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Book Review

Canada and the United States

James H. Moorhead. World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880–1925. (Religion in North America, number 28.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1999. Pp. xxii, 241. $29.95.

Anyone who has observed the half-filled pews and sea of gray hair in America's no-longer "mainstream" Protestant places of worship, in contrast to the nation's thriving evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic churches, cannot fail to recognize that seismic changes have overwhelmed American Protestantism. In Why Conservative Churches are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (rev. ed., 1977), Dean M. Kelley blamed the liberal churches' pursuit of social activism to the neglect of parishioners' longings for community and spiritual nurture. James H. Moorhead agrees and traces the problem to the turn-of-the century decades, when many Protestant leaders, responding to the era's intellectual and social upheavals, abandoned or watered down such central evangelical tenets as Christ's literal Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and hell as a real place of eternal punishment. Instead, they promulgated a new eschatology that envisioned perpetual human progress, the redemption of the present age through social action, and an ever-closer approximation of Christ's kingdom through human effort. Operationalizing this new eschatology, the mainstream denominations and their ecumenical agency, the Federal Council of Churches, launched a frenetic round of fundraising, social reform, foreign missionizing, and bureaucratic tinkering to increase their "efficiency," resulting in a spiritually inert "corporate Protestantism." . . .

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