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The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century

Online ISBN:
9780199979141
Print ISBN:
9780195374490
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century

Matthew S. Hedstrom
Matthew S. Hedstrom

Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies

University of Virginia
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Published online:
24 January 2013
Published in print:
23 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780199979141
Print ISBN:
9780195374490
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, this book contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise. Most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals instead a story of “cultural victory.” The defining features of religious liberalism—its cosmopolitanism; its engagement with the latest historical and scientific thought; its ethics; its focus on psychology, mysticism, and individual religious experience—arose among a spiritual vanguard in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, but by the middle decades of the twentieth century had become commonplace among the American middle class. This book tells how that happened. This book attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture—particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century—as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, this book provides an on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-World War II period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. The conclusion relates these trends to the religious transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, and on into the twenty-first century.

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