Liberals Rising, Part I: An Interview with Matthew Hedstrom
by Mark Edwards
Matthew Hedstrom can now add to his impeccable taste in sushi and gyros a book that deserves every bit of praise it has already received, The Rise of Liberal Religion (Oxford, Nov. 2012). It will no doubt become a standard-bearer in the cultural history of American spirituality. I recently “sat down” with Matt to discuss how Santa breaks in to houses that don’t have chimneys, but he insisted on talking about his book and the state of the field instead.
Matthew Hedstrom can now add to his impeccable taste in sushi and gyros a book that deserves every bit of praise it has already received, The Rise of Liberal Religion (Oxford, Nov. 2012). It will no doubt become a standard-bearer in the cultural history of American spirituality. I recently “sat down” with Matt to discuss how Santa breaks in to houses that don’t have chimneys, but he insisted on talking about his book and the state of the field instead.
1. Mark Edwards (ME):
Why would anyone choose to study religious liberals in our
conservative times? What drew you to this general topic?
Matt Hedstrom (MH):
Ah, but that’s the thing – we don’t live in conservative times, at least when
it comes to the actual religious beliefs and practices of most Americans. I
have been taken by the idea of the “cultural victory” of liberal Protestantism,
a thesis first advanced by the sociologist Jay Demareth in the mid-1990s and
re-worked by Christian Smith and David Hollinger more recently. Smith has
studied the religious lives of young adults, while Hollinger writes about the
broader mid-century cultural and political impact of what he calls “ecumenical
Protestantism,” but both make the same larger point: we need to get outside of
church if we want to really understand American religion. This is something
that folks who study American Catholicism and Judaism have long understood, but
oddly it’s taken a while to apply these same insights to American
Protestantism, especially liberal Protestantism.
The other challenge here is the simplistic equation of
religious liberalism with liberal Protestantism. I think liberal Protestantism
has had tremendous cultural impact in the 20th and 21st centuries, but much of
that impact, ironically, has been beyond Protestantism itself, both in other
traditions and in the phenomenon of spirituality.
2. ME: I think there
used to be an assumption, perhaps still is, that everything that could be said
about liberal Protestants had already been said. How do you see your work
departing from previous studies of liberal Protestantism?
MH: Culture.
Previous studies focused, for the most part, on churches and the intellectual
life of leading seminaries, or on the politics of the Social Gospel. This is
important work, and I think we are poised for a serious reconsideration of
institutional liberal Protestantism. Your work does this, as does Elesha
Coffman’s forthcoming The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (Oxford, May 2013), and others. But I wanted
to connect the work of churches, preachers, the Federal Council of Churches and
similar organizations to developments in other arenas of culture, and to
religious phenomena that don’t happen inside churches. When I found what I
thought were some cool sources in book history, I was hooked. I guess that’s
the American Studies in me.
3. ME: Your study
reminded me of an old joke: Q—What’s a Methodist? A—A Baptist who can read. Why
focus on liberal Protestant book culture? Do you think that religious liberals,
more so than their conservative counterparts who began channel-surfing for
Jesus after World War I, were a peculiar people of the books? Did that narrow
focus in part explain why liberals appear to have been left behind by Billy
Graham’s techno-evangelicals?
MH: I decided to
study books because it helped me get at the questions that most interest me. In
particular, I wanted a way to study the mechanisms of culture. How did the
religious sensibilities of a late-nineteenth century avant-garde—think of someone
like William James—enter the middle class?
Well, if you are interested in the mechanisms of culture,
and you study the twentieth-century United States, you have to study media and
markets. These are the most powerful forces in American cultural life. I try to
make the case that books were a critically important—perhaps the most
important—religious commodity of the twentieth century, certainly by the 1920s.
In that decade liberals finally and fully abandoned their traditional concerns
about the corruptions of the market, and began to market religious book like
soap or any other commodity for the first time.
Regarding religious liberals as people of the book: I do
think in some ways this is a story that applies particularly to liberals. First
of all, in the mid-twentieth century liberals had much more cultural power than
conservatives. There really is something to this notion of a liberal
establishment. The folks who ran the major trade publishing houses, or sat on
the religious books committee of the American Library Association, or
coordinated Religious Book Week in the 1920s, or organized the reading programs
during World War II—these were liberals, and that kind of cultural power
matters.
I tell the story in the book of a librarian from Newark, New
Jersey, who came to the American Library Association meeting in 1919 for help,
because so many patrons were coming to her asking for religious books after
attending a Billy Sunday revival. After a few years of study the ALA began to
issue lists of recommended religious books for public libraries, and at the top
of the list were books by Harry Emerson Fosdick. Cultural power matters.
And that’s why I don’t think it makes sense to say that
liberals were left behind by the techo-evangelicals. Fundamentalists and
neo-evangelicals organized to get on radio and television for the same reasons
evangelicals have always embraced new media—to spread the gospel—but in the
mid-century this drive often had a defensive cast. Liberals controlled
mainstream media and publishing, and the conservatives recognized, rightly I
think, that they were losing the battle over culture.
Part II tomorrow!
Comments