A comprehensive, balanced, and insightful review of the liberal American Protestant story.
The rise and fall of progressive American Protestant leadership.
Political science professor Compton provides a historical review of the role of social justice and reform within white Protestant churches in the U.S., noting that the importance of social issues through much of American history was especially related to the authority of church leaders and the strength of denominational and ecumenical organizations. However, as the author shows, after more than a century of such authority tying together the activities of American churches, these structures fell apart rapidly beginning in the turbulent 1960s, opening the way to a starkly different religious landscape in the modern U.S. Compton begins by exploring the unique American view—beginning with the Puritans—“that Americans were duty bound to remake society in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom”—a view that situated the concept of sin as communal in nature. From that view arose the Protestant movements against slavery and other social ills. Compton notes that in the 19th century, the power of progressive denominational authorities was joined by a social need for professionals to belong to established churches, a trend that sociologist Max Weber explored during the Progressive Era. Among the many high-water marks in the history of progressive Protestantism’s firm grip on the rudder of public affairs were temperance, suffrage, New Deal social programs, and the struggle for civil rights. Multifaceted changes in society, however, from the rise of Evangelicalism to the radicalism of Vietnam-era protests, led to the near collapse of once-mighty Protestant denominations and related ecumenical networks. As Compton chronicles, there followed the rise of the religious right and the increasing disregard for edicts from progressive church leadership, trends that seem to have found their apotheosis in the form of evangelical support for Donald Trump.
A comprehensive, balanced, and insightful review of the liberal American Protestant story.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-006918-6
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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