Overview:
The Protestantism that began in the Reformation came a long way in England's Atlantic colonies and then in the United States. The sixteenth-century reformers preached a religion of prophetic protest based on the principles of scripture alone, justification by grace through faith, the priesthood of all believers, and a fellowship of common worshipers. These teachings of the Reformation brought into being a series of churches in which a subtle individualism combined with a new interest in the preaching of the Word and a call for moral action in the world. As Protestant church buildings became simpler and more austere pulpits more prominent in their sanctuaries, they expressed a cultus and a code that led out of the churches and into public life. Paradoxically, the spirit of Protestantism separated extraordinary from ordinary religion in its emphasis on the gap between God and the material world. But it brought them together in another way in its insistence on a thisworldly ethic.
In England the spirit of Protestantism was reflected in the Church of England and in the many strands of the religious movement called Puritanism. With its Calvinist leanings, Puritanism fostered a spirit of still greater reform and promoted the establishment of English colonies in North America. New England and (in the loose sense) Virginia were both settled by Puritans, and so was Quaker Pennsylvania. Gradually, other Protestant peoples, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, and the Dutch among them, became part of colonial society.
In the context of all that had gone before, the American liberal tradition grew slowly. The colonists accepted pluralism for practical reasons, but tolerance of manyness gradually came to be seen as advantageous. Moreover, religious freedom--importnat for dissenters who sought purity of faith--promoted the growth of more and more groups. For many, Calvinism was gradually modified by Arminian ideas, while rationalism, moralism, and--by the time of the Revolution--even deism became discernible themes in Protestant religion.
After the Revolutionary War and a period of concern regarding church membership, Protestant churches thrived, restructuring in light of the new needs of the times. For many, such as Congregationalists and Presbyterians in their Plan of Union, an early liberalism meant accepting the value of cooperation. For others, a more intellectual agenda governed a move toward liberalism. In urban eastern Massachusetts, late-eighteenth-century liberal Christians became nineteenth-century Unitarians, while their rural relatives turned to Universalism. By the late 1830s a new generation of Unitarians had begun to teach the liberal doctrines of Transcendentalism and, in many cases, to work for reform of church and world. And by midcentury other Protestant Christians were inspired by a Christian Romanticism that had its most articulate American spokesperson in Horace Bushnell.
In the Civil War era, increasing pluralism meant that earlier liberal themes of breadth and tolerance were repeated but emphasized. However, the post-Civil War period and early twentieth century brought greater challenges to Protestantism from a rapidly changing American society. In general, Protestants either affirmed culture, as in popular evangelical liberalism, the Gospel of Wealth, a related New Thought Christianity, and a more intellectual modernism. Or they partially withdrew from the culture and rejected liberal doctrine, as in fundamentalism and the holiness-pentecostal movement. Or, finally, they sought to transform cutlure, as in Social Gospel activism.
By the late twentieth century, liberalism and conservatism seemed permanent within Protestant life. On their side, liberal Protestants responded to the needs they saw with renewed efforts at interdenominational cooperation and with involvement in the ecumenical movement. Meanwhile, they transformed teh older Social Gospel to address issues such as the civil rights of African Americans. But the inherited Social Gospel liber consensus fell away in mainstream denominations when questions regarding sexual orientation, especially for ministers, and appropriate gendered theologies and roles for women came to the fore. Beyond these concerns, the question remained for Protestants whether the success of their version of liberalism had changed it too much into the ordinary religion of present-day American culture.
In the language of the text, boundary questions plagued liberal Protestantism.
Conservatives flourised partly because the liberal gospel became less and
less clear about what separated Christians from other people of goodwill.
More numerous than liberals--and in the late twentieth century more vigorous
than they--evangelical Protestants throughout American history responded
t the times out of their own reading of the gospel Word. It turned out that,
read by a less liberal set of Protestants, the gospel Word said different
things, or at least said them in different ways and underlined a different
list of priorities. As we will see, in an understanding different from the
liberal sense of the term, what the gospel Word said to evangelicals most
of all was mission.
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