Matthew Hedstrom contributes to a growing body of recent work on American religious liberalism with his analysis of American Protestant book culture from the 1920s through the end of World War II. Focusing upon a range of literary campaigns conducted by liberal Protestant book clubs, and joined during World War II by joint publishing campaigns with Catholics and Jews, Hedstrom shows how an emerging book culture crafted a distinctive form of American popular religion that was geared toward a white, middle-class cultural center (what the author refers to as “middlebrow culture”). He shows how the desire of liberal Protestant leaders to forge a concerted campaign to promote religious literacy through books opened readers to a wider embrace of religious pluralism by the middle of the twentieth century. Increasingly this pluralism was defined not in terms of theological doctrines and beliefs. Rather “the most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology” (15). Ultimately, this religious quest through books opened new vistas of spirituality in the latter half of the twentieth century.

An assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia, Hedstrom builds upon a spate of recent scholarship arguing that liberal Protestants were far more influential in shaping religious and cultural worldviews than often given credit. Building upon arguments from Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), Hedstrom follows religious liberalism's impact beyond the parameters of churches and denominations. Beginning with an examination of religious book clubs in the 1920s, he discusses how these liberal Protestant endeavors lived in tension between a wish to preserve an older Protestant culture of privilege and a desire to capitalize upon a growing consumer demand for reading. Influenced by the insights on religious experience articulated in the early twentieth century by figures such as Rufus Jones and William James, the emerging movement of book publishers promoted religious literacy while increasingly exposing Americans to intellectual currents that moved beyond the exclusive domain of American Protestantism. While these initial efforts in the 1920s and 1930s were often rooted in a hope to promote a vision of America as a Protestant Christian nation, increasingly these book clubs exposed readers to a wide range of religious traditions. This pattern is especially evident in the author's discussion of Eugene Exman. The longtime religion editor at Harper & Brothers (including serving as Harry Emerson Fosdick's editor), Exman's expanding interest in Eastern religion helped foster a spate of works that both promoted the core values of liberal Protestantism while also fostering a growing interfaith consciousness.

By the time of World War II, these earlier Protestant reading clubs joined forces with Catholic and Jewish publishing interests to promote reading in both the American military and on the home front. These wartime ecumenical-interfaith campaigns helped forge a distinctive vision of American religion (what would become commonly known in the 1950s as “the Judeo-Christian heritage”). The war also set the stage for a boom in what later generations would call seeker religion, centered upon an interfaith ethos and, in particular, a desire to engage in personal forms of religious mysticism and the pursuit of physical and psychological wellbeing.

Hedstrom's analysis of three bestselling books published during and following the war, Harry Emerson Fosdick's On Being a Real Person (1943), Joshua Liebman's Peace of Mind (1946) and Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain (1948), accentuate the transformation of American religious values through reading. Far from being seen as a decline in liberal religion, the popularity of Fosdick, Liebman, and Merton (among others) not only demonstrates the interfaith nature of religious reading, but reveals how ordinary Americans were challenged to engage a range of intellectual ideas that crossed faith traditions. This middlebrow reading culture not only facilitated an intellectual exchange between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews but contributed to widening definitions of spirituality, “as psychological and mystical cosmopolitanism soon reached beyond the religions of the West to include Buddhist, Hindu, and other religious traditions. What critics have bemoaned as decline instead constituted a rising force in American religious life” (213).

In addition to the work of Leigh Eric Schmidt (a scholar who Hedstrom acknowledges his debt throughout the book), The Rise of Liberal Religion complements two other recent books on religious liberalism: David Hollinger's After Cloven Tongues of Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) and Elesha Coffman's The Christianity Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline also published by Oxford University Press in 2013. All three authors argue that liberal Protestantism's cultural impact went beyond denominational membership statistics. Yet Hedstrom's book allows one to understand that the so-called seeker culture of the late twentieth century (embodied by the slogan “I'm spiritual, not religious”) had deep-seated roots within early twentieth century liberal Protestant campaigns to promote religious literacy (as opposed to simply being an outcome of the 1960s, as many scholars argue). While scholars often caricature the immediate post-World War II religious context as an intellectually numbing era of “suburban captivity” and cultural assimilation, Hedstrom challenges readers to view the rise of liberal reading culture as a sophisticated and intellectually rigorous alternative to the social, cultural, and political chaos caused by that war and ultimately the Cold War.

The winner of the American Society of Church History's Brewer Prize for best first book, Hedstrom makes historians view liberal religion beyond institutional criteria of church or denominational growth and decline. Ironically, even as many conservative evangelicals have decried the inward-focused dimensions of liberal religion, the legacy continues to flourish even among religious conservatives. In a book like Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life, one hears within the language of evangelical Protestantism echoes of the liberal religious legacy discussed by Hedstrom. The Rise of Liberal Religion is a thoroughly researched and engaging monograph that should stimulate further scholarly exploration into the legacy of American religious liberalism.