Calvinist doctrine. Unitarians countered that what really mattered was the puritans' spirit—a progressive spirit, pushing the Reformation further. At the 1865 Boston Council, one liberal leader warned against a “servile imitation of the fathers,” insisting “that the true Pilgrim legacy was a spirit of adventure and openness to the new” (58). Conservatives resisted. What settled the dispute was a trip to Plymouth. At the Pilgrim Burial Hill, Alonzo Quint read a paper defining Congregationalism as the inheritance of puritanism with no mention of Calvinism, and, moved by the moment, all consented. Congregationalists united around the concept that they would live out the principle or the spirit or the idea or the traits of the puritans, but not necessarily their doctrines or dogmas. Without a common creed, a shared cultural memory mattered all the more.
Almost a century later, Congregationalists merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ. Some again resisted and took church leaders to court. Plaintiffs argued that historical precedent defended local autonomy against overriding denominational structures. Defendants, meanwhile, claimed that New England churches stressed uniformity over local autonomy. Both sides called historians as “expert witnesses.” As Bendroth explains, “they all believed that history would provide the final answer in the debate, and that the only history that really mattered took place in the seventeenth century” (171). Soon, however, the new-formed UCC began to disown the puritans, leaving them to the resisters. Being “emphatically oriented to the present,” meant the UCC could “take the lead on social issues of race, gender, and sexuality” but at the cost of “regular searching for a clear and distinct identity” (8–9).
The Last Puritans is a denominational history—a topic largely out of favor—but as these debates reveal, it broaches much broader concerns about how history functions in the lives of the religious. Regular, church-going Congregationalists thought a great deal about history. As Congregational churches united, they set up a puritan library and reprinted seventeenth-century texts. Such details reveal why historians might want to take up denominational histories once again: such histories are, in fact, stories of intense struggle about the way the past shapes doctrine, polity, liturgy, and identity. Each time a denominational body makes a decision, it rereads and rewrites a history of itself in relation to scripture and tradition. Given the self-consciousness of history to church organizations, denominations can become important sites again for the study of history at work.
Not only does Bendroth's book reveal why denominational histories matter, it also helps redefine mainline protestantism. “One of this book's core arguments,” she writes, “is that mainline Protestants are not simply failed evangelicals, traditionless and compromised, but people with a particular historical burden, distinct from that of newer twentieth-century denominations and religious organizations” (3). Bendroth, like others, thus reverses traditional accounts and understandings of mainline Christianity. That refocusing comes to the fore in chapter six. Here Bendroth focuses on the way lay persons reacted to the higher criticism of the Bible. Reading letters and personal accounts, Bendroth finds “surprising equanimity toward historical criticism among laypeople, even in small-town churches—in fact, we might wonder whether the ‘spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age’ penetrated all that far beyond the ivied walls of leading universities” (108). Those in the pew seemed able to accept ambiguity and compromise; they did not faced “forced choices between fixed positions” (110). As she shows, people go to church for many reasons, and their faith can continue in the midst of dialogue, dispute, and doubt: “Somewhere in between these poles—absolute faith and absolute doubt—Protestant laypeople continued to attend church, listen to sermons, and teach their children the tenets of Christianity” (111). Making vivid the experience of local religion—suppers, plays, pageants, rituals, services—The Last Puritans shows that the life of a religious community can absorb ideas that might challenge the faith.
In the process of this remarkable history, Bendroth's book makes many small points equally illuminating. For example, Gothic-style churches—all the rage in early twentieth-century protestantism—could symbolize radically different things to different denominations. For some, they stood for “the permanence of Christianity in a world going astray”; but for Congregationalists, who were just beginning to move beyond their embrace of a Puritan heritage, “those medieval churches demonstrated to the world their modern freedom from old restrictions” (129). Members of churches often shape their worldviews around meanings that arise from denominational history, showing again why such histories deserve attention.
Some claims made in The Last Puritans might seem like too much pleading for mainline protestantism. For instance, the idea that Congregationalism declined because of its own success—that its values were embraced by American culture more broadly—seems questionable. Did American culture embrace Congregational values of “tolerance, freedom of thought, and respect for differences,” or did Congregationalism shift to embrace American values (2)? If so, what counts as “success”? Still, this claim comes embedded within a welcome, wider movement to reassess the contributions of mainline protestantism—especially how powerful they can be for those who sit in the pew. Given the richness of this study, one hopes that more such histories will follow.
