Dissent as Mainline

Abstract

This chapter examines how shifts in ideas, culture, and politics reconfigured dissenter Protestantism in twentieth-century North America. The first of these shifts, the rise of modernist ideas, divided dissenter Protestants into strict biblicists and more intellectually inclusive ‘liberals,’ which set mainline denominations on a path to theological pluralism and institutional stagnation. The second, the rise of consumer capitalism, pulled these two Protestant streams away from a shared social vision of ‘Christian civilization’ and toward consumer individualism in the forms of therapeutic, prosperity-driven theologies and consumer models of outreach. The third, the expansion of the liberal pluralist state, threatened American Protestantism’s privileged cultural status, set mainline advocates of pluralism against evangelical defenders of ‘Christian America,’ and restructured the ways dissenter Protestants engaged society. By the close of the twentieth century, these changes had propelled the demographic and cultural assent of evangelical organizations over older Protestant denominations, making them the new ‘mainline.’