This highly readable book, developed from the author's Boston College dissertation, uses the popularity of Niebuhr the theologian, Graham the evangelist, and Tillich the philosopher to contest the conventional narrative of mid-twentieth-century religion in the United States. Where observers such as Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955) defined the culture as being simply captive to a conformist “American Way of Life” Christianity, Finstuen claims that Niebuhr, Graham, Tillich, and the tide of laypeople who followed their careers engaged in deeply textured theological discussions, particularly about original sin.

Finstuen focuses on the two decades after World War II so vexed by threats of international conflicts but also energized by domestic potential. Finstuen watches the ancient Christian concept of original sin wend its way through the work of these three modern men and concludes that “sin as fact,” as human condition, structured not only elite theological discourse but also the ruminations of “everyday Protestants” (2). Indeed, one of the contributions of this book is to show that everyday Protestants did ruminate on topics such as the nature of creation—including the nature of human beings—the nature of the Christian God, the fractured relationship between them, and the route to reconciliation. Closely examining the figures' major published works and certain significant sermons, along with selected private correspondence, Finstuen recreates a mid-century landscape shared and shaped by these leaders and the lay people who pondered them. The terrain looks craggier than that mapped out in the accepted version of 1950s religion. Rather than emphasizing the period's complacency, Finstuen's story emphasizes Americans' restive hopes for grace in the postwar passage.

The book proceeds efficiently through six chapters and a conclusion. The first three chapters each explore an aspect of the mid-century situation. Chapter 1 characterizes 1950s American Protestantism, distinguishing between the “captive revival”—what John Bennett called the “revival of interest in religious activity” (14)—and the “theological revival” (8)—represented by Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich. The second chapter considers these men themselves, sketching biographies but dwelling on distinctive and shared theological commitments. In the third chapter, Finstuen takes on the doctrine of original sin itself, describing its life in twentieth-century American thought and showing how, despite the inattention of recent American religious histories to the concept, ordinary believers and religious elites alike kept circling around it as an essential part of modern Christian life.

The second part of the book builds on this foundation. Finstuen works through Niebuhr's writings and sermons (chapter 4), then Graham's sermons and My Answer columns (chapter 5), and finally Tillich's writings for theologians and lay folk (chapter 6), showing the importance of original sin to their work. The most compelling part of these chapters comes in Finstuen's examination of letters written to and about Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich—all of whom appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the 1950s and had, through their books, columns, and public appearance, large followings among lay Protestants.

Graham's presence alongside Niebuhr and Tillich, obviously, marks the most surprising aspect of Finstuen's discussion, yet without his inclusion here, the book's claims would not be as convincing. Finstuen distinguishes between Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, perhaps the strongest exponent of the “captive revival.” Graham deployed a strong notion of sin in his preaching and writing, unlike Peale. He did conceive of sin in different terms from Niebuhr and Tillich, in part because he took as his main task the conviction of individual sinners rather than the sharp conceptualization of theological terms. Where Niebuhr and Tillich published extensively, spreading their views predominantly through popular magazines and best-selling books, Graham preached in person to millions of Americans and reached millions more through his newspaper column. Finstuen shows all three men, however, in energetic conversation about original sin with an enormous audience of American laypeople.

Finstuen makes claims for the diversity of these “everyday Protestants,” the lay theologians who studied the writings of Niebuhr and Tillich and devotedly followed Graham's preaching crusades. He does observe—albeit in a note—that women outnumbered men as correspondents to these figures, bearing out Ann Braude's claim that “Women's History Is American Religious History” (in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997]); one cannot narrate the story of religion in the United States if one has not accounted for the women involved at any given moment. And Finstuen includes exchanges of letters between homemakers and mothers alongside those from male farmers, clergy, graduate students, businessmen, and the three focus figures. Yet he does not—and perhaps cannot—clarify whether or not these correspondents are ethnically diverse. Did original sin ring as powerfully among black laypeople at mid-century as it did apparently among white readers of Time, the Christian Century, Christianity and Crisis, and Christianity Today? How might black veterans returning from service in the war to racialized communities have interpreted Niebuhr on corporate sin or Tillich on estrangement or Graham on repentance? How might black Protestants give further nuance to Finstuen's counter-narrative? Were these three captive to ethnocentric modes while prophetic in others? Finstuen does narrate the episode when Graham invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at Madison Square Garden in 1957, but the powerful lay voices in his argument need further strengthening through the addition of black lay voices. Many Americans—ordinary and elite, black and white—found their religious commitments troubled by the struggle for racial equality and many certainly understood racial injustice as a token of original sin.

The book treats popular, lay religion as serious business. Finstuen does not devalue the ideas of non-specialists who write to Niebuhr, Graham, or Tillich, even when those ideas are only marginally comprehensible. He carefully sorts through sometimes tangled prose to show that moms and newspapermen and laborers wrestled with sin as a human condition and as a personal plague. One wishes that Finstuen could include more of these lay voices, because they are so compelling; however, what he does include makes a strong case for the fruitful contact between ordinary folk and these three leaders on the subject of original sin.