LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM: REALITIES AND POSSIBILITIES
Robert S. Michaelson and Wade Clark Roof, editors
The Pilgrim Press, 1986
$11.95, paperback
Robert S. Michaelson and Wade Clark Roof are the editors for this collection of fifteen scholarly essays that together evaluate the current status and future prospects of "liberal," "mainline," or "old-line" Protestantism. Once the dominant school of Christian thought and practice in the United States, liberal Protestantism has lost its prominence and popularity in recent years in the wake of a resurgence of "conservative" Protestantism. The contributors are professors and doctoral students or religion, history, and sociology. They identify themselves as Protestant liberals and share a view of theology that stresses “freedom, liberation from earthly authoritarianism, closed systems, [and] the ultimate authority whose way is dynamically disclosed in and through the Bible."
Normally, such collections are full of "in-house" academic jargon, so much so that their appeal is limited, meriting review only in the appropriate professional society journals. Liberal Protestantism, however, avoids the pitfalls of the academic journal and provides the reader with accurate, concise, comprehensible, and thorough analyses of the issues that confront liberal Protestantism. The essays are arranged thematically. None seems out of place or irrelevant, and the writers are not reluctant to make bold value judgments. The authors give us the empirical data that we would require of "objective scholarship," but they also interpret the date from the perspective of their own disciplines and from their personal life experience as liberal Protestants. Written for a symposium held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the spring of 1985, and funded by the Lilly Endowment, the essays are conversational in style and appeal to an interested general reader.
The Contemporary Setting
The book is divided into four sections. All of these articles are identified, discussed briefly, and placed in context within the excellent introduction to Liberal Protestantism by the work’s editors, Robert S. Michaelson and Wade Clark Roof. The first group of essays contains articles by Peter L. Berger, William McKinney and Wade Clark Roof, Phillip E. Hammond, and William R. Hutchison and focuses on the current shape and social context of Protestant liberalism in America.
Berger discusses the position of liberalism in the wake of the resurgence of Protestant conservatism, reminding us that the United States is the least secularized for all developed Western nations, and that conservatism in America is nothing new. What is new, however, is the fact that conservative Protestants have become upwardly mobile in recent years, and in the process their conservatism has taken on the same "sophisticated" style that marked liberalism in the 1960s. Although the influential liberals are gathered mainly in the bastions of "elite" culture (such as New York City, Cambridge, and Berkeley) and within the leadership of the contemporary Protestant denominations, and although their numbers are relatively small, they have been very effective in imposing their values on the rest of society through the educational system, the media, and the
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