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The Search for a Plural America: Protestant and Enlightenment Authority in American History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2016

Andrew Finstuen*
Affiliation:
Boise State University

Extract

A crisis of authority defines modernity. The crisis in the Christian West dates to the Reformation and the church-and-state conflicts based upon the question: whose Christianity? The crisis deepened during the Enlightenment as advances in science, reason, and technology changed the question: Christianity or not? By the 1960s, post-structuralism or postmodernity had posed the very question of authority and asserted competing authorities.

Type
Review Essay*
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2016 

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Footnotes

*

George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 264 pp. $26.99 hb.

References

1 Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 168-69.

2 Ibid., xxviii.

3 Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989) 4, 9, 144Google Scholar; Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 50.

4 Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) 5Google Scholar.

5 Grief, Mark, The Age of Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) 12, 316–30Google Scholar. Throughout this article, the non-inclusive male pronoun “man” appears. This is an exception to Harvard Theological Review’s preference for inclusive language. The exception granted here corresponds to Grief's title and usage as well as the immediate post-World War II context where the use of “man” predominated.

6 Ibid., 23.

7 Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xvi.

8 Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 316–30.

9 Ibid., 328.

10 The late John Patrick Diggins argued Niebuhr's legacy “continues to be misconstrued in the service of flawed political ends,” and he insisted that Niebuhr “was a realist because he was religious” (Diggins, John Patrick, Why Niebuhr Now? [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011] 5, 71)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xxvi, 118–22.

12 Hollinger, David, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) 213Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 220.

14 Ibid., 222.

15 Ibid., 223.

16 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and A Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944) 10Google Scholar.

17 Hollinger, Cloven Tongues, 39, chs. 8 and 9.

18 Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 149, 150; see also, 144–48.

19 Ibid., 165.

20 Ibid., xxix.

21 Ibid., 175; see also, Lovin, Robin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Hollinger, Cloven Tongues, 198.

23 Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Hollinger, Cloven Tongues, 170.

25 James Madison, Federalist #10, Constitution Society, accessed November 16, 2015, http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm.

26 Hollinger, Cloven Tongues, 14.

27 Ibid., ch. 9.

28 The realities and horrors of Leninism-Stalinism, Maoism, modern racism, eugenics, and exploitative capitalism come to mind.

29 Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright; New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) 129–56, 146Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., 155.

31 Clydesdale, Tim, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006) 8, 208Google Scholar.

33 Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 330.

34 Hollinger, Cloven Tongues, 2–3, 202.

35 Grief, The Age of The Crisis of Man, 262–263.

36 King, Martin Luther Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings And Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (ed. Washington, James M.; San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1986), 259267Google Scholar.