'Working out our own salvation': A history of liberal Protestant faith and religious practices, 1844--1893

In the last half century, historians interested in enduring forms of American spirituality have lost interest in liberal Protestant subjects. This decline in interest in liberal Protestant spirituality hit a new low in the 1970s and 1980s, when important intellectual and church historians implicated liberal Protestants in several different narratives of religious decline. Liberal Protestants were blamed for the secularization of higher education, the marginalization of theology in public discourse and the decline of the assumption that God exists. In short, liberal Protestants were too willing to compromise core Christian beliefs, too eager to reconcile the Church and the world, too sentimental to maintain more robust notions of human sin and divine punishment. In the last ten years, however, cultural historians have called into question these images of liberal Protestants and the meta-narratives of decline that have produced them. Historians like John McGreevy and Jon Butler have complained that this historical literature has obscured the religious lives and motivations of this once-powerful contingent of American Christians. The surprising result is that we "remain without a persuasive description of liberal Protestants as religious people.";My dissertation helps fill this gap in the literature by examining closely the faith and religious practices of liberal Protestant preachers and laypeople during the early period of liberal Protestantism (1844--1893). I argue that liberal Protestant spiritual traditions were more complex than historians have made them out to be---and that in particular historians who have linked them to secularization have not appreciated adequately how these liberals held together sacred and secular, church and world, nature and revelation. For in addition to embracing the secular they preserved Christ and Christian symbols; in addition to focusing on the subjective side of faith they posited an objective God; in addition to promoting self-realization they also insisted on responsibility, discipline and obedience to Christ. Their decisions on these matters did not follow a simple logic of decline; like Christians in all ages, they were both critical of and true to their tradition in different ways, working through tensions inherent in Christian theology---nature and grace, free will and determinism, faith and works---and the existential problems that confronted them as they struggled to gain and sustain Christian faith.