Book Review

Canada and the United States

The periodical Christianity and Crisis owed its origin to the growing dismay of Reinhold Niebuhr and others, in the late 1930s, at the dogged anti-interventionism of Christian Century, liberal Protestantism's principal journalistic voice. Christianity and Crisis never achieved a circulation comparable with the Christian Century's, or with that of Christianity Today, the vehicle of postwar evangelicalism. It nonetheless wielded great influence, initially as one voice of a tough-minded political realism in domestic and foreign policy, and then, from about 1966 until its demise, as a principal organizer of a new Protestant left. Mark Hulsether's book, although it traverses the entire history of the journal, is focused on this "left turn" of the late 1960s—a Vietnam-era move that, while not surprising in retrospect, was also not inscribed in the DNA of Niebuhrian political realism. (Old Christianity and Crisis hands such as Michael Novak and Ernest Lefever were quick to point this out, though not necessarily quick to seek friendlier surroundings.)

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Hulsether suggests a number of reasons why this story is worth telling. Among these, the one general historians may want to ponder is an alleged inattention to religion in analyses of the postwar public policy establishment and of its fragmentation in the 1960s and after. One can quibble about that allegation; surely Niebuhrian influence on Cold War containment policy has been recognized, regularly or even excessively. Hulsether might concur and yet hold that such influence has been acknowledged only insofar as we have been able to wrench it from its theological base. In any case, before deciding that "religion" played no part, we should take a closer look at Christianity and Crisis's involvement in the broader drama and, in particular, at the dramatis personae. Who, in or outside the religious communities, wrote for the journal? Who read and reacted to it?

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