If a time traveler from the 1950s were to land in 2026, she would be surprised to see a complete reversal in American Protestantism. Then, mainline Protestants were numerically, culturally, and politically ascendant, while their white evangelical cousins were on the fringes of American society. Now, it is the evangelicals who capture all the attention and, within the Republican Party, are often described as the kingmakers. Still more puzzling, evangelicals have achieved this prominence even as the United States has experienced a surge of secularism.
In Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, historian David Hollinger explains how mainline and evangelical Protestants traded places. While Hollinger is not the first to tell this tale, he adds some important themes unmentioned in other histories. Most historical accounts start in the 1970s and focus on the evangelicals. Christianity’s American Fate begins much farther back and directs our attention to the mainliners. As one example of the insights Hollinger offers, he rechristens the mainline as “ecumenical” Protestants. This is because, as he dryly notes, when the term mainline was popularized in the 1970s this group was a shrinking share of the population. And who are the ecumenical Protestants? These are the denominations who, at one time, were the closest America ever came to an established religion, such as the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists. By employing the label of ecumenical, Hollinger emphasizes their defining characteristic: an openness to people with other worldviews, whether they be non-Protestants, non-Christians, or even the nonreligious.
Why did those Protestants in particular become so ecumenical? Hollinger argues for two explanations that have received little attention in this literature, one inside the United States and one beyond the nation’s borders. Within the United States, these Protestants were often exposed to Jews in academia, business, and the arts. As he notes, “the idea of a ‘Christian America’ … was harder to maintain as non-Christians occupied more and more cultural space” (p. 28). Outside of America, many ecumenical Protestants served as missionaries in foreign lands. Those missionaries returned to America to hold positions of leadership within their denominations, multiplying the effect of their experiences abroad. While missionary work overseas was originally meant to win converts to Protestantism, exposure to new cultures, traditions, and faiths came to convert those Protestant missionaries to a cosmopolitan perspective.
Why did those ecumenical Protestants begin to lose their hold on the cultural psyche? In a telling passage, Hollinger counters what is often described as the market model of religion. According to this model, evangelical churches thrive because they place high demands on their members, while ecumenical congregations wither because they ask too little. Hollinger contends, “The opposite is true. Evangelicalism made it easy to avoid the challenges of an ethnoracially diverse society and a scientifically informed culture” (p. 5). But in meeting the demands of pluralism, ecumenical Protestants became victims of their own success. Beginning in the 1960s, when Harvey Cox published The Secular City and Time magazine proclaimed that “God is dead,” ecumenical Protestantism began to wane. In another memorable phrase, Hollinger describes ecumenical Protestantism as a “way station to post-Protestant secularism” (p. 127).
Politics is also an important part of the story. As ecumenical Protestant clergy grappled with the political tumult of the Long Sixties, they often adopted positions on the political left. The irony is that, in so doing, they moved too far and too fast to the left for their older members, but not far or fast enough for their younger parishioners. Compounding their woes, those young folks who stayed with the church were also having fewer babies. As a result, ecumenical Protestantism went into a demographic freefall from which it has yet to recover. More recently, ecumenical denominations have also struggled to deal with rapid growth in the Global South, where clergy and members alike are far more socially conservative than their American co-religionists. In some cases, this has led to schism between socially liberal and conservative branches of these denominations, comparable to how, in antebellum American, slavery caused schisms that divided many Protestant denominations. The conservatives who have maintained their ecumenical Protestant affiliation often choose congregations affiliated with the Global South, which they find to be ideologically sympatico.
Evangelicals, on the other hand, experienced a boom in the 1970s. By the 1980s, they had latched onto conservative politics and found a home in the Republican Party, which gave them political prominence. Their political role has become so regularized that on election night, we have come to expect commentators to discuss the evangelical vote. (When was the last time you heard anyone mention, say, the Episcopalian vote?) The political ascendance of white evangelicals would surprise our time traveler, but it also explains why they are so prominent in an otherwise secularizing society.
While he does not address this development explicitly, Hollinger helps us understand the recent talk of a religious revival, particularly among men under 30. If true, this would be a striking counter-trend to the nation’s rising secularism. This purported revival, however, does not actually appear in the data. Instead, what appears to be happening is an energized base of young, MAGA-aligned men who lean into the identity of “Christian” or even “evangelical,” without the beliefs and behaviors that have historically defined evangelical Christianity. They are not attending church, studying scripture, and serving the needy. Nor are they developing what in an earlier era were called the Christian virtues, such as humility, patience, and charity. Instead, their version of evangelical Christianity is rooted in the harsh language and combativeness that characterizes today’s political conservatives: owning the libs takes precedence over loving your neighbor. Hollinger argues that this overtly partisan turn among evangelical Protestants has been largely immune from critical scrutiny, owing to the norm of treating religion as a private concern. Paradoxically, the result is a world in which “religious ideas are both relevant to public policy and excluded from critical evaluation” (p. 159).
However, Hollinger is not afraid to offer his criticism of evangelicals’ ideas, which he contrasts with the form of ecumenical Protestantism that our time traveler would find familiar. Christianity’s American Fate thus echoes the lament of Robert Wuthnow in his 2021 book, Why Religion is Good for American Democracy, in which he also argued for ecumenical (mainline) Protestantism’s democratic virtues and the increasingly partisan evangelical movement’s lack thereof.
For those readers with little background in religion and politics, Christianity’s American Fate is a succinct yet enlightening account of how we arrived at the current moment, in which “evangelical” has become synonymous with “Republican.” For those who are more familiar with the subject, there is nonetheless much here that is novel, as Hollinger provides fresh insights—particularly his discussion of how encounters with Jews in America and other cultures abroad broadened the worldview of ecumenical Protestants.
With that said, this book is not a comprehensive discussion of religion and politics in America. While the title refers to the fate of Christianity, and the subtitle refers even more broadly to religion writ large, this is really a book about white Protestants. It pays only a little attention to Black Protestants, even less to Catholics, and none whatsoever to Mormons. But no book can cover everything. For those interested in understanding how and why how religion became more conservative in a secularizing America, this crisp and engaging book tells an important part of the story.
