After decades charting the rise of conservative evangelicalism, the study of protestantism in America now boasts a flourishing body of work devoted to the study of religious liberalism. The work of Matthew Hedstrom, David Hollinger, Sally Promey, and others have all focused—or, to be more accurate, refocused—the study of protestantism upon those major denominations and ecclesiastical associations that considered themselves to be the standard bears of American Christianity. Elesha J. Coffman's new monograph on The Christian Century is an important part of this growing subfield. But in addition to contributing to this robust discussion, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline also makes an important attempt to frame the entire conversation.

Like all good books, Coffman's text operates on multiple levels. On the surface, the book is a history of The Christian Century magazine in the years surrounding the singular influence of publisher and editor C. C. Morrison. Beginning with Morrison's early life and ordination, Coffman follows the editor as he purchased the struggling periodical in 1908 and transformed it into the flagship publication of liberal protestantism by the time of his retirement in 1947 and death in 1966. On another level, however, Coffman's text also uses The Christian Century's renown as an avenue through which to view the social construction of the very category of mainline protestantism. According to Coffman, it was no accident that a magazine of theology, politics, and high culture would become liberal protestantism's standard-bearer. Such a mass-produced yet learned product embodied the desire of numerous liberal protestant ministers, theologians, and laymen (and Coffman's subjects are, by the nature of her sources, mostly white men) to amass the cultural capital they deemed necessary to enhance their status and advance their influence over American life.

By “cultural capital” Coffman draws directly upon French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's notion of those literary sensibilities and aesthetic tastes that amplify an individual's social standing. For Coffman, the quest of Morrison and those like him for such respectability animated the consolidation of the protestant mainline. In the absence of any kind of governing body, The Christian Century's pages became a space, if not the space, where liberal protestantism's elite wove a number of mainline ideas—about ecumenism, scholarship, and social welfare—into the very idea of a mainline “as the center, to which all other religious groups were peripheral.” (4). This vantage turns what could have been a simple institutional history of The Christian Century into a dynamic exploration of the process by which a magazine came to bear the weight of a movement. Coffman's opening chapter on Morrison's education, for example, situates the editor's early life within a larger collective biography of individuals like William Raney Harper, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and others whose desire for cultural and intellectual esteem suggests why they would eventually support, read, and contribute to the publication. Other early chapters evocatively position Morrison's editorial leadership within the larger context of modern magazine publishing, noting that The Christian Century's tone was often less about “defeating” theological conservatives and more about fashioning a moderate voice that would win market share.

The book's latter half tends to chart more familiar ground, covering the falling out between Morrison and longtime Century contributor Reinhold Niebuhr, the publication's numerous failed attempts to transform its readership into an ecclesiastical body in the years after World War II, and the Century's tempestuous relationship with Billy Graham's Christianity Today. Underlying these final chapters is Coffman's second insight about the mainline. As a social construction conceived in a quest for cultural capital, the protestant mainline emerged embattled and unstable. The term “mainline” did not enter the American lexicon until 1960, at a moment when Christianity Today's enormous popularity already signaled the Century's forthcoming decline. Its very coinage revealed that the Century's claim to be an elite publication that spoke for ordinary protestants was always a loosing proposition.

By the book's end, however, one wonders if the Century's fate is the most accurate barometer of the mainline's history. For while the magazine's establishment reveals a stage upon which the idea of a “unified American Protestantism, culturally dominant, socially progressive, [and] fulfilling its obligation its obligation as shepherd of the nation's soul” (147) was born, The Christian Century ultimately offers too narrow a cast of characters with which to watch this drama unfold. Figures like Niebuhr and organizations like the Federal Council of Churches all exist in the text only insofar as they relate to the magazine. What role they may have played in constructing the social, financial, and symbolic capital of the mainline protestant habitus, to extend Bourdieu's analysis further, awaits further exploration and theorization.

In many ways, however, these absences are more invitations than limits in Coffman's text. Her thoroughly researched, richly written, and intensely focused history of The Christian Century is a much-needed first monograph on the publication, which is often cited but rarely researched. The book not only should be required reading for scholars of modern American religion, but would also work well in upper level undergraduate courses as well.