After Cloven Tongues of Fire

Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity

Bibliographic Data

ID5706384
AuthorsDavid A Hollinger (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume98
Issue1
Pages21-48
Publication date2011-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jar155
OpenAlexW2320277428
LanguageEN
Citations received23

The life of human beings today “is cast in a multicultural context,” wrote the great comparativist Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1960. “Every community on earth is becoming a minority in a complexity of diverse groups,” he continued. In this “age of minorities,” no particular “we” can any longer credibly claim superiority to any “they.” The most defensible solidarity is now “humanity itself,” insisted Smith, who then identified Christians, capitalists, communists, and Muslims as prominent minorities slow to recognize their true status. It was especially important, he asserted, to get the truth across to white people and “Westerners” who “seem almost incapable of adjusting themselves to a new world” in which they, too, are minorities. For Smith, the recognition of the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.1 These ideas resonate well with the multicultural initiatives of the 1990s and even more resoundingly with the whites-are-a-minority exclamations of the 2000s. That these observations were offered with such urgency in 1960 in the pages of Christian Century and by one of the period's most respected ecumenical Protestants can flag for us the role that ecumenical Protestants played in diminishing Anglo-Protestant prejudice and embracing the varieties of humankind. Recognizing this role can lead us, in turn, to an understanding of the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs. Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists. Appreciating the significance of this Protestant dialectic, within which the two great rivals for control of the symbolic capital of Christianity defined themselves in terms of each other, can yield a more comprehensive and accurate account of the place in modern American history of the so-called Protestant Establishment.2 We now have an extensive and increasingly helpful literature on evangelical Protestantism in the twentieth century, but studies of ecumenical Protestantism remain fewer in number, narrower in scope, and lower in professional visibility

Context (archaeology · Diversity (politics · Faith · Humanity · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term · Protestantism · Sociology · Solidarity · Theology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies