William R. Hutchison had a complaint. Though he was a dean of American religious history and a gatekeeper of the field at Harvard, Hutchison could not shake the feeling that the discipline was going in the wrong direction. In 1989, when he wrote an introduction to his edited volume, Between the Times, his fellow religion scholars were busy examining trans-denominational movements like revivalism, smaller religious practices like voodoo in New York, and “dissenters and other outsiders” to the mainstream. But their efforts had ignored what Hutchison considered the most important subject of all, the Protestant denominations that had guided American life since the American Revolution.Footnote ¹

Hutchison had a name for this group: the Protestant Establishment. Although the United States had no official religious establishment, no state religion, Protestantism had long enjoyed a preferred status within the nation's political and cultural life. Protestants, it would be fair to say, ran the country. When Franklin Roosevelt claimed flatly in 1942 that the United States was a Protestant nation in which “the Catholics and Jews” lived “under sufferance,” he was only stating a widely acknowledged (if not totally accepted) reality.Footnote ²

Yet scholars had, for various reasons, ignored the Protestant Establishment. Their disinterest, according to Hutchison, grew out of a false assumption that so much had already been written that nothing was left to be understood. The rationale for not studying that history, Hutchison complained, “resembles that of a famous sports figure, Yogi Berra, who declined to take his friends to a certain restaurant.” “Nobody goes there anymore,” said Berra. “It's too crowded.”Footnote ³

To Hutchison, the entire attitude was mistaken. He believed not only that the Protestant Establishment required more attention but also that it allowed a sort of inquiry that other subjects did not. After all, to study the way that a small group of denominations controlled American life was really to study social, cultural, and political power in the United States. What Hutchison wanted was a research program that examined how American Protestantism had come to occupy its position within the nation prior to the 1960s and how it maintained that power until the crumbling of its social authority as a result of the 1960s revolution. Did the Protestant Establishment rely on elite networks? Did its position emerge as a result of intellectual or organizational vitality? Did it command a hegemonic or simply a leading role in American society? Hutchison, in other words, called for an assessment of the way in which Protestants created or took over social, cultural, and political institutions and the way in which they subsequently lost them. In that way, he hoped to understand how American society worked.Footnote ⁴

But in spite of Hutchison's status, the study of the Protestant Establishment continued to languish after his call to arms. What flourished in the 1980s and 1990s were books about a specific strain within American religious life: pietistic evangelicalism. Led by a group of scholars that included George Marsden, Mark Noll, Joel Carpenter, Harry Stout, and Nathan Hatch, the production of evangelical histories, often written by historians who were themselves evangelicals (of a moderate or liberal variety), took off. The evangelicals were aided in their effort by generous funding from the Pew Foundation, where Joel Carpenter worked as the director of the religion program and which at the time was extremely interested in reviving the study of evangelical religion in order to promote that religion more broadly.

The resulting body of work was very good but had definite limits. The evangelical historians focused on the ideas of evangelicals and/or fundamentalists and traced the consequences of those ideas in their subjects’ actions. But they also had a persistent desire to rehabilitate their subjects, both as an object of study and as a religious tradition to which they subscribed, which led to a celebratory (and sometimes defensive) quality to their analysis. At a time in which some scholars viewed evangelicalism as obscurantist and backward, the new histories claimed, for example, that evangelicals were at the forefront of spreading ideas of democracy and paving the way for the Revolution (Hatch and Stout). When discussing later periods, they argued that evangelicals and fundamentalists were followers of an older vision of science and innovators in grassroots mobilization (Marsden, Noll, and Carpenter) that had real impact on the culture and politics only of the later twentieth century. These studies involved an analysis of social power of a sort, mostly through its loss, since evangelicals and fundamentalists in the first part of the twentieth century so often found themselves on the losing end of cultural struggle.Footnote ⁵

Not everyone was happy with the new trend. When I began graduate school in 2001, I occasionally heard grousing about the “evangelical cabal” that was driving the agenda in the study of American religion. Many of the evangelicals, for their part, nursed a feeling of marginalization, bordering on victimhood, about the status of their work. When George Marsden attached an afterword to his groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture, claiming, among other things, that God “enters human history and acts in actual historical circumstances,” several reviewers expressed puzzlement and skepticism. The resulting brouhaha drew Marsden into about a decade and a half of polemics, defending what he called “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” from the skeptics in the academy. Meanwhile, Hutchison himself spent the 1990s finishing off what would be his last book, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, which continued to address his central concern with the power of the Protestant elite.Footnote ⁶

Others attempted to go in different directions. By the late 1990s, many scholars working in religious studies departments had begun to gravitate toward anthropological and ethnographic approaches to the study of American religion. Taking issue with Hutchison and largely ignoring the evangelicals, a group led by Thomas Tweed began to argue that Hutchison's desire to focus on Protestant elites obscured as much as it revealed. In a conference and then in an edited volume entitled Retelling U.S. Religious History, Tweed and his co-laborers promoted new narratives of American religion that mapped social spaces and utilized the anthropological concepts of “contact” and “exchange.” Power was present in their analysis, but it operated almost exclusively on the micro, rather than macro, level. It also became remarkably diffuse, localized, and contested, while broad political, cultural, and social power receded to the dim background. Tweed called, in particular, for studies of American religion “situated at cemeteries and hospitals, fairgrounds and malls, parades and festivals, elementary schools and nursing homes, museums and choir lofts, and kitchens and bedrooms.” His contributors provided examples of just what that might look like: a radically decentered process in which religion becomes, in Tweed's words, part of local “negotiations for meaning and power in natural environments and at social sites.”Footnote ⁷

For a time, all three approaches—the social/systemic, the confessing, and the anthropological—had adherents. But in the last decade or so, things have begun to change. Pew decided to stop its funding for religion scholarship, which pulled a vital lifeline for the study of evangelicalism. Meanwhile, the Lilly Endowment, which supported Hutchison's work at Harvard and encourages the study of liberal Protestant religion, has continued and even expanded its financial commitment. It has been joined by other funding agencies, especially the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, which supports dissertation fellowships that address “ethics and/or religion,” a designation practically made for works on liberal Protestantism.

Contemporary events also played a role. By the end of the George W. Bush administration, with its overtly conservative religious foundation, scholars within both religious studies and American religious history began to reconsider, out of activism and perhaps a whist of nostalgia, the tradition of religious liberalism that had been neglected. Notable works on liberal Protestantism began to emerge, including Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey's edited volume American Religious Liberalism, Schmidt's Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality—From Emerson to Oprah, Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature, Matthew S. Hedstrom's Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century, and even Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin's edited collection American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity. Much of this new work is quite good and quite engaging.Footnote ⁸

Within that new direction, a group of scholars have begun to return to Hutchison's program, exploring what has sometimes been called the Protestant “mainline,” the Protestant elite of yesteryear. In studying the mainline, scholars’ concerns are less with Protestant spirituality or belief, which is the main focus of the works above, and more with the way that Protestants influenced and directed American culture and society. That new focus has become so important that we now appear to be entering what has been called a “mainline moment.” In addition to the three books under review here, some of these recent works include Kevin M. Schultz's Tri-faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, Andrew Preston's Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, Jonathan P. Herzog's The Spiritual–Industrial Complex: America's Battles against Communism in the Early Cold War, and even my own The Myth of American Religious Freedom. At the center of all of these books is the issue of cultural, social, and political power.Footnote ⁹

Yet in spite of their shared agenda, these works raise a number of issues for research in the future. To unpack the exact points of conversation, the best place to start is Elesha J. Coffman's The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline. In an exceptionally lucid and elegant account, Coffman tries to explain the ascent of the mainline as an idea while specifying the exact nature of the group's cultural power. Rather than assuming the mainline's hegemonic domination of society, Coffman argues for a slightly different relationship between ecumenical Protestantism and American culture than that envisioned by Hutchison. For Coffman, the mainline always possessed a certain amount of internal disorganization—it was a set of denominations, a form of religious expression, a network of religious activists, and “an attempted religious establishment.” But it could not be reduced to any one of those things. At its heart, in her account, the mainline was a tradition that, borrowing from the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, consisted of “an historically extended, socially embodied argument.”Footnote ¹⁰

Accordingly, Coffman focuses on one of the chief proponents of the argument, Charles Clayton Morrison. As the editor of Christian Century, the magazine that David Hollinger calls the “house organ of the Protestant establishment,” Morrison sought to create a central platform for mainline discussion. Coffman is particularly attuned to subtle dynamics of power at play in Morrison's project. He began as a Disciples of Christ leader who sought to direct the Disciples movement in more modernist directions, but it soon became apparent that the Disciple's denomination (a label that they would reject) was not large enough to sustain either his magazine or his ambitions. So in 1917 the magazine unceremoniously became “an undenominational journal of religion” that spoke to a broad American Protestantism.Footnote ¹¹

Morrison saw himself in the vanguard, though in his attempt to move American Protestantism in modernist directions he responded to important intellectual and cultural changes that had been felt for some time. Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of the Species offered an account of human origins that no longer required the divine. Working on a parallel track, over the course of the nineteenth century biblical scholars had shown the historical nature of the Bible, the way in which biblical authors had written in the culture, idiom, and intellectual understanding of the various times in which they were living. The higher critical study of the Bible had undermined the traditional view that the Christian Scriptures were a plenary inspiration from God and not the result of historical and to some extent even accidental processes. That higher critical view combined with the new theory of evolution to create a suspicion among some in the educated classes that the “God of the gaps”—that is, the intellectual postulate of God needed to explain various facts of natural existence and of human history—might soon disappear.

Modernists like Morrison recognized these challenges and believed that religious claims needed to be changed accordingly. Even though the Bible might come clothed in the forms of the Ancient Near East, the essence of God's message could be extracted from that clothing, modernists believed, and made intelligible in the terms of the twentieth-century world. Liberal theologians since at least Horace Bushnell in the first half of the nineteenth century had read the Bible as a repository of metaphor, but the higher critical methods made the task more urgent and more widespread. And the doctrine of evolution, as religious modernists understood it, offered an account of human history that seemed to aid their project. Because religious modernists assumed that God directed evolution, they read Darwin's theory as part of the teleological purposes of God in directing his creation. The technological progress of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the momentous social changes that had occurred over that period assured religious modernists that the world was quickly evolving into a postmillennial utopia in which all people came to recognize the essence of religious faith: the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. For that reason, they looked for a coming ecumenical religion and a corresponding world government—the institutional expressions of unity that would govern the coming kingdom of God.

It is easy to mock the naivety of this kind of thinking after the bloody twentieth century, but Coffman shows the calculated savvy behind the rhetoric. In putting forth an ecumenical vision, Morrison recognized that he was presenting a program for the future. His analysis, Morrison explained, “penetrates prevailing practices and prevailing opinion.” It “cracks open characteristic phrases” and “goes back to the origins and traces out historical process” in order to show the contradictions of modern life while prescribing a direction for the future. But Morrison did not simply sketch a vision. He also sought to fill out a social network in order to accrue what Coffman calls, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, “cultural capital” that would enable his vision to become reality. By pulling the educated elite into his readership and by making Christian Century the platform for discussion among the “Christian intelligentsia,” Morrison hoped to build a network of power that would advance his ecumenical vision.Footnote ¹²

Yet others worked in opposing directions. David Hollinger, in his excellent new collection of essays, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, describes what he calls the “post-Protestant” project that was emerging at the same time. Rather than reshaping religion through selective adaptation of belief to new intellectual and social realities, post-Protestants turned to science to provide the cultural and intellectual authority that religion had lost. “De-Christianized academic elites,” Hollinger writes, promised that the methods and spirits of science could “both advance knowledge and improve society's moral discipline” through the rigor of its training and the values embodied in its method. In T. H. Huxley's phrase, science offered the world “justification, not by faith, but by verification.”Footnote ¹³

Though Hollinger discusses several post-Protestants in the middle essays of his book, he is clearly most attracted to the philosopher William James as an exemplar of this intellectual transformation. James never went as far as Huxley in his critique of religion, but his intellectual journey illuminates a fairly common pattern as Protestants sought to reconcile their religious beliefs with the new knowledge about the Bible and the world then emerging from specialized researchers. Early in his career, James had believed that religious beliefs had value, even if they could not be substantiated by science. Religious beliefs occupied, according to James, a distinct and separate sphere from that of science, so they did not require the same kind of warrants. But over time, Hollinger shows, James changed his stance by adopting a pragmatic strategy (first put forward by C. S. Peirce) that presumed, in Hollinger's words, “the epistemic unity of all experience and belief.” That stance required a constant testing of belief through experience in the world in a way that assumed the modern structures of plausibility. But it still left room for those “too tender to give up on God but too tough to give up on science.”Footnote ¹⁴

Meanwhile, religious modernists grew in strength through the first third of the twentieth century. After the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the 1920s, they took over the major denominations and set their sights on directing American national life. Yet they were not all in agreement. With the coming of fascism in the 1930s, liberal Protestantism split into pacifist and hawkish branches. Pacifist ecumenicals still nursed their belief that war could be avoided in fulfillment of their postmillennial vision. Morrison in particular pushed for a peace treaty that outlawed war, a proposal that others mocked as a useless piece of paper that could not bind another nation. The emerging critics then began calling themselves realists as opposed to pacifist idealists, a process that Mark Thomas Edwards takes as his subject in The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism. Unfortunately, Edwards is given to rather obscure, even gnomic utterances that diminish the usefulness of his book. For example, he says of realism, “Considered as an incoherent yet interdependent whole, Depression-era Christian Realism was medievalist in intent . . . modernist in method, and postmodernist in outcome.” His meaning is not any clearer in a wider context.Footnote ¹⁵

The best explanation of realism, therefore, comes from Coffman and Hollinger. It is sometimes common to hear theological realism, especially of the variety pushed by Reinhold Niebuhr, explained simply as a religious justification for the later Cold War. And it is true that realism was useful during the Cold War. But Coffman and Hollinger show that it cannot be properly understood unless it is seen first as an argument within 1930s ecumenicalism about American entry into World War II. In contrast to most ecumenical Protestants’ optimistic belief in progress and the essential goodness of all human beings, realists began with the essential sinfulness of humankind and the essentially tragic nature of human experience. For many ecumenicals, the specter of war did not require anything on their part other than patience and prayer. The furies of war would eventually be suspended and God's peaceful kingdom would come. But realists argued that any action, including nonaction, implicated the church in the world situation. To join the war effort or to abstain from it were equally moral choices. Both involved getting blood on one's hands. That was part of the tragic sinfulness of the world. Rather than simply staying aloof and assuming that God's kingdom would come in the fullness of time, realists believed that a person simply had to do the best they could in the tragic world that they inherited, struggling in the ambiguity to bring God's kingdom into existence.Footnote ¹⁶

Niebuhr, in particular, had an elaborate understanding of what that ambiguity meant. In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, he argued that societies, as such, were never moral because all groups were fundamentally selfish. But he still put forward a vision of social action that would, he argued in 1932, lead to a proletarian victory. The key to that victory was individuals working within societies to compel change through something more than moral suasion. By embracing a certain amount of force and even violence—which was, he believed, simply one form of force—Niebuhr directly rejected the optimistic progressivism of Protestant liberalism, while still hoping to find a set of principles in ethics and in politics to bring about a better world.Footnote ¹⁷

Because Niebuhr arrived at a moment of particular Protestant dominance, his message, though it was really an intramural dispute directed at ecumenicals, found a wider adherence even among secular thinkers as a useful rationale for the nation's war efforts. Though he moved away from Marxism, he continued to put forward a realistic vision of social action to urge defeat of the Nazis. And with the beginning of the Cold War, his prestige grew still further.

But Hollinger points out the limits of Niebuhr's appeal. Secular critics, who were then emerging into places of prominence in the university and in public life, complained that Niebuhr's message was not realistic enough. With his talk of God and sin, absolute morality, and the immortality of the human soul, he reintroduced a mode of conversation that had begun to disappear from educated discourse as religious modernism had spread. Morton White, Arthur Murphy, Walter Kaufmann, Meyer Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, William Phillips, James T. Farrell, and Dwight Macdonald, among others, complained in various ways of what Rosenfeld called the “crazy” religious view put forward by Niebuhr that his contemporaries were supposed to regard with a straight face.Footnote ¹⁸

That paradox is at the heart of the argument of Edwards, who finds in realist rhetoric an eerie anticipation of the conservatives of the late twentieth century. Caught up in Henry Luce's rhetoric of an American Century and the new status of the United States as a world power, according to Edwards, realists “encouraged more audacious expressions of planetary Protestant hegemony than would ever be uttered by the nationalistic new Christian right.” During World War II realists spoke of creating a “new Christendom” and a new “Christian civilization” that the war would bring about. And after the war they sought, in the words of E. Stanley Jones, “God's totalitarianism.”Footnote ¹⁹

Yet realists did not suddenly take over the Protestant establishment. At the end of World War II, ecumenicals at Christian Century still looked out over the nation with a certain sense of satisfaction. Religious attendance surged in the aftermath of war, and the mainline seemed more robust than ever. To a certain extent, the God-talk that Niebuhr perpetuated still fed ecumenicals’ sense that the nation was moving toward a unity of expression that would redound to the benefit of the world.

But a closer look would have shown dark clouds on the horizon. In 1947, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment required a “wall of separation” between church and state, an opinion that alarmed ecumenicals and realists alike. And just a few years earlier, in 1942, fundamentalists had reemerged into American life and organized into the National Association of Evangelicals. Signs of fracture were everywhere, for those with eyes to see.Footnote ²⁰

The reemergence of fundamentalist evangelicals proved especially vigorous once they found their great popular leader in Billy Graham. Morrison and his associates had assumed that they could, at once, create an elite network that relied on cultural capital and win the popular masses to Protestantism. For a time, without any obvious challengers, mainline leaders believed that their strategy was a success. But Coffman points out that when Graham came on the scene, mainline leaders faced a choice. Graham immediately attracted the patronage of Henry Luce and the oil magnate J. Howard Pew (who was one of the four founders of the Pew Charitable Trusts). For the first time, mainline Protestants faced a challenge that relied on “popular support and actual capital rather than cultural capital.” Faced with the limits of their appeal, mainline leaders decided to decouple their desire for cultural authority from any pretensions to popular victory. In the fight over how to direct American culture, Coffman argues, the mainline focused on building elite networks, which is how they came to be called the mainline, after a rail line that went through the elite suburbs of northwestern Philadelphia. The evangelicals, by contrast, relied on grassroots appeal and strategic alliances with businessmen.Footnote ²¹

It is in trying to assess the mainline's loss of popular authority that the biggest disagreements within these books emerge. Both Hollinger and Coffman agree that the mainline in the 1960s ceded the banner of Christian America to the evangelicals. But they see somewhat different results that emerged from liberal Protestants’ decision. Coffman notes that liberal Protestants also jettisoned ecumenicalism to engage in more interfaith programs. This was, after all, the era of Will Herberg's Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1955) or what Kevin Schultz calls “tri-faith America.” For Coffman, the switch to interfaith initiatives was a strategic retreat that finally recognized the true nature of the mainline faith. It had always had limited appeal to the people in the pews, being “rooted in elite, university-related divinity schools at the turn of the twentieth century.” By recalibrating their goals after mainline churches started losing members, the tradition continued its influence. “The mainline never achieved what its name implied—height and breadth, influence and representation—but the effort defined its nature,” Coffman concludes. “It is a living tradition because that effort, as well as that argument, continues.”Footnote ²²

Hollinger goes somewhat farther. He is less interested in the mainline as a living tradition and more interested in the effect of the mainline on the culture at large, and in that vein Hollinger believes that the mainline won a resounding popular victory. Once liberal Protestants began to form interfaith alliances, they jeopardized their organizational coherence, according to Hollinger, in order to eliminate “Anglo-Protestant prejudice” and to push the nation toward an embrace of “the varieties of humankind.” Their boldness moved in ever more surprising directions. Although Protestant leaders had pushed in the 1940s and 1950s for an ecumenical Christianity to counteract what they feared would be the disastrous spread of secularism, by the 1960s they quickly acceded to the post-Protestant realities. When Harvey Cox's The Secular City appeared in 1965, some of them even seemed prepared to jettison Christianity. Cox himself no longer worried about labels. It was not their job to fuss about their own identity, Cox counseled. They needed, instead, to “take up the work of liberating the captives.”Footnote ²³

The liberationist thrust of ecumenicism, Hollinger argues, allowed for the series of alliances with more secular organizations during the 1960s, including the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And the ecumenical leadership went far out in front even of their own congregations on a range of issues from racial and gender equality to their opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet when the establishment disappeared in the 1960s, many scholars assumed that the mainline somehow lost because of what Hollinger calls a “survivalist bias” that evaluates success and influence in terms of organizational vitality. As a result, Hollinger claims, scholars have missed the importance of post-Protestant institutions and values, including the human rights organizations and activist groups that are “a major feature of modern American life.” In fact, their success was so great precisely because they were able to instill their values into the wider culture in a way that makes them no longer distinctly Protestant. “Much of what American Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches,” Hollinger concludes, “and hence we have been slow to see it.”Footnote ²⁴

I am not necessarily convinced that the Protestant establishment deserves quite the credit that Hollinger gives it. The secular Jewish and post-Protestant alliance (which Hollinger discusses in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture) strikes me as more influential in generating cultural change, and there is a persistent ambiguity about what exactly is Protestant about many of the values of toleration and equality that he discusses. But it is certainly true that ecumenical Protestants did argue for liberal values in the 1960s, which triumphed even as the mainline went into organizational decline.Footnote ²⁵

That triumph does help explain evangelicals’ feeling of victimhood and grievance, even as they emerged as a powerful political force in the late twentieth century. Hollinger is especially strong on what he sees as the disingenuous call among contemporary Christian activists for a greater role for Christianity in American intellectual and public life. Under the guise of admitting a plurality of perspectives into the debate, many proponents of a renewed attention to Christianity in American scholarship (such as George Marsden) now call for an unacknowledged change in “the structure of plausibility taken for granted by the prevailing epistemic communities.” Their argument is wrongheaded, Hollinger believes. A scholar who argues that a proper conception of justice requires a strict adherence to the sanctity of life might be drawing upon their own brand Christianity as a motive for their argument, Hollinger concedes. But if the argument is to be conducted with those not of their tradition, Hollinger points out that the argument's warrant, its mode of reasoning that authorizes belief, must follow a commonly agreed set of standards that arise out of the disciplinary community's rules for evidence and explanation.Footnote ²⁶

This argument is, perhaps appropriately, exactly the kind of debate that the ecumenical Protestants had with their more sectarian adversaries. Ecumenicals on the Christian Century staff, Coffman shows, sought not a system of doctrines but a method of inquiry to adapt doctrines to the present. In their desire to move in the broadest possible directions, they wound up, by the 1960s, adopting a public rather than a sectarian voice to argue for a range of reforms in conjunction with secular liberals. In taking up his argument with Christian activists in the present, Hollinger is, in essence, calling upon contemporary Christian sectarians to make the ecumenical turn.

Yet in the final essay of his book, Hollinger admits that such a shared structure of plausibility might in fact be hard to sustain, at least in the political realm. He believes, as do I, that it would be preferable in a pluralized nation like the United States to require the transformation of religious ideas into the languages of common public discourse. That would prevent social conflict over religious ideas. “There is a lot to be said for letting each other alone,” Hollinger notes. But given the aggressive promotion of religious ideas within public debate, Hollinger concludes that they must be interrogated to the fullest. Currently, some conservative Christian activists want to have it both ways—using their religious beliefs to justify public policy without even bothering to offer a common, public rationale and then responding with umbrage when their religious beliefs are critiqued. To Hollinger, their position makes no sense. In the current political environment, Hollinger calls on religious liberals to serve again as “rival voices within their own communities of faith” and to “encourage faiths consistent with modern standards of cognitive plausibility.” Such a debate would only strengthen the democratic culture of the United States, he argues, as it did in liberal Protestantism's organizational heyday.Footnote ²⁷

Ultimately these three books suggest the importance of Hutchison's research program and the issues that are at stake. Coffman seeks to defend the vitality of the mainline as a religious tradition. Hollinger seeks to understand the ecumenical project and commend its effect on the United States. And Edwards seeks to show the confusing and shifting connections between religious cultures and political cultures over time. These three books raise questions and articulate disagreements about the exact nature of the Protestant establishment's power and influence. And perhaps most importantly, they ask about how we are to regard the establishment's legacy. Together, they suggest that the “mainline moment” in historical scholarship has just begun.