In We Gather Together, independent historian Neil J. Young offers a bracing and innovative retelling of the rise and fall of the Religious Right in the United States. Young's important book distinguishes itself from other histories of the Religious Right by focusing on the theological and political problems associated with ecumenism in American Christianity. Rather than finding the origins of the Religious Right in the usual historiographical suspects—politicized premillennial eschatology, separatist fundamentalism, or anti-desegregationist backlash, to name just a few—Young weaves a complex tale documenting how the religious voting bloc of the late 1970s and 1980s emerged from a heterogeneous and contentious coalition of conservative evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Latter-day Saints (LDS). Young refuses to reduce his story to narrating disputes within this or that tradition, and instead traces theological and cultural disputes across many organizations and expressions of American Christianity. As a result, We Gather Together stands out for the scope of its story, its depth of research, and the incorporation of Catholics and Latter-day Saints into a historiography that has generally been too narrowly focused on theologically and socially conservative Protestants.
Young's primary insight is to situate his narrative as “a history of anti-ecumenism” (7). Aptly drawing its title from the eponymous Dutch hymn, Young's study highlights cooperation in conflict and evolving perceptions of seemingly intractable disagreements. Moving chronologically and thematically, Young organizes his book around a series of controversies associated with the problem of interfaith cooperation in mainline liberal Protestantism, conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, and Mormonism. Beginning in the 1950s, mainline Protestantism—so often relegated to a marginal status in studies of the Religious Right—plays an important role in the early chapters as the limit against which theologically and socially conservative Christians of all stripes defined themselves. All of Young's actors—Catholic, Protestant, and LDS—agree on one thing: whatever Christianity is, it certainly is not mainline Protestantism. This construction of the proximate Christian other initiates much of the theological action in Young's book and constructs the space in which evangelicals and fundamentalists began to find common ground with Catholics and Latter-day Saints by the late 1970s.
If mainline ecumenism and social activism provide the catalyst to Young's story, it is the rapid global growth of the LDS during the 1950s and 1960s under the leadership of President David O. McKay and the Cold War-era normalization of anti-Communist Catholicism, that generate much of the interfaith friction Young chronicles. Through eight chapters, he tells the complex story of how conservative evangelicals softened their militant theological exclusivism as American Catholics and the LDS made systemic bids to shape public discourse in the United States. Theologically, anti-ecumenism took on unprecedented urgency in the form of the twin threats of international Communism and liberal Protestant “Death of God” theology. Initially, conservative evangelicals deployed well-worn condemnations of centralized religious bureaucracies to attack the ecumenical aspirations of liberal Protestants, the “saga of sacrilege” (38) represented by the modernizing impulse embodied in Vatican II, and the “maze” of byzantine Mormon theology and social organization (92). Yet, ironically, Young details how reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council played an important role in softening hardline separatism between Protestant denominations. Vatican II encouraged inter-Protestant cooperation as even “the most separatist elements of evangelicalism,” such as the Southern Baptists, looked to other Protestants as partners in resisting “Catholic aggression” (64). By the end of the century, however, Pope John Paul II's firm stand against Communism and conservative Catholic reassessment of Vatican II encouraged at least some evangelicals to admit grudgingly “that the doctrine of the pope as antichrist” is “inapplicable now” (188).
Rapprochement with the LDS came more slowly as both evangelicals and Catholics found much to abhor in the revelations of Joseph Smith. But Young demonstrates how these centrifugal theological forces began to reverse direction as evangelicals and Catholics increasingly regarded Mormons as allies on a number of issues related to the family. Important court rulings that redrew the rules regarding the relationship between religious instruction and public education initially divided evangelicals and Catholics as the former perceived the progressive weakening of America's de facto Protestant establishment. These divisions, however, gave way to new routes for cooperation as a series of court rulings, culminating with 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, seemed to cut to the heart of the traditional American family. As momentum toward the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment accelerated, Catholics, Protestants, and, gradually, Mormons found opportunities for political cooperation that sidestepped old theological divisions. By the 1980s, Young details how political cooperation became a matter of legitimizing the imagined shared familial visions of the three faith communities.
Even as Young's story hurtles to the inevitable apotheosis of Ronald Reagan, a number of compelling set pieces illustrate the tensions and halting, give-and-take between the factions of the coalescing Religious Right. Whether in the form of a close study of The God Makers, a rabidly anti-Mormon propaganda animated cartoon distributed by evangelicals in the 1980s, or in his description of conflicts between evangelicals and Catholics over Reagan-era nuclear weapon policy, Young's narrative reminds readers that the political homogeneity aspired to by the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition remained stubbornly elusive. As Young's epilogue on the Obama administration makes clear, the three traditions will never reach an ecumenical consensus, but they can always temporarily unite in their righteous anger over federal policies related to healthcare and the idealized shape of the American family.
While the book might invite a number of easy criticisms—it begs for more attention to the role racial strife played in the anti-ecumenical movement, for example, and the political significance of international theological developments, such as liberation theology, are conspicuously absent—Young's book should instead be seen as an exemplary model for comparative studies that should take up such issues for future research. We Gather Together joins the growing body of work offering a drastic expansion of the scholarly frame of reference for evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the twentieth century. Along with important recent contributions by Molly Worthen, David A. Hollinger, and David R. Swartz, Young's text continues the trend of widening the historical record to include overlooked or under-appreciated elements of the Religious Right. Yet Young's book is truly unprecedented and groundbreaking for its ambitious attempt to not only synthesize all manner of Protestant sects into his narrative, but for his expansive and nimble discussion of Roman Catholicism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
