The World's Parliament of Religions, one of many auxiliary events staged during the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, is a familiar, if contested, touchstone for historians of American religion. Almost as important in the historiography is the tri-faith movement, most often described with reference to Will Herberg's aptly titled Protestant, Catholic, Jew. In Saving Faith, David Mislin links these two touchstone movements through a broader story about liberal Protestants and their emerging commitment to religious pluralism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mislin makes a compelling argument that advocacy for religious pluralism provided one way for liberal Protestants to navigate their doubts about the truth of Christianity and their anxieties about its future in the modern world. This is a novel interpretive move and a valuable corrective to the existing scholarship both on religious pluralism and on liberal Protestant engagements with modernity. The first two chapters of the book, one on the links between doubt and diversity and another documenting widespread Protestant enthusiasm for “world religions” beyond the Parliament, are especially convincing in this regard.

Unfortunately missing from Mislin's analysis, however, is any discussion of how this liberal Protestant ideal intersected with the politics of empire. While he acknowledges that his Protestant subjects continued to uphold the superiority of Christianity, he treats this in isolation, as an exclusively theological concern. He cites Tomoko Masuzawa's influential book, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), but does not speak to her argument, or that of David Chidester in Empire of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), that the discipline of comparative religions and world religions as a system of classification supported European and American claims to their own civilizational superiority and so helped rationalize their imperialism. Only a few years after the Columbian Exposition, which revealed the nation's rising imperial ambitions, the United States would emerge from the Spanish-Cuban-Philippine-American War with a newly global empire. The liberal Protestants discussed by Mislin were deeply invested in the era's debates for and against empire, and in my view their ideas about religious pluralism cannot be adequately understood in isolation from those debates.

The final two-thirds of the book, which deal with the development of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish interfaith cooperation and the emerging vision of America as a tri-faith nation, are in some respects disconnected from the first two chapters. Mislin notes that liberal Protestant interest in world religions declined in the early twentieth century, but offers no real explanation for why that may have been the case. He posits a stronger link between the world religions discourse and the rise of the tri-faith movement than he is ultimately able to demonstrate. Because Catholics and Jews were the only non-Protestants present in significant numbers on the ground, he argues, liberal Protestants cultivated new relationships with them and so began to live out their visions of interreligious cooperation against the threat of secularism and the rise of anti-religious ideologies around the world.

In the process, Mislin helpfully traces the beginnings of tri-faith organizing to the early decades of the twentieth century, far earlier than most of its historians have recognized. But his evidence, and my own reading of the primary sources, would suggest that the early collaborations among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews (which rarely involved all three groups) were unstable, driven more by practical exigencies, as in the debates over religion in the schools or the effort to provide religious and recreational facilities for servicemen in the First World War, than by a broader vision of interreligious harmony. In other words, I remain unconvinced that the liberal Protestant fad for world religions in the 1890s provided any significant impetus for the practical collaborations among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews that had already been happening but became more systematized through the organizational efficiencies and social reforms of the progressive era.

Toward the end of the book, Mislin suggests that liberal Protestant engagements with religious pluralism ultimately fostered a new interest in racial reform. This point, too, I find unconvincing. I argue to the contrary in my forthcoming book Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) that while liberal Protestants in the 1920s goodwill movement expressed equal concern for racial and religious brotherhood, the redefinition of that movement in tri-faith terms shifted its focus away from race and toward religion. As African American observers noted at the time, the tri-faith movement of the 1930s through the 1950s was almost exclusively white and gave little more than lip service to the cause of civil rights. Indeed, by legitimating Judaism and Catholicism as fully American religions, this movement arguably supported the racial redefinition of Jewish and Catholic immigrants as fully white. In so doing, it worked indirectly to solidify rather than to challenge the black-white racial binary in American life. While some white Protestants in the Federal Council of Churches and elsewhere were absolutely active in the cause of racial justice, it was African American civil rights leaders, rather than white Protestant interests in religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue, that pushed them to get involved. It was not until the mid-1950s, and the new cultural climate of the Cold War, that African American civil rights protests began to gain traction in the larger society. In short, I find the connections that Mislin posits between religious pluralism and racial justice both too linear and too easily drawn.

Despite these concerns, Saving Faith charts an innovative and useful history of liberal Protestant engagements with religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue. Mislin is surely correct in his core argument that these interests and involvements provided one way for his liberal Protestant subjects to navigate the crises of modernity, the challenges of secularism, and their own sense of increasing marginality in the larger society. This is a book I found very much worth wrestling with, a worthy addition to a growing literature on liberal Protestantism in the United States.