Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 36, 194– 95. 2. Ibid., 10– 11, 19, 41, 113, 195. 3. James Luther Adams, “What Kind of Religion Has a Place in Higher Education?” Journal of the Bible and Religion 13 (Nov. 1945): 184; John Coleman Bennett, “Implications of the New Conception of ‘Separa- tion,’” Christianity and Crisis 8 (July 5, 1948): 89– 90. On the NCC slo- gan, see Michele Rosenthal, American Protestants and TV in the 1950s: Responses to a New Medium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 39. 4. David Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protes- tants and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History 198 (June 2011): 21– 48; D. G. Hart, “Mainstream Protestantism, ‘Conservative’ Religion, and Civil Society,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, eds. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 203; E. Stanley Jones, A Song of Ascents: A Spiritual Auto- biography (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968), 152. Jones in 1968 was recalling his similar wording from his World War II book Is the Kingdom of God Realism? (Nashville: Abingdon- Cokesbury, 1940), 263. 5. Participatory democracy has been defined in the abstract as “a system of government where rank-and- file citizens rule themselves.” In con- trast to representative, majoritarian, and pluralist (i.e., interest group) forms of democracy, participatory democracy is often considered practi- cal and desirable only on small social scales such as the neighborhood. In that light, it has more in common with contemporary communitari- anism than with Western liberalism, which focuses more on individual than group freedom from political and economic controls. See Ken- neth Janda, Jeffrey M. Berry, Jerry Goldman, Challenge of Democracy: American Government in a Global World, 10th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2009), Chapter 2. The label “participatory democracy” itself was popu- larized by the student New Left during the 1960s and referred to efforts to empower minorities, the poor, and other marginalized groups. How- ever, as explored in Chapter 1, historians have located participatory democratic concepts in the Progressive era. This work identifies other moments and formulations of participatory democracy between 1920 and 1960. 190 Notes 6. I am indebted to one of Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers for the word “countertotalitarianism.” 7. John Coleman Bennett, “The Christian Response to Social Revolution,” Ecumenical Review 9 (Oct. 1956): 1– 15. 8. For two classic introductions to the Old Left, see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti- Stalinist Left from the 1920s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 9. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 230. Geertz defines cultural ideologies as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience.” Geertz would suggest that cultural ideologies are essen- tial tools by which all persons and groups make sense of reality. Yet he also sees times of crisis or substantial sociostructural change as especially generative of new, competing cultural ideologies—which betrays their fundamentally conservative nature. Geertz’s notion has largely been superseded in present- day intellectual and cultural history by attention to “discourse,” defined as “a linguistic unity or group of statements which constitutes and delimits a specific area of concern, governed by its own rules of formation with its own modes of distinguishing truth from falsity.” See Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 300. To be sure, cultural ideologies can easily take on the disciplinary functions of discourses. The primary difference between the two concepts is that people make cultural ideologies, while discourses make people. 10. See Elesha Coffman, “The Measure of a Magazine: Assessing the Influ- ence of the Christian Century,” Religion and American Culture (forth- coming). This article is based on Coffman’s dissertation, “Constituting the Protestant Mainline: The Christian Century, 1908– 1947” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008). 11. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in Amer- ica (New York: Dial, 1970). I use the term mainline to refer to the 33 denominations that composed the FCC membership after 1908. See William R. Hutchison, “Protestantism as Establishment,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900– 1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3–18. For surveys of liberal Protestantism, see especially Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Pro- gressive Religion, 1805– 1900 (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001); and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992). 12. A relevant list of studies on Progressivism and the social gospel will be found throughout the notes section of Chapter 1. Notes for Introduction 191 13. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 288– 312; Joseph C. Hough Jr., “The Loss of Optimism as a Problem for Liberal Christian Faith,” in Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities, eds. Robert S. Michaelsen and Wade Clark Roof (New York: Pilgrim, 1986), 145– 66. For other stud- ies linking American Christian Realism to European Neoorthodoxy, see Sydney A. Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought since World War I,” Church History 27 (Sept. 1958): 256– 72; and Gary J. Dorrien, The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theol- ogy (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 71– 72. Early studies of Christian Realism did not restrict the term so narrowly to Niebuhr. One of the first and most influential to do so was Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919– 1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 14. See Heather A. Warren’s Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920– 1948 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1997). See also Eric Patterson, ed., The Christian Realists: Reassessing the Contributions of Niebuhr and His Contemporaries (Lan- ham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003), an attempt by current professing Realists to recover other members from their formative years. For one early attempt to define Realism broadly in an American context, see George Hammar, Christian Realism in Contemporary American The- ology: A Study of Reinhold Niebuhr, W. M. Horton, and H. P. Van Dusen (Uppsala, Sweden: Appelbergs Boktryckeriaktiebolag, 1940). 15. See discussions of the term in Walter Marshall Horton, Realistic Theology (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934). 16. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire,” 45. 17. David R. Bains, “The Liturgical Impulse in Mid- Twentieth- Century Mainline American Protestantism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, Study of Religion, 1999). 18. Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity- Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lasch, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 25–44. See, on Ellul’s phrase, Randal Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (New York: Broadview, 2002), 34. 19. See John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now? (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011). 20. See Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: Uni- versity of Michigan, 1991). 21. The “Christian totalitarianism” reference is quoted from Keith Clements, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J. H. Oldham (Geneva: WCC, 1999), 368. On the Christendom Group, see Philip M. Coupland, “‘National Renewal’ and Anglican Peace Aims, 1939– 1945” (unpublished address, University of Winchester, April 18, 2011 [paper in author’s possession]). Coupland’s address is part of a larger forthcoming book chapter. On the 192 Notes “Christendom narrative,” see Philip M. Coupland, Britannia, Europa, and Christendom: British Christians and European Integration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 22. “The General Meetings,” in The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches: The Official Report, ed. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft (London, SCM, 1949), 37; Henry Pitney Van Dusen, “A Fifty-Year Conspectus,” Report to Board of Trustees, Oct. 25, 1960, 7, in Presidential Papers, The Burke Library Archives at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (hereafter PP), Box 18. 23. Ronald D. Rotunda, “The ‘Liberal’ Label: Roosevelt’s Capture of a Sym- bol,” Public Policy 17 (1968): 377– 408; Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review (1994), reprinted in The Progressive Era in the USA, 1980– 1921, ed. Kristofer Allerfeldt (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007), 109–39; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harvest, 1991), 285. 24. Leo P. Ribuffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservativism in the US and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?” American Histori- cal Review 99 (1994): 439– 41; Clinton Rossiter, Conservativism in Amer- ica: The Thankless Persuasion, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1962), 24, 33, 40– 42, 47–