Rethinking the Protestant Left

Last year a top journal in my field, American Religions, invited me to join a symposium called Back Pages: the Present in Retrospect. This gathered an impressive set of established scholars to reflect briefly on what we had tried to accomplish with our first books, three or four decades ago, and what we would say about them now. Today I write to link my essay here—partly to invite readers who missed it to check it out and partly to sync it up with other things on this site.

My first book, Building a Protestant Left, dealt with many issues of evergreen importance—essentially the key trends in left-liberal Protestant social thought and activism from the 1940s into the 1980s—while offering context (I would say fascinating context!) and suggesting framing (I would say highly useful framing!) for understanding current developments and controversies in this arena.

At the same time, most younger scholars have more-or-less forgotten about this book if they ever read it in the first place. There are plenty of things about this whole situation to second-guess. In this light, I was thrilled to join the symposium and now I invite you to join it too.

I won't post the whole piece, also entitled "Rethinking the Protestant Left." You can click here for an open-access version. For a teaser, this is how it starts:

Of course things are far worse today, but when I began my Ph.D. work in 1988, the academic job market was already terrible and universities were already under sustained attack. I knew I was unlikely to find a tenure-track job unless I entered a top program and studied a reasonably trendy topic. However, I wanted to stay on my home ground in Minneapolis, and I had funding to do so in the American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. I had discovered that David Noble who with George Lipsitz then anchored Minnesota’s program, was an ideal mentor for me. If I couldn’t count on a job in any case, why not set my course there?

My dissertation topic was rooted in a matrix of activism and cultural critique on the Christian left—which however counter-intuitive this sounds amid assumptions about liberal Protestant decline after 1970, was at a high tide in the 1980s. I thought that, if necessary, I might leverage my studies into a career amid this matrix. I had not yet registered how much success neoconservatives would soon have in crippling it. They pursued many of the goals that the Trump coalition does today, although in these years they did not favor such overtly thuggish tactics that barely even make a pretense of intellectual honesty. 

Meanwhile I wanted to understand where this matrix had come from....

Now we skip over a few paragraphs that I hope you will go over to American Religions and read. It's not very long. The even shorter summary is that to pursue such understanding, I studied transformations in a magazine called Christianity and Crisis, or C&C. This work turn ramified in various ways worth revisiting, some good and some bad.

Here's how I ended:

But it is too late for a do-over. I thank the editors for inviting these reflections, and I invite younger readers to take a look and see if there is anything there for them. Few of the issues that C&C addressed have gone away. Nor have people in left Christian traditions disappeared. (Yes, they are a minority, but we often underestimate how much that has always been true). We can learn from their experience in the current moment.