The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century
The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century
Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies
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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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Front Matter
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Introduction
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1
1 Enlarging the Faith Books and the Marketing of Liberal Religion in a Consumer Culture
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2
2 The Religious Book Club: Middlebrow Culture and Liberal Protestant Seeker Spirituality
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3
3 Publishing for Seekers: Eugene Exman and the Religious Bestsellers of Harper & Brothers
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4
4 Religious Reading Mobilized: The Book Programs of World War II
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5
5 Inventing Interfaith: The Wartime Reading Campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews
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6 Religious Reading in the Wake of War: American Spirituality in the 1940s
- Conclusion
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End Matter
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