How did a small group of theologically and politically liberal Protestants maintain authority for much of the twentieth century over churchgoers who were largely unreceptive to their ideas and their politics? Elesha J. Coffman's book sheds much needed light on this curious feature of American history by investigating liberal Protestantism's flagship journal from 1884 to 1960. According to Coffman, liberal Protestants gained their prestige from their education at doctoral programmes in leading seminaries, where they encountered a world of ideas that transformed their childhood faiths. Some, like the Century editor Charles Clayton Morrison, maintained close ties to seminaries and ecumenical organisations, while others became pastors in small towns where their congregations were sceptical of their theological liberalism. As Coffman illustrates, for these isolated pastors ‘the Century constituted the only link to the kinds of people and conversations they had found so stimulating in college and seminary’ (p. 96). This educational and theological gap between the clergy and the laity is at the heart of Coffman's narrative. The ‘mainline’ – a term that did not gain currency until the 1960s – was an imagined community whose success was ‘measured in prestige rather than popularity, conferred by other cultural elites rather than by the masses’ (p. 7). Coffman expertly locates the Century amid a heterogeneous Protestantism but says little about the mainline's relationships with cultural elites outside of Christianity and with ecumenical institutions that the journal worked hard to promote. Coffman highlights several political campaigns waged by the journal in the 1920s and 1930s, like prohibition and the outlawry of war, but her focus remains on the challenges faced by the Century. Among the first was the break with Reinhold Niebuhr, who criticised Morrison's pacifism in the late 1930s and launched a rival journal in 1941. Whereas the tension with Niebuhr died down after the Second World War, the rise of secularism and evangelicalism during these years proved to be more persistent threats to the Century's authority. In the 1950s the aging Morrison was increasingly critical of secular culture and he attacked his former mentor John Dewey. The Century was even more panicked by Billy Graham's New York City revivals, which the editors saw as a threat to their liberal theology; they responded with a barrage of accusatory editorials. The fragility of the mainline was further revealed when the Graham-backed journal Christianity Today launched in 1956 with more paid subscriptions than the Century. Amid these setbacks it appeared that the Century was being abandoned by its constituency. Most readers backed Graham, ‘revealing a disconnect between the magazine's editorial position and its audience’ (p. 189). Coffman's account of the ‘Rise of the Protestant mainline’ provides useful parallels between the history of the Century and the fate of liberal Protestantism more generally, although its explanatory power is limited by the focus on the journal's staff and its readership. The book's major contribution is its sustained focus on the fragility of the Century's cultural and political authority.