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Matthew Bowman explores the world of a neglected group of American Christians: the self-identified liberal evangelicals who began in late nineteenth-century New York to reconcile traditional evangelical spirituality with progressive views on social activism and theological questions. These evangelicals emphasized the importance of supernatural conversion experience, but also argued that scientific advances, new movements in art, and the decline in poverty created by a new industrial economy could facilitate encounters with Christ. The Urban Pulpit chronicles the struggle of liberal evangelicals against conservative Protestants who questioned their theological sincerity and against secular reformers who grew increasingly devoted to the cause of cultural pluralism and increasingly suspicious of evangelicals over the course of the twentieth century. Liberal evangelicals walked a difficult path, facing increasing polarization in twentieth-century American public life; both conservative evangelicals and secular reformers insisted that religion and science were necessarily at odds and that evangelical Christianity was incompatible with cultural diversity. Liberal evangelicals rejected these simple dichotomies, but nonetheless found it increasingly difficult to defend their middle way. Drawing on history, anthropology, and religious studies, Bowman paints a complex portrait of these understudied Christians at work, at worship, and engaged in advocacy in the public square.
"American exceptionalism" was once a rather obscure and academic concept, but in the 2012 presidential election campaign the phrase attained unprecedented significance in political rhetoric. President Obama’s conservative critics—most notably Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney—accused the president of disbelieving in American exceptionalism and thereby offending the nation’s civil religion. This creed traditionally has included the notion that America is a political "new Israel" called by God and guided by His Providence to be the exemplar, vanguard, and champion of liberal democracy and the free market for all humanity. The newly politicized narrative of exceptionalism portrayed Obama as a president embarrassed by his own country and intent on remaking the United States in the image of the secularist and socialist countries of Europe. This book takes a step back from the partisan rhetorical bluster and examines afresh the historical and analytical meanings of American exceptionalism, and the extent to which religion—both "real" religion and the more ambiguous "civil" religion—has shaped these meanings and their uses/abuses. This book was published as a special issue of The Review of Faith and International Affairs.