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The central task facing early American leaders—governing a stable society without their age's customary mechanisms for coercing conscience—required political and theological creativity. Porterfield charges them with a failure of imagination, with worrying about their own self-preservation rather than realizing the ideals of the Revolution by nurturing a more inclusive political process. Where Hatch and Stout emphasized the role of the press in the early republic as a medium for popular dissent and political empowerment, Porterfield sees partisan newspapers manipulating public opinion and stoking passions on behalf of the politicians who bankrolled them. Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were closer in mind here than either party cared to admit: both dreaded the expansion of suffrage beyond white men. Both clamped down on anarchic political rallies to squeeze out African Americans and relegate women to a powerless, symbolic role.Footnote ¹⁴ Porterfield jumps into the ongoing academic dog pile on Thomas Jefferson, who fell far short of his high-minded Enlightenment rhetoric in his treatment of slaves and his policies toward Native Americans.Footnote ¹⁵ Even his demotic comportment and style of dress were ploys, studied informalities meant to critique and irritate his Federalist rivals.Footnote ¹⁶ In Porterfield's telling, Jefferson is less a founder demigod than an early Huey Long—and the comparison seems unfair to the Kingfish.

Those evangelicals who had the most success in the new republic did so, in part, by framing their theology to address social and political anxiety. Methodists preached that a paralyzing sense of anxiety was a good thing: it meant that one felt the weight of one's sins and perched on the precipice of conversion.Footnote ¹⁷ Porterfield downplays John Wesley's radical theology of free moral agency and Baptist ideas of “soul liberty.” She suggests that these theologies of freedom could be dangerously individualistic if taken to extremes or understood in isolation, and thus made poor tools for maintaining an orderly, virtuous society. Americans craved—or, rather, their politicians and clergy encouraged them to crave—clear hierarchies and social roles. The problem of early American femininity is a case in point. American women had enjoyed a striking degree of sexual freedom in the Revolutionary era, but the 1790s brought a backlash against outspoken feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, whose marital indiscretions now undermined her credibility as a social commentator. Religious societies established houses for unwed mothers, stigmatizing sexual independence and transforming prostitution into a permanent class identity rather than a short-term exigency.Footnote ¹⁸

Porterfield is building on the argument that we have heard from scholars who have quarreled with Nathan Hatch in the past. Earlier, Paul Johnson contended in A Shopkeeper's Millennium (1978) that “evangelicalism was a middle-class solution to problems of class, legitimacy, and order.”Footnote ¹⁹ Like other scholars who have understood religion in terms of social control, Porterfield downplays the role of individual agency and subjective religious experience in the history of worship and revival, and sometimes verges upon reducing a long theological tradition to an episode of political cynicism. She joins Johnson, Mark Noll, and other scholars in offering an ambitious synthesis of early American political theology, but like them she ignores most of the true radicals, the wildest products of America's religious free market. Her narrative ends too soon to include Mormons. She neglects eccentric but immensely popular Methodist itinerants like Lorenzo Dow, and mentions only briefly Restorationist preachers such as Barton Stone. These individuals were not without authoritarian tendencies, but they were also engaged in a kind of social protest against established authority. They fit less neatly into Porterfield's thesis.

Her essential claim, however, is convincing: religious and political leaders in early America curbed personal freedom while they preached liberty—in part because uncertain Americans wished for and responded to such authority. “Religious freedom” meant freedom largely circumscribed by the dictates of the white, male, Protestant moral establishment, as books such as Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty and David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom have confirmed.Footnote ²⁰ Taken together with Hatch's seductive portrait of the democratizing power of American revivalism—for these books are best understood as complementary, rather than wholly contradictory—Conceived in Doubt helps us trace the familiar Protestant tension between the antinomian freedom of God's grace and the demanding law of God's expectations, a paradox that has plagued American Christians’ efforts at self-government since Puritan times. In focusing too much on the political and theological divide between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, between revivalist evangelicals and rationalist deists, historians have obscured their common efforts to soothe political anxiety and manage the social order.

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Scholars have sometimes understood the nineteenth century as the evangelical century, an era of moral crusades and teeming revivals, expanding missions abroad and a Baptist and Methodist juggernaut at home. It is not entirely possible to distinguish between “liberal” and “conservative” Protestantism in the years before the fundamentalist–modernist crisis, although branches of the emerging liberal tradition—particularly Unitarians and Universalists—came into early flower and foreshadowed the ways in which twentieth-century liberals would reinterpret the Bible's authority and challenge the political and cultural decrees of the moral establishment. What is striking, however, is how much these modern liberals still had in common with their forebears. They continued to worry over how to manage anxiety and cultivate virtue in their flocks. Matthew Hedstrom picks up these threads in The Rise of Liberal Religion, an account of how liberal (and mostly Protestant) leaders worked together with the publishing industry to foster a culture of mass religious reading. Through book clubs, reading lists for libraries, and national campaigns such as Religious Book Week, liberal elites promulgated a “middlebrow” version of their theology. They embedded their values into mainstream American culture—values that would last even after membership in liberal Protestant churches began to decline.

While Porterfield's subjects were preoccupied with patrolling the political process and strengthening the public presence of their institutions, Hedstrom's characters—ranging from national religious personalities like Harry Emerson Fosdick and celebrity rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman to Eugene Exman, the mystical head of Harper & Brothers’ religion department—wanted to stimulate and guide Americans’ private spirituality. The Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones argued that reading, like singing the divine hours, should be a religious practice. He fretted over new religious cults that entrapped Americans with their pamphlets and tracts. Christians needed to strengthen their own faith and share it with others by buying and devouring orthodox books (he seems to have meant books that reflected the liberal Christian temperament, even if they did not preach the Nicene Creed). “I am pleading for the ownership of books and for the cultivation of the habit of reading,” he wrote in 1921, the same year that publishing executives and liberal religious leaders created Religious Book Week.Footnote ²¹

Jones and his colleagues were following a long Protestant tradition of zeal for the personal encounter with the printed word, honed by nineteenth-century American Christians into what Hedstrom calls an “ideology of reading” intended to help Christians navigate a diverse and tumultuous print culture, a “priesthood of all readers.”Footnote ²² However, the organizers of Religious Book Week made a point of nonsectarian magnanimity—bounded by a liberal Protestant sense of propriety, of course—in selecting titles to recommend to the American Library Association and book clubs around the country, including the Religious Book Club, founded in 1927. The Religious Book Club featured authors ranging from Henry Pitt Van Dusen and Carl Jung to Martin Buber and Swami Akhilananda; the ALA's Religious Books Round Table began inviting a Catholic and Jewish member to join their selection committee in the 1930s.Footnote ²³ These leaders hoped that an inclusive curating strategy, combined with savvy ad campaigns, would help them win over new readers and sell books “while fortifying the spiritual life of those middle-class Americans struggling to cope with the dislocations of modernity.”Footnote ²⁴

Hedstrom, like Porterfield, sees his subjects’ time as an age of anxiety. Every period of human history is an age of some sort of anxiety: the question for historians is how the people who lived through each one made sense of their own cultural and intellectual upheaval. World War II compelled increasing numbers of American readers to seek solace and meaning in religious books, and new organizations like the Council on Books in Wartime and the National Conference of Christians and Jews attempted to guide this “spiritual mobilization.”Footnote ²⁵ But if they tried to coax Americans into reading their way into a proud and sufficiently Protestantized “Judeo-Christian” civil religion, they could not help but notice that many of the best-selling books spoke more to Americans’ desire for a private sense of self-confidence, contentment, and purpose than to grand patriotic virtue. Middlebrow readers emerged from the war newly aware of the powers of modern psychological analysis. They embraced books like Fosdick's On Being a Real Person (1943) and Liebman's Peace of Mind (1946), which blended pop psychotherapy with watered-down existentialist theology to offer a path out of alienation and into authenticity.

These were the two golden rules of mid-century liberal religion: tolerate all but the rabidly intolerant, and be true to yourself. Hedstrom glosses over the ways in which this mild-mannered creed assumed an unspoken pact to think and behave like a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and therefore excluded many Americans, particularly racial minorities and new immigrants (he admits the limits of his narrative outright in the book's introduction). But he is masterful in highlighting the lasting cultural legacy of the liberal religious establishment: a legacy that is not explicitly Christian, and has therefore received short shrift from historians preoccupied with the institutional decline of the Protestant mainline.

Porterfield and Hedstrom note something else that may surprise their readers: in the early republic as well as the mid-twentieth century, religious leaders readily acknowledged that many Americans affiliated with no religious institution at all. From the origins of efforts like Religious Book Week, clergy and booksellers marketed aggressively to the “nones” of their day.Footnote ²⁶ They discovered one guru in “New Thought superstar” Emmet Fox, who was so popular in the 1930s that he mesmerized crowds of six thousand at Carnegie Hall and wrote best-selling books packed with his “wildly eclectic mix of New Thought, transcendentalism, Christianity, Hinduism, and a variety of other metaphysical teachings.”Footnote ²⁷ It has never been a secret, then, that America's liberal religious “mainstream” stretches well beyond the bounds of orthodox Protestantism. Yet this broader spectrum of belief and practice has long cried out for sustained investigation.

Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey have edited a volume that begins to fill this gap. Earlier scholarship has examined many of the individual religious communities and traditions included in American Religious Liberalism. These essays offer new interpretive angles, and the volume as a whole prods the reader to consider whether the label “religious liberalism” can encompass a constellation of religious characters and practices ranging from Whitmanism and theosophy to science fiction and the Bahá’í Faith. The authors do not offer a definitive answer, but in the course of considering the question, they expose the strengths and limits of the liberal religious imagination.

The men and women who star in these essays are seeking the same essential ends as Porterfield's and Hedstrom's subjects: a source of authority that provides order, existential meaning, and a path to right living. But most of them look farther afield for their fonts of truth and guidance. Many of these essays reconsider “religious liberalism” by toying with the problem of how to define religion in the first place. Michael Robertson describes the brief but colorful rise and fall of Whitmanism, a loose fellowship of fans and seekers who sought enlightenment through literature by elevating Walt Whitman to near-messiah status after the poet's death. Carrie Tirado Bramen wonders if Harriet Beecher Stowe's religious writings portray liberalism as an etiquette and an aesthetic rather than an institutional religion: a “niceness” that provides “social and spiritual comfort by anchoring the vicissitudes of life in the predictable rhythms of the everyday.”Footnote ²⁸

In a particularly jaunty essay, Jeffrey Kripal analyzes Charles Fort, a writer and researcher of “anomalous phenomena,” as a spiritual pioneer. Fort's “metaphysical liberalism,” his refusal to dismiss strange occurrences for which the science of the day could not account—reports of UFOs, flying saints, and stones that seemed to defy gravity—demonstrated a willingness to question fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality.Footnote ²⁹ Fort criticized both traditional religion and Enlightenment science. His liberalism constituted what Kripal calls a “third space” beyond both belief and reason, in which humans are free to consider a paradigm shift that might rearrange their standards of knowing. Kripal traces the long legacy of Fortean experimental thinking in modern science fiction, a genre devoted to upending the reader's reality, “rife with theological and religious implications, and almost all of them radically liberal, if not actually devastating to conservative worldviews.”Footnote ³⁰

What, exactly, makes these figures “liberal?” Is it simply that they abandon traditional interpretations of scripture (Christian or otherwise) and ignore the accepted parameters of orthodoxy? If the liberals in these pages were not prone to convening heresy trials, many still found ways to divide the sheep from the goats. Emily Mace notes that although the ecumenical Bell Street Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island invited participants to become “citizens of all the world's temples,” its leaders banned spiritualists and Trinitarian Christians from teaching in or on behalf of the chapel and preferred Protestant readings and hymns over the literature of other traditions.Footnote ³¹ Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott revered eastern religions, but considered himself a greater expert on Buddhism and Hinduism than were native practitioners themselves, whose faiths were “but brutalizations of their primal types.”Footnote ³²

Maintaining boundaries and reserving the right to judge what is best and true are not, then, uniquely “conservative” practices. Perhaps to be “liberal” is to locate religious authority not in scriptures, institutions, or human leadership, but in personal experience with the transcendent. Sally Promey outlines an “aesthetic spirituality” that emerged in nineteenth-century liberal Protestants’ writings on art and nature. Henry Ward Beecher declared that a Christian might have a religious experience—something akin to Plato's notion of “unforgetting” eternal truths that one has always known—when encountering the majesty of Niagara Falls. In his Discourse on Christian Nurture (1847), Horace Bushnell urged Christians to cultivate spiritual “taste,” an ability to discern God's ideal of beauty.Footnote ³³

Yet these men were hardly the first to acknowledge the power of art and nature to speak of the divine where human words fail. For all their anti-Catholicism, they followed an ancient Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition of apophatic theology. They had kindred spirits among the titans of Puritanism, too: Bushnell's raptures remind one of Jonathan Edwards's contention that Christians must develop a spiritual sensitivity, a new appreciation and appetite, for “the glory of all the perfections of God, and of everything appertaining to the divine being: for . . . the beauty of all arises from God's moral perfection.”Footnote ³⁴ Nor were their teachings so distant from those of their conservative evangelical brethren. If there is any place in American spirituality in which humans reach out directly to a divine presence, it is an evangelical revival. Conservative evangelicals may be more inclined to bind this individual communion to an institutional community's rituals and expectations, but recent anthropological studies such as T. M. Luhrmann's When God Talks Back caution us never to underestimate the radical subjectivity of their religious experience, or overestimate their slavish obedience to one fixed interpretation of doctrine.Footnote ³⁵

Instead, liberalism might be a kind of pragmatism: a functionalist approach to religious belief and practice, a willingness to do what it takes to make religion “work” in a changing world. This theme runs through Yaakov Ariel's essay on Reform Judaism's evolution to accommodate Western modernity and Gretchen Boger's study of Protestant missionaries’ efforts in China to adapt Christianity to the local political context. In The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, William Hutchison noted that liberal Protestants’ debates over the need to preach the bare “essence” of Christianity centered on the challenge of foreign missions. The Congregationalist theologian George Angier Gordon argued that successful evangelization in places like China demanded that “the nonessentials, the parochially cultural accretions to Christianity, must somehow be stripped away.”Footnote ³⁶ Protestant liberals, then, are sometimes just as primitivist, just as eager to recover the ahistorical marrow of the Gospel, as fundamentalists. However, they have proven to be more candid about the difficulty of that task—and more open about the anxiety and anguish that it brings—than their conservative brethren.

* * *

The essays in this volume mostly ignore these commonalities between liberal religionists and those whom we conventionally label more conservative. But several highlight a presupposition that distinguishes liberal approaches to these shared spiritual practices and problems. The traditional Christianity of Porterfield's protagonists often served as a vehicle for excluding women and minorities from the political process, and for privileging a special blend of Western rationalism and Protestant dogma as the only legitimate guide in faith and culture. By contrast, the liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened the door—or at least held it ajar—for oppressed and marginalized people, and began to question the privilege of Western Protestant ways of knowing and living.

In academia, this liberalism emerged as an exploratory openness, an enthusiasm for the unfamiliar that characterized the careers of scholars like the Semitic philologist Morris Jastrow Jr. Jastrow advocated the study of world religions in order that humans might cultivate a “spirit of intense sympathy with one another.” For Kathryn Lofton, “sympathy as an academic value [is] drawn from a distinctly liberal tradition which formed the basis of American religious studies.”Footnote ³⁷ Kathi Kern describes the fruits of such openness among American and English women who, frustrated by the limitations of traditional Christianity, found that the New Thought movement “combined a commitment to metaphysical healing with a theology that privileged women's ‘moral power’ and criticized male desire.”Footnote ³⁸ Some, such as the feminist Clara Colby, joined the “craze” for the Indian writer and “spiritual guru” Rabindranath Tagore, whose books featured complex and self-confident female protagonists and provided Western women with a rubric through which to critique their own society.Footnote ³⁹

This spirituality is a far cry from the rationalist Protestantism that most readers associate with the notion of religious liberalism. Like Charles Fort and the doyenne of theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, these women refused to be domesticated by the Enlightenment. They believed that “progress” required not pushing the principles of science to their ultimate conclusions, but breaking free of the confines of Western reason and custom altogether. African Americans such as Alain Locke, genius of the Harlem Renaissance, critiqued the black church as a poisonous construct of the white West, one that “socialized black people into cultural worlds that privileged Western aesthetics and perpetuated a warped perspective on African culture,” writes Josef Sorett.Footnote ⁴⁰

In the volume's afterword, David Hollinger returns to “ecumenical Protestantism,” the “mainline” that has become most scholars’ shorthand for religious liberalism, and which nurtured or at least obliquely emboldened many of these individuals. He sees a religious community whose leaders “vigorously interrogated themselves about their own traditions.”Footnote ⁴¹ This thread of self-criticism, this admission that one's own tradition is not the standard by which all other faiths must be judged, permeates the thought and actions of many of the thinkers and communities considered here. Yet there is a related theme that may be more pervasive, especially among those outside academia like the lay readers who flocked to libraries during Religious Book Week, the feminist theosophists, the Whitmanists, and the African Americans groping for their ancestors’ religions: the search for personal authenticity. Even the ecumenical Protestant project of self-interrogation is, in part, aimed at this goal. It is a desire to see oneself in the glass more clearly, to believe and live a “real” faith unencumbered by worldly power and prejudice.

This quest for authenticity is both a “modernist impulse” and a powerful critique of modernity. It became possible only with the emergence of Western conceptions of secularism that expected humans to share a public sphere with people who believed differently from themselves, and encouraged them to cultivate an internal, private faith. It is closely entwined with the rise of modern theories of mind and the therapeutic spirituality that Fosdick and Liebman embraced. It has evolved into a self-obsessed, seeker spirituality that celebrates doubt as an excuse for more navel-gazing: a religious atomization that has eroded the intellectual authority of the politicians and clergy who tried to manipulate that doubt in Porterfield's account. Yet the cult of authenticity has become the serpent eating its own tail. Some of its most committed disciples soon began to wonder whether “being true to yourself” required jettisoning Western rules of reason and selfhood altogether.

In the end, even this is not uniquely liberal. Observers of contemporary American evangelicalism have long noted the community's fixation on authenticity. T. M. Luhrmann has described the “seeker-sensitive” culture of charismatic evangelicalism, which trains believers to read the Bible as a divine message written expressly for them; to hear God's voice talking them through their daily problems; to pray until they progress beyond the formalities of going to church on Sunday morning and discover an intimate relationship with Jesus. “I think that when you get to know God, you’re really getting to know yourself,” one believer told Luhrmann.Footnote ⁴² When political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell published the results of their massive survey of American religious thought and practice in American Grace, they revealed that even religious conservatives are prone to a do-it-yourself spirituality, a desire to pick and choose beliefs that feel right to them rather than subscribe mechanically to their church's statement of faith.Footnote ⁴³

At the same time, the “culture wars” are no fiction. The polarization of America's current political climate makes it clear that there are real differences between “liberal” and “conservative” religion. If conservatives often share liberals’ quest for authentic spirituality and personal contact with the divine, they depart from liberals in their narrative of American history: they have very different ideas about which cultural practices are treasured heritage, and which are corruptions that cry out for reform. They place much tighter limits—even if these are subtly shifting—on what constitutes true religion, and they perceive more costs than benefits in America's growing religious pluralism. But if the rise of the Christian right pushed scholars to rush to explain the triumph of conservative religion, these three books provide an important correction. They clear away romantic ideas of the alliance between evangelicalism and democracy, and reveal the world we miss if we define “liberalism” or “religion” too narrowly. They offer a narrative that is not one of decline and disappearance, but an infusion of liberal religious ideas into mainstream culture. Perhaps it is so hard to define “religious liberalism” because we are all religious liberals now.