| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

D. G. Hart. The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. (American Intellectual Culture.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2002. Pp. xxxiv, 197. $37.50.

The common contemporary image of American Protestantism as divided between evangelicals (or fundamentalists) and modernists (or liberals) is an oversimplification, argues D. G. Hart. We need to take account of a third important category: confessional Protestants. Hart reminds us that both the evangelicals and modernists of today derive from the nineteenth-century revivalists, who emphasized the religion of the heart rather than theological rigor and judged doctrines by their practical efficacy. Hart uses the term "pietist" to refer to their kind of religion, which rose to dominance in the United States. The confessional religious bodies, by contrast, rejected nineteenth-century revivalism in favor of traditional definitions ("confessions") of faith. The nineteenth-century revivalists promoted reforms through which they intended to build the kingdom of Christ in America, ranging from antislavery and public education to temperance and sabbatarian regulations. Only around 1912 did this pietist reform impulse bifurcate into liberal and fundamentalist versions. The evangelical and modernist pietists of our own day continue to push their agendas for American society, although of course they disagree over whether to legitimate or ban abortion, homosexual behavior, and common prayer in the public schools. By contrast, confessional Christians are content to preserve their distinctive traditions in a sinful world, to save the souls of their followers by means of those traditions, and to disavow any ambition for reshaping society as a whole. According to Hart, they do not judge the validity of their doctrines as pietists do, by their practical efficacy in winning converts or improving the world. Religious confessionalists are perhaps the only true conservatives in twenty-first-century American society. The evangelical fundamentalists, declares Hart, although carelessly labeled conservative, are in fact antitraditional populists.

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