The story is by now familiar: after dominating the American religious landscape, the hegemony of the mainline Protestant churches began to wane in the 1960s and then deteriorated rapidly in the decades that followed. Replacing them were conservative churches of what came to be called either the Christian Right or the Religious Right. The split in Protestantism that first surfaced between modernists and fundamentalists a century ago has now more or less played itself out. The modernists did not fare well.

But reports of the death of the mainline are clearly exaggerated. At least, that seems to be the case in the historiography of American religion, which is witnessing a surge on works on white, liberal, modernist, ecumenical Protestants in the twentieth century. Even if the major liberal churches have never recovered their influence, the mainline has never been more interesting to historians.

With The Right of the Protestant Left, Mark Thomas Edwards joins a growing list of scholarship on how liberal white Protestants helped shaped American politics and foreign relations in the first half of the twentieth century. His focus is on Christian realists, a diverse and disputatious group usually overshadowed by, and often even conflated with, the towering figure of Reinhold Niebuhr. Edwards does not want to add to the growing field of Niebuhr studies, though as he admits the great man is impossible to ignore. Instead, Edwards seeks to recapture the political ideology of those establishment clergy who led the Christian realist movement, and mainline Protestantism more broadly, from the 1930s to the 1950s. In doing so, he provides a highly original interpretation of twentieth-century religious history. Authoritative in tone and persuasive in its conclusions, The Right of the Protestant Left will be an important and influential book.

Edwards's argument is nuanced and complex, but it can be essentially boiled down to three propositions: first, members of the old Protestant left marked a continuation of the Social Gospel movement into the 1930s and beyond, long past the point (c.1920) when most historians have declared its death; second, they sought world order, particularly after 1945, through a global ecumenism that would be led by American Protestants working with their government; and third, and most innovatively, they had much more in common with traditionalist conservatives than has been previously recognized. Motivating all three concerns was the emergence of industrial authoritarianism. Industrialization everywhere undermined the moral bases of society and, through its dehumanizing power structures and reliance on machines and bureaucracies, threatened to destroy the dignity of the individual. The subsequent rise of communism, fascism, and National Socialism imperiled not only democracy but Christianity itself by elevating the state above all else as an object of human veneration. It now seemed possible that everything liberal Protestants stood for would be smashed against the combined forces of industrialism and authoritarianism.

Their solution was to fight fire with fire, and here's where Edwards's subtitle, God's Totalitarianism, comes in. To counter the totalitarianisms threatening Christian civilization, they offered one of their own. Coined by the mainline missionary leader E. Stanley Jones, “God's totalitarianism” was intended to be a worldwide rival to industrial authoritarianism and materialism, a vision that both understood the realities of power and yet would redeem humanity and save it from evil. This leads Edwards to apply labels to the Christian realists (and mainline Protestantism more generally) that seem counterintuitive, such as “evangelical” and “catholic.” As Edwards puts it, “Christian Realism cannot be separated from the development of liberal evangelical transnationalism. Nor can it be understood except as a collaborative Christian response to the rise of totalitarian forms of nationalism. The old ecumenical Protestant left labored to conserve conventional social formations of family and neighborhood against dehumanizing power structures” (9). The irony, Edwards concludes, is that this vision propagated by tolerant liberals simply attempted to create a hegemonic power structure of its own.

It would be difficult to overstate the originality of this thesis. As a group, and particularly Niebuhr as an individual, Christian realists have received ample scholarly attention, and Niebuhr has become an object of fascination for pundits on both the left (Andrew Bacevich) and the right (David Brooks). Even Barack Obama has singled Niebuhr out for special praise. What more is there to say? Plenty, it turns out.

Edwards is especially keen to break the link between Niebuhr and neoconservatism that commentators—including many neocons themselves, such as Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama—have recently forged. Michael Novak even claimed Niebuhr as the “father of neoconservatives.” Edwards rightly dismisses these “questionable associations” as “nonsensical at best” (15), and his task in doing so is not especially difficult given that a repudiated Marxist past and the identification of evil as an indelible presence in the world are about the only things Niebuhr's thought shares with the neocons. But Edwards does more than a simple demolition job. Instead, he observes that Niebuhr and Christian realists had much in common with classical liberalism. In other words, they believed in a type of conservatism that had more in common with traditionalist, Burkean notions of organic change than with more radical variants of socialism or libertarianism or populist conservatism. This is demonstrated effectively, though it does not necessarily mean that the Christian realists were themselves Burkean conservatives. They were, rather, American liberals through and through, as their positions on civil rights and political economy showed—even if they lingered in the moderate margins of liberalism's rightward edge.