| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. By D. G. Hart. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. xxxiv, 197 pp. Cloth, $37.50, ISBN 0-7425-0768-8. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-7425-0769-6.)
How is a scholar to make sense of the bewildering array of Protestant denominations, post-denomination coalitions, anti-denominational congregations, single-issue movements, and other affiliations in a peculiarly religious America? D. G. Hart argues that a traditional two-party division into mainline and evangelical parties, with a portion of the evangelical group making up a fundamentalist segment, simply misses the mark. He finds analysts such as Martin Marty and Robert Wuthnow employing the two-party paradigm— liberal (mainline) and conservative (evangelical/fundamentalist). The inadequacies of this dichotomy seem quite apparent to Hart, as indeed they should.	1
In the face of this inadequate mapping, Hart offers, albeit with some caveats, an alternative mapping of American Protestants into a quite different brace of parties—pietists and confessionalists. Pietists, according to his schema, "distinguish the essence of Christianity from the external practices and observances of it" (p. xxviii). Confessionalists do not. As he explains, however, Hart wishes primarily to introduce confessional Protestantism as a way of conceiving certain forms of Protestant faith and to illustrate this outlook through different episodes in the histories of Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterians in the United States. (p. xxix)	. . .

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