Measured against its once formidable sway over American public life, liberal Protestantism appears to be in steady decline. Membership in mainline sects is down, numbers in evangelical churches are up, and WASPs no longer dominate the structures of political power. But this is not because liberal Protestantism has simply slid into irrelevancy, says David Hollinger. Rather, its adherents and their descendants have become so integrated with mainstream, multicultural American society that they are no longer easily defined by religious belief. At the same time that liberal Protestantism has been relegated to one spiritual perspective among many, it has embraced the very cacophony of voices that threatens to drown it out.

Hollinger has collected his most trenchant essays on liberal Protestantism in an effort to resuscitate its legacy and uncover its impact on late twentieth-century America. “What has come to be called liberalism,” he writes, “owes what triumphs it has enjoyed to many forces in American life, one of which is the success of the Protestant liberalizers in pushing their constituents in those directions” (xii). In so emphasizing the role of liberal Protestants, he offers a crucial corrective to recent historical literature on American evangelicalism, which, in focussing much-needed attention on the rise of conservative Christianity over the past several decades, tends to underestimate the significance of competing Christian ideas. Evangelical activists of the post-World War II period, Hollinger points out, were not simply reacting to the general liberalization of social norms – much of their fiercest criticism was reserved for their former brethren in the mainline denominations, whom they saw as traitors to a Bible-based Christianity. And it was liberal Protestant leaders, after all, who were among the first of America's elite to take up a number of the social causes that many evangelicals found offensive, from civil rights to feminism to the United Nations. The militancy of postwar evangelicals makes them an attractive object of study for historians. But to truly understand recent shifts in American religion, Hollinger argues, we need a wider lens.

One of Hollinger's main goals is to highlight the tension between liberal Protestantism's ideological expansion and its demographic contraction. Contrary to popular belief, liberal Protestantism has not lost many members to conservative churches. Rather, it has failed to keep up with evangelical growth. This is partly due to higher birthrates among evangelicals. But as importantly, according to Hollinger, it is also the result of mainline churches’ increased engagement with secular society. As liberal Protestants have assimilated secular values into church teachings, their Christian identity has become more diffuse. This has led people to abandon mainline churches – not for evangelical ones, but for a life without religion. Children raised in liberal churches, especially those of the baby boom generation, simply no longer heard much that was novel or different or urgent inside chapel walls. And so the new Protestantism, while more welcoming than ever, paradoxically “served as a halfway house to post-Protestant secularism” for many of its members (xi).

Liberal Protestantism has thus been defined less by theological change than by a broader cultural accommodation to modernity. Although the book's main focus is recent history, two of its ten essays take us back to the writings of William James, whose own personal struggle to reconcile his belief in a supernatural God with the empiricist demands of modern science is meant to represent the trajectory of liberal Protestantism as a whole. But this dip into the nineteenth century, which showcases Hollinger's subtlety and skill as a traditional intellectual historian, is relatively brief. The real turning point in Hollinger's episodic narrative is not 1859, when Origin of Species shook the world, or even 1925, when the national furor over the Scopes trial cemented the growing split between liberals and fundamentalists.

Instead, Hollinger asserts 1942 as a critical moment. First, it witnessed a major “summit meeting” of the mainline sects, which outlined a Protestant agenda for the postwar world that endorsed “sweepingly egalitarian and universalist ideals” on issues of race, colonialism, and international cooperation (57). That same year marked the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals, which, Hollinger suggests, was instrumental in undermining that liberal agenda during the Cold War.

Hollinger can sometimes take a reductionist view of evangelicals, who often serve as foils to his liberal protagonists. Evangelicalism itself was undergoing its own ideological transformation during this period, as modernizers such as Billy Graham worked to shed the hardline fundamentalism of the interwar period in their effort to attract more followers. But while he may overlook some of the nuances in the archival record on evangelicalism, the larger purpose of Hollinger's essays is to provoke debate. Religion, despite its heavy presence in American life, is too often exempted from public scrutiny. For this Hollinger blames evangelicals as much as mainline Protestants, who since the 1970s have largely ceded any claims to national religious authority. Hollinger's essays are thus not only an appeal to historians for more research, but a call to religious liberals to better understand their own history.