Bibliographic Details
Author: David A. Hollinger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2022
Series: Politics and Society in Modern America
Pages: 328
Thesis Statement
David A. Hollinger argues that the progressive political tradition in the United States between 1900 and 1945 was not a secular project born of pragmatism and social science alone, but rather a deeply religious enterprise whose architects—from Walter Rauschenbusch and Jane Addams to Reinhold Niebuhr and Dorothy Day—drew upon dissenting Protestant, Catholic social teaching, and Jewish prophetic traditions to construct a vision of social democracy. Hollinger contends that the decline of this religiously grounded progressivism after 1945, and its replacement by a secular liberalism shorn of prophetic voice, helps explain the political fragmentation of the later twentieth century and the enduring difficulty American reformers face in articulating a moral case for collective action. The book thus reframes the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the road to World War II as a single arc of religiously inspired reform, and it challenges the standard secularization narrative that dominates histories of American politics in this period.
Summary
Hollinger opens by surveying the crisis of American Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Social Gospel movement, led by figures such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, sought to apply Christian ethics to the brutal realities of industrial capitalism. He shows how this movement provided the moral vocabulary for early progressive reforms: settlement houses, child labor laws, the regulation of trusts, and the campaign for women’s suffrage. The book then turns to the diverse religious sources of progressive politics—Catholic social teaching exemplified by Monsignor John A. Ryan, Jewish labor activism on the Lower East Side, and the Black church’s role in early civil rights organizing. Hollinger argues that these streams converged in the Progressive Party of 1912 and, later, in the coalition that produced the New Deal.
A central section examines the 1920s as a period of religious and political reaction, when fundamentalism, the Ku Klux Klan, and business conservatism attacked the Social Gospel as un-American. Hollinger contends that the Scopes Trial and the immigration restriction acts of 1924 were not merely cultural skirmishes but part of a sustained assault on the religious left’s vision of a cooperative commonwealth. The Great Depression revived prophetic religion, as Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, and the labor priests of the Congress of Industrial Organizations gave theological weight to demands for economic justice. The New Deal, in Hollinger’s reading, was a coalition of secular planners and religious activists whose alliance was always uneasy but remarkably productive.
Hollinger then traces the fracturing of this coalition during World War II and its immediate aftermath. The war effort, he argues, subordinated social reform to military victory and gave rise to a national security state that marginalized prophetic critiques. The Cold War further narrowed the space for religiously inspired social democracy, as anticommunism purged the left and mainline Protestantism retreated into a privatized faith. By 1945, the religious left that had animated progressive politics for nearly half a century was in disarray, a development that Hollinger sees as a turning point in American political history. He concludes with reflections on what the religious roots of progressivism might still offer contemporary reformers, arguing that a politics without moral grounding is a politics without staying power.
Throughout, Hollinger is attentive to race and gender, showing how Black church leaders and women reformers often led while white male clergy followed, and how the religious left’s failure to fully confront white supremacy limited its political reach. The book is based on extensive archival research in denominational records, personal papers, and periodicals, and it engages deeply with the historiography of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and American religion.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Introduction: The Prophetic Strain in American Politics – Hollinger defines prophetic religion and argues for its centrality to progressive reform, distinguishing it from both secular liberalism and conservative evangelicalism.
- Chapter 1: The Social Gospel and the Crisis of Industrial America – Examines Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and the theological response to urbanization and industrial poverty.
- Chapter 2: Catholic Social Teaching and the Making of the Social Wage – Focuses on Monsignor John A. Ryan and the Catholic case for a living wage and labor rights.
- Chapter 3: The Jewish Labor Movement and the Politics of the Lower East Side – Analyzes the role of Jewish immigrants, socialists, and union organizers in shaping progressive urban politics.
- Chapter 4: The Black Church and the Long Freedom Struggle – Traces the religious roots of early civil rights activism, from the Niagara Movement to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
- Chapter 5: The Progressive Party and the Religious Coalition of 1912 – Reinterprets Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party campaign as a coming together of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish reformers.
- Chapter 6: Reaction and Reactionaries: The 1920s Assault on the Religious Left – Examines fundamentalism, nativism, and the business offensive against social Christianity.
- Chapter 7: Depression, Prophecy, and the New Deal – Shows how Niebuhr, Day, and labor priests provided moral energy for the New Deal coalition.
- Chapter 8: The War, the Cold War, and the Unraveling of the Prophetic Alliance – Argues that World War II and early Cold War anticommunism severed the ties between religious activism and progressive politics.
- Conclusion: The Legacy and Promise of Prophetic Politics – Reflects on what the religious left’s rise and fall means for contemporary debates about religion, secularism, and social justice.
Scholarly Reception
Hollinger’s book has been widely praised for its ambitious synthesis and its challenge to the secularization thesis in American political history. Reviewers in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and Church History have commended its archival depth and its nuanced treatment of the relationship between religion and reform. Some critics, however, have questioned whether Hollinger overstates the coherence of a “religious left” and underplays the role of secular socialists and labor radicals. Others have noted that the book’s focus on the Northeast and Midwest leaves the South and West comparatively underexamined. Nevertheless, the consensus is that American Prophets is a major contribution to the historiography of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and a valuable corrective to accounts that treat religion as a conservative force in American politics.
Representative Quote 1: “The progressive movement was not a secular awakening that happened to borrow religious language. It was, in its bones, a religious revival—a revival of the prophetic impulse that had animated American reform since the abolitionists, and it drew its power from the conviction that God’s justice demanded a new social order.” (Hollinger, p. 12)
Representative Quote 2: “When the religious left lost its voice after 1945, American liberalism lost its soul. The New Deal had been a moral crusade as much as a legislative program; the Cold War liberalism that replaced it was a technocratic enterprise, and it never inspired the same devotion or the same sacrifices.” (Hollinger, p. 271)