In After Cloven Tongues of Fire David Hollinger makes an important argument about particular protestant groupings, their accommodations, and their making of an American modernity. The gist of Hollinger's story, told in a series of previously published essays, is about the recent fate of liberal protestantism in America, what Hollinger labels “ecumenical Protestantism.” Wary of instantiating an unsubtle narrative of liberal vs. conservative piety, Hollinger seeks to achieve more analytic purchase on the complexities of protestant history. In contrast to what Hollinger sees as an “obscurantist” (one of his favorite words) position of “Christian survivalists;” i.e., evangelicals, ecumenical protestantism refers to those groups and individuals open to “sympathetic exploration of wider worlds” (21). In contrast to the former, the latter were integral to reducing “Anglo-Protestant prejudice” in the twentieth century and fomenting its embrace of “the varieties of humankind.” And this is the victory whose mechanics Hollinger explores in the trajectories of protestants who were politically engaged, scientifically rigorous, and committed to a vision of progressive humanism. And it is a victory, Hollinger argues, that comes at a loss, specifically, a loss of “organizational hegemony” (46) and political capital.

But there is a silver lining. As Hollinger writes, “Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to offer the United States than did its evangelical revival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it” (48–49).

For despite the emptying of the “vast sanctuaries built by the Methodists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the center of almost all American cities and towns,” the spirit of ecumenicism still circulates. The mark of ecumenical protestantism is both present and absent in Hollinger's rendering of “post-Protestant” domains.” Hollinger employs what he calls a dispersionist approach to illuminate protestant influence “beyond the churches” (160). And for the most part, this influence has been positive and democratically constructive. There is a sense here (at least for this reader) of a Hegelian process of Protestantism emptying itself out in the world, recognizing itself, and its true calling, in the so-called secular world of politics, activism, and science. This version of protestantism is not merely liberal or ecumenical. It is progressive by definition.

The formal nature of the collected essay complements the dispersionist approach as Hollinger circles the intellectual complex of ecumenical protestantism in the long twentieth century. He takes its measure from different angles, from close and counter-intuitive readings of figures like Reinhold Niebuhr and William James to current debates about religion in higher education to the ecumenical protestant presence in mid-century foreign policy circles.

Hollinger pits his dispersionist approach against “prominent communalists” like “Mark Noll, George Marsden, D.G. Hart, Richard Bushman, Grant Wacker, and Harry Stout, all of whom study the institutions and ideologies of professing Protestants with special attention to the adhesives that make for the preservation of Protestant communities” (161). Hollinger sees himself as non-apologetic in making a case for a style of protestantism into which he was born but has since “left” and become a thoughtful critic from the post-protestant space of beyond. Having grown up within an ecumenical and “intensely Protestant atmosphere,” Hollinger writes “from a secular perspective,” adding that he is “no longer Protestant.” (170). Whereas a Noll or a Hatch might feel the need to tell a story that conserves an identifiable religious community, Hollinger sees his essays as serving the project of diffusion, the ironic legacy of ecumenical protestantism—the more it dissipates the more influential it becomes.

Hollinger urges historians to see the different threads and fates of liberal protestant thought so as to better see the invisible legacy of ecumenical protestantism. He charts, for example, the division of a nineteenth-century protestant heritage into social and intellectual gospels. As the latter became less cognitively plausible in the twentieth century, it did not so much wane as lose touch with the figure of Christ and talk about him. “Science-admiring de-Christianized elites” diminished the moral authority of Christianity even as they maintained many of its virtues in the service of secular truth. Hollinger's is a sophisticated rendering of a classic secularization narrative—big science being “an updated version of earlier religious callings” (83).

Hollinger notes the messiness of a situation in which “much of American Protestant thought has been reactive to the scientific enterprise” even while “much of that enterprise has been propelled by cognitive and moral energies drawn from the Protestant religious tradition.” This is an essential point that cannot be made too often or too forcefully for it demands an incredible degree of interpretive reflexivity if one is to follow through on it. Indeed, it has led some even to question the celebrated differences between science and religion, reason and faith, particularly as both have been practiced over the past few centuries, which is not to say that there is no differences at all but to question the mythology that such differences are fundamental and not epiphenomenal to processes of discursive formation. It would be fascinating, then, to pair Hollinger's analysis with an exploration of the complexities or constructedness of the science with which self-conscious renderings of religion are struggling. As the rich body of science studies have shown over the past few decades, scientific objectivity has its history and one that is integral to the liberal and erstwhile protestants Hollinger so deftly chronicles.

Hollinger is onto something profound here in mapping the contours of what he calls a “post-Protestant secularism”—a way for many Americans to live in and through their modernities without excessive tension or acknowledged allegiance to the religious history that has allowed them to arrive at this point in history. Spiritual-but-not-religious, indeed. One outcome of Hollinger's narrative frame is that he tends to undervalue the ways in which liberal protestantism undergirds less palpable and less easily admired formations than cosmopolitanism and civil rights. The Bigness of techno-scientific advances, neo-liberal economic policies, and therapeutic styles (of which spiritual-but-not-religious is but one)—but more importantly, their dispersion, expanse and swath are also part of any story about liberal/ecumenical protestantism in the twentieth century. Hollinger, for example, cites Norman Vincent Peale as a kind of ecumenical turncoat for failing to live up to his liberal theologizing. But the therapeutic turn—a most significant process over the past 60 years and one spearheaded by Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking—is one anchored in liberal theology, in general, and its particular approaches to the psyche. But the so-called triumph of the therapeutic is strangely absent in a book that tackles the death and dispersion of liberal theology.

A kind of Protestant exceptionalism simmers throughout the book—neither an apology nor plea but a familiar set of assumptions about what constitutes the civic sphere and politics within it, how that sphere and those actions are prerequisite for agency and ethical action. For example, the very notions of ecumenicism and accommodation that drive Hollinger's analysis are, themselves, historical, emerging from a particular set of concerns and valuations and strategies. They are, in other words, part of a liberal self-understanding whose boundless energy for expressing humanist pathos and advertising their capacity for searing self-critique is part of the history that Hollinger (and others) do not engage as historical so much as self-evident. Might there be something left out of any universal humanism? Is there a history of exclusion that is part and parcel to the dispersion of ecumenism? Or more precisely, what kinds of humanities or ways of thinking about the human have not been invited to the ecumenical table or worse, been banished from the get-go as outside the fold of political transparency and common sense epistemology?

Despite this parsing, Hollinger's work is a substantial contribution to our understanding of ecumenical protestantism in the twentieth century. This is a book by a master of the craft and one that must be reckoned with if one plans to engage the relationship between liberal religion and politics.