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To see religion in its broadest intellectual, social, and architectural contexts, New York City is a good place to go. Matthew Bowman's The Urban Pulpit begins with the simple yet powerful notion of considering religious ideas in their urban settings. Though “New York intellect” has been a prominent subject for intellectual historians, scholars of religious ideas have taken this approach less often, usually seeing New York and other urban places as the sites of popular spiritual practice rather than formally articulated belief. Key texts on the history of theology in Bowman's era, such as William Hutchison's The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism and George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture, scrutinize it mostly abstracted from particular locales.Footnote ³

Bowman's well-researched, informative book illuminates the history of evangelical Protestantism in the crucial decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by grounding that history in the terrain of New York City. Manhattan featured the prominent evangelical reformer Charles Parkhurst, the fundamentalist John Roach Straton, the progressive standard-bearer Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the psychologist of religion George Coe, while Henry Ward Beecher and De Witt Talmage held forth across the river in Brooklyn. Gotham was a meeting place for translators of the new Revised Version of the Bible and the site of the heresy trial of Charles Briggs, two symbols of growing discord over scriptural interpretation. The city's residents provided eager audiences for Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday, and other revivalists. On the upper west side stood Union Theological Seminary, the most influential mainline Protestant educational institution in the nation. “What happened in New York,” Bowman asserts, “set the tone for evangelical division across the nation” (15).

What happened in New York was a series of competing responses to the perceived dangers of the city for evangelical faith, the most notable being the rise of “liberal evangelicalism.” The term, first coined by Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church minister Henry Sloane Coffin, is adopted by Bowman to unsettle historians’ shorthand for the two camps of modern American Protestantism: liberals versus evangelicals. For him, that dichotomy is incomplete, or at least anachronistic before the 1920s. Liberal evangelicals were comfortable with “both faith and reason, a personal relationship with Christ and the fruits of the scientific method.” They embraced social reform while maintaining the “firm commitment that, ultimately, evangelical Christianity was the one true faith by which human life could be redeemed.” Evangelicals could be liberal, and liberals insisted that they were evangelical. Even Fosdick, who earned the ire of conservative Christians for his 1922 polemic “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”, stated repeatedly that he was an evangelical Christian (4).

The twenty-first-century appeal of this spiritual stance is not far to seek. In an age when almost everyone decries the polarization of American theology and politics, Bowman presents liberal evangelicalism as a reasonable middle ground. The Urban Pulpit began as a dissertation under Michael Kazin, and Kazin's “godly hero” William Jennings Bryan is a kind of a prairie version of these New York divines. Squint a little at the characters in Bowman's previous book, the valuable survey text The Mormon People, and the Latter-Day Saints, too, look like liberal evangelicals, believing fervently in God's supernatural intervention in human affairs while caring for the material needs of their communities in Utah and beyond.Footnote ⁴ Where Bryan and the Mormons were once interpreted as examples of irrational extremism, they stand in these retellings for a social ethic that had much to admire. Similarly, The Urban Pulpit casts liberal evangelicals, who to the untrained eye can seem almost caricatures of Victorian moralism, as humane reformers who adapted Christianity to a modernizing culture.

In late nineteenth-century New York, the liberal evangelical project proceeded on several fronts. The rise of a Romantic sensibility in evangelical culture is one of the book's most intriguing discoveries. Influenced by Horace Bushnell and Beecher, some evangelicals “began to locate the Word's converting power in the aesthetic and the numinous” (67) rather than in the severity of precise doctrinal language. That was why the Presbyterian minister Henry van Dyke had his Brick Church redecorated in a medieval Byzantine style (69), and why he “frequently would bypass a sermon entirely during Christmas services in favor of reading a Nativity novel to his congregation” (113). Though this Romantic turn echoes the antimoderns in Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace, here it happens within evangelicalism rather than in protest against it. Observers of the contemporary religious scene will immediately recognize the persistence of the Romantic impulse in all manner of evangelical art, music, and worship.Footnote ⁵

If Van Dyke sought to remake the church, Charles Parkhurst wanted to take Christian morality to the city. Working through the Society for Prevention of Crime and the City Vigilance League, Parkhurst became a leading figure among New York's Progressives. He sought to shut down the city's saloons, brothels, and other unsavory spaces, an agenda that eventually encompassed the reform of the corrupt municipal government as well. Through it all, Parkhurst insisted on the goal of saving sinners, not merely the creation of a more humane social order. As he put it, because he wanted to “convert Third Avenue prostitutes from their harlotry,” he had to “antagonize” a government “the one necessary outcome of whose policy it is to breed prostitutes.” Reform, Bowman explains, “was bound into the metaphysical work of salvation that churches performed, a necessary new sacrament demanded in the city” (124).

Parkhurst and his coreligionists tell us much about how evangelicals came to embrace social work. What can The Urban Pulpit tell us about the broader currents of progressive thought and action that preoccupy intellectual historians? The implication of the book is that scholars have too impatiently embraced the secular progressive narrative, pushing the evangelical emphasis on individual salvation off the stage to highlight more agnostic goals of social justice or human flourishing. Not so fast, says Bowman. The liberal evangelical movement had not merely echoes or legacies of Christianity but a Christian center, and its aspiration to save souls has to be counted as an important motivation for social reform rather than reform's antithesis.

That said, these faith-based undertakings were surely less benevolent than this book implies. As Sehat, Gaines Foster, and Leigh Schmidt have shown, evangelical reform actively maintained existing power regimes through legislation and coercion. One suspects, though Bowman does not say, that liberal evangelicals would have approved of New York Protestant reformer Anthony Comstock and his relentless persecution of Schmidt's freethinking sex counselor heroine Ida Craddock. From a different perspective, the historian of urban sexuality Chad Heap uses Parkhurst as an example of the ways that Christian reformers inadvertently “fueled the furor for urban slumming” even as they positioned themselves in opposition to it. After all, Heap points out, newspaper accounts of the minister's public testimony “provided readers with a virtual map of illicit resorts to visit.” Though Bowman is not unaware of this line of interpretation, more extensive attention to liberal evangelicalism's repressive elements and its lurid fascination with sex may have led to a more ambivalent assessment.Footnote ⁶

In the late nineteenth century, liberal evangelicals could believe that they were on the same team as other reformers, even if they had their own distinct motives. Yet economic and cultural changes eventually undermined the overlapping consensus on what the ideal New York should look like. By the 1910s, bohemians in Greenwich Village and pluralist intellectuals such as Dewey posited modern culture as a realm of irreducible multiplicity. While “many of New York's progressives,” Bowman writes, “came to see the city's diversity as strength, and celebrated its cosmopolitan, multicultural vigor” (155–6), New York's evangelicals were more or less “horrified” by the loss of a shared moral universe (165).

Under this pressure, the liberal evangelical project fractured. Bowman makes a compelling case that fundamentalism, often associated with the rural hinterlands, actually emerged as a response to urban conditions, with fundamentalists such as Straton developing the doctrine of inerrancy as a fixed point amid Gotham's cacophony. Against this trend, other Protestants, still calling themselves evangelicals, tried to assimilate some of the new cosmopolitanism. At Union School, an experimental Sunday school affiliated with Union Seminary, students learned Greek mythology and Buddhism alongside Christianity. Eventually this approach went too far: after a 1928 Easter service approached resurrection through the myth of Attis and the cycles of plant life, Henry Sloane Coffin, now president of Union, shut the school down. As these examples suggest, the second half of the The Urban Pulpit provides some revealing prehistory for Hollinger's explorations of how attitudes toward cultural diversity split evangelical and ecumenical Protestants.Footnote ⁷

Bowman is an even-handed scholar to the end, yet one senses that the split bothers him. Evangelicalism “is strongest,” he concludes, “when it imagines itself diverse” (293). Maybe so, but Hollinger has convincingly argued for downplaying this angle of interpretation. Rather than focus on what makes evangelicalism “strongest,” an approach that Hollinger labels more generally as “Christian survivalism,” scholars would be better served by examining the wider range of effects that religious ideas had.Footnote ⁸ Leilah Danielson's biography of the American radical A. J. Muste shows how New York's liberal evangelical culture shaped even those who rejected it. In Muste, prophetic Christianity and pragmatic pluralism combined to form the intellectual foundations of the American left.

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A. J. Muste has seldom received sustained attention from historians, even though he is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American leftists of the twentieth century. A limited archive and a somewhat bewildering career path have undoubtedly deterred researchers. Two useful biographies have already been written, journalist Nat Hentoff's 1963 account and a more scholarly effort by Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson in 1981, but Danielson's book easily surpasses them.Footnote ⁹ In fact, the scope of its research and the sophistication of its analysis place American Gandhi among the finest biographies of modern American radicals.

Danielson makes sense of Muste's life by focusing on the creative tension between his “messianic” or “prophetic” outlook and his “pragmatic method” (1–2). For the most part, readers should look past the book's title, which appears to be part of a marketing strategy by the publisher. The author spends little time comparing Muste to the leader of the Indian independence movement, surely an endeavor of limited scholarly value. The mahatma did, however, share with the American an orientation toward politics that combined prophecy and pragmatism, an appeal to transcendent principle alongside an attention to contingency and context. Danielson reminds us that pragmatism, in the philosophical sense, does not refer to moderation but rather holds that truth “emerges out of the dynamic interaction between the individual and the environment, theory and practice, and thus is always subject to change and revision” (66). Radicals, Indian or American, can be pragmatists. American Gandhi makes creative use of intellectual historians’ recent studies of pragmatism, most notably James Livingston's Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, to show how that outlook shaped the far left.Footnote ¹⁰

Before he became a prophetic pragmatist, Muste was a Calvinist in the heavily Dutch immigrant community of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Though he would always retain a kind of Calvinist focus on human corruption and impossible ethical ideals, his religious horizons broadened when he came to New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1906 to train for the ministry. He would stay in the greater New York area until 1914, receiving another degree from Union Theological Seminary and imbibing the cultural and religious ferment that Bowman describes. New York ministers served as models for Muste's preaching style, and one imagines that liberal evangelicals were among them. At the same time, he embraced the cosmopolitan ethos that made Bowman's subjects so anxious. He later recalled that he “never had the feeling that some people do. . . that New York is a terrible place to live in. I can put up with almost anything in New York” (43).

Like Bowman, Danielson presents the years between the outbreak of the Great War and the early 1920s as a time of crisis. That cosmopolitan cultural style, along with the war and the triumph of corporate capitalism, all cast doubt on old systems of values. For Bowman, the result was a loss, the decline of the delicate liberal evangelical balance between conversion and social action into a destructive polarization of fundamentalists and modernists. Danielson's biography demonstrates, however, that the modernist pole had its own intellectual integrity and spiritual depth. Muste underwent an estrangement from orthodox Christianity in these years, breaking with the Dutch Reformed Church over doctrinal disagreements. Eventually, he would move to what Danielson calls “religious humanism” (30), part of the lineage of Emerson and William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience Muste read and admired. The young minister switched from his Reformed pulpit to a more liberal Congregational church in Massachusetts, then left the ministry entirely.

Not only his dissatisfaction with Christian creeds but also the war put him on his new path. Like many progressive Americans, he opposed the conflict; unlike many of them, he maintained this stance even after the United States entered the fray in 1917. His congregants felt, and Muste came to agree, that a pacifist minister could not offer effective pastoral support as their sons were fighting and dying in Europe. Out of step with an increasingly nationalist faith, he found his way to the labor movement. From the perspective of Christian survivalism, this turn of events marked the disappointing (though, as it turned out, temporary) exit of a bright and energetic young leader. In the history of American radicalism, something more exciting had begun, as Muste turned his prophetic voice and pragmatic outlook to the cause of economic justice.

Though he gradually moved away from Christianity during his years in the labor movement, certain religious themes persisted. He exemplified nonviolent protest in leading a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, then became the leader of Brookwood Labor College, which served, in a sense, as labor's Union Theological Seminary, training a generation of progressive organizers rather than pastors. Muste also helped form the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a challenge to the cautious American Federation of Labor, and the American Workers Party, a Marxist vanguard group nicknamed the Musteites. Even at this moment, Edmund Wilson slyly remarked that these radicals, with their “conventional dress, literate language, and polite approach” were “a little like the students of a divinity school” (133).

Wilson's remark, though patronizing, revealed some insight into the ambiguities of radical ideology. Muste indeed maintained some “conventional” American Christian ideas about gender, for example. Though he strove to organize women workers as a way of strengthening the labor movement as a whole, “he simply did not see the realm of family, gender, and sexuality as having political meanings” (14). Danielson effectively highlights the few scraps of available evidence that make visible how Muste's public success depended on the unseen work of women. Most notably, his long-suffering wife Anne stayed out of the political fray but clearly bore the brunt of the family's frequent moves and uncertain finances. Though these revelations will not be especially shocking to historians of gender, such glimpses remind us of the limits of even the most thoroughgoing radical visions.

If radicalism is often limited, it can also be a little tedious to read about. Even among professional historians, accustomed to tedium, the tortured subject of interwar labor sectarianism can make eyes glaze over. Yet Danielson excels in this part of American Gandhi, providing essential details and then backing up to lay out the substantive stakes of apparently arcane disputes. She uses the wonderful term “labor pragmatism” to sum up her subject's distinct perspective, making the biography, in its middle chapters, a smart combination of labor history and intellectual history, fields too seldom on speaking terms. As Muste moved left, he was influenced by V. F. Calverton, Lewis Corey, Sidney Hook, and other radical intellectuals who endorsed Marxism but spurned the ideological narrowness of the Communist Party. Muste's own contribution to revolutionary struggle was called the American Workers Party, the name a sign that it would respond to the demands of laborers in the United States rather than the dictates of an abstract global dialectic. Still, the former minister retained his messianic side; he later reflected that the theory of the vanguard party had much in common with the theology of the “True Church” (155–6).

Marxism's True Church failed Muste. By 1936, his labor activism was in shambles. Brookwood had closed amid bitter recriminations. The American Workers Party had merged with the Trotskyist Communist League of America, a move Muste initially supported but soon came to regret. Musteites balked at the Trotskyists’ more rigid interpretation of Marxism and their enthusiasm for infiltrating existing socialist parties, a strategy (known as the “French Turn”) that Muste deemed unethical. After rancorous infighting, the distinctive Musteite Marxism went down to defeat, even as union leaders across the nation were moving increasingly toward an acceptance of the New Deal, which Muste dismissed as superficial “ballyhoo” (187). It was an opportune time for a vacation, so he and Anne embarked on a long European trip that summer. While visiting Paris, he walked into the dilapidated medieval church of St Sulpice and heard a voice say, “This is where you belong” (200). With that, he unexpectedly swerved back to the Christian pacifism of his early career.

This life-changing event was, to put it mildly, open to interpretation. Matthew Bowman might point out the Romantic elements of a former Dutch Calvinist experiencing the divine in a ruined French Catholic church. Some of his radical colleagues understood the episode as a convenient opportunity to escape his recent defeats in the movement. Then, too, Muste fits into a more general renewal of interest in religion among intellectuals during these years.

Danielson focuses on what Christian pacifism offered to Muste. In some ways, he was the same man, still on the left, still organizing, still unwilling to compromise with mainstream politics. However, his experience with the Trotskyists had convinced him that secular radicals were misguided, that Marxists shared with capitalists “a mechanical and materialist view of human beings,” as Danielson puts it (204). She sees Muste questioning the trajectory of modernity itself, as “the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason, science, and historical progress marginalized precisely the values of love, empathy, and cooperation that revolutionaries claimed would predominate in a socialist society” (182). Only Christianity, with its uncompromising transcendent love, could lead the way to a better future. Muste, and much of the American left, would try to find intellectual sources for radicalism more durable than the secular narrative of progress that had seemingly failed amid the crises of fascism, communism, and total war.

Though he remained a pragmatist open to the tests of experience, Muste's outlook in the 1940s moved increasingly toward existentialism, another important area where religious ideas intersect with a broader intellectual history. He was influenced by the general Kierkegaard revival that George Cotkin discusses in Existential America, and his thought also lends support to Doug Rossinow's claims about the Christian existentialist roots of the New Left.Footnote ¹¹ Working primarily through the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a group that Muste had first encountered during its early years opposing World War I, he helped to develop nonviolence into an existentialist style of protest in which individuals would undertake audacious moral witness against war and injustice. In addition, his little-known writings from this period, especially his 1947 book Not by Might, offered thoughtful counterpoints to the more famous work of Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists.

Muste was never more radical than in his steadfast opposition to American participation in World War II. Transformed by his experience in the previous global conflict, Muste assumed that the new struggle would be somewhat like it, a clash of rival nationalisms. Furthermore, he foresaw that domestic mobilization would centralize American power and militarize American society, pioneering a critique that would later be taken up by the New Left during Vietnam. Danielson, sympathetic but never fawning, remains unconvinced. “He never grappled with the reality,” she writes, “that it was highly unlikely . . . that the Allied powers would respond to Nazism by unilaterally disarming and renouncing their claims to spheres of influence,” nor did he wrestle with Niebuhr's interventionist argument that the Allies, while imperfect, represented a significantly lesser evil (233). American Gandhi provocatively raises the question whether Muste's Christianity, inclusive and humanist as it was, may have had an “ethnocentric” dimension that led him to misjudge the universality of nonviolence as a principle. That principle “held little appeal for Jews,” Danielson suggests, because it seemed so unlikely to succeed against Hitler and because Jewish theology did not share the Christian valorization of crucifixion and martyrdom (234).

Only after the war did Muste's views once again gain traction on the left. Though few Americans of any political stripe agreed with his opposition to World War II, his interpretation of the atomic bomb as a harbinger of existential crisis rang true for many concerned observers. He became a leading intellectual and organizer in the antinuclear movement, a massive transnational effort that histories of the postwar period often overlook. Most notably, Muste helped start the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which committed civil disobedience at missile bases and undertook a six-thousand-mile “Walk for Peace” across America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Continuing to find mainstream politics repellent, he refused to vote or pay taxes, cultivating an outsider stance that served as an inspiration to countercultural critics such as Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman.

Muste's most creative contribution in this period was his role in retooling nonviolence as a strategy for the civil rights movement. His attention to race went back to his Brookwood days, when he had sought to bring African American workers into labor's big tent. During World War II, though, the fight against Jim Crow offered a unique opportunity for beleaguered pacifists to prove the efficacy of Gandhian principles and to connect their global anticolonial politics to the American scene. Prodded by young FOR workers Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, Muste provided crucial early support for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other antiracist efforts. Indeed, this radical Christian pacifist culture contributed more ideas, methods, and styles to the civil rights movement than did the Communists who have so enamored recent scholars. Danielson avoids the sentimentality that so often accompanies discussions of Gandhian nonviolence, emphasizing the strains and fissures that had developed by the 1960s. Certainly, Rustin's 1965 essay “From Protest to Politics,” which urged African Americans to build practical coalitions within the electoral system, was far from the approach that his former mentor favored. As much of the civil rights movement affiliated itself with the Democratic Party, just as the labor movement had before it, Muste remained committed to an independent radical struggle for racial justice, continuing his association with CORE even in its controversial separatist years. By that time, another international conflict was straining the bonds among civil rights leaders and American progressives.

Muste's last great struggle was against the Vietnam War. Years before mass mobilization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other small pacifist groups spoke out, a natural consequence of their opposition to the Cold War and American imperialism. Again Danielson skillfully navigates the intricacies of various antiwar positions, especially the fraught relationship between the civil rights and peace movements. In 1967, Muste took a final existential leap, flying to Hanoi to meet face-to-face with Ho Chi Minh. Existential, and possibly a little bit evangelical, too, evincing the hardy faith that an honest Christian with love in his heart could be a witness for reconciliation, armies and politics notwithstanding. Muste died shortly after his return to America at the age of eighty-two. Niebuhr's respectful appreciation in the New York Times was titled “Christian Revolutionary” (331).

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Maybe historians of social thought will never be entirely comfortable with religious actors’ transcendent claims. A. J. Muste, his mind changed not by momentous events or careful study but by an unverifiable mystical experience, may always provoke a moment of scholarly hesitation. Possibly the liberal evangelicals’ emphasis on individual salvation will leave them perennially outside the trajectories of progressivism that valorize scientific expertise and efficiency.

The general impression left by Bowman and Danielson, however, is that religion usually fits quite well with intellectual history's subjects of inquiry. Religious ideas have cross-pollinated with strains of Romanticism, pragmatism, Marxism, and existentialism. They have taken shape within, and influenced, the social history of labor and the city. Religious reform has operated in dialogue with wider ideologies of liberalism, progressivism, and radicalism. Intellectual historians interested in religion need not have personal commitments to faith traditions, nor must they master the complex phenomenological and definitional debates that animate religious studies. The field would simply benefit from more scholars of social thought who didn't mind, now and then, looking a little like the students of a divinity school.