Mark Hulsether

Building a Protestant left : Christianity and crisis magazine, 1941-1993

Founded in 1941 by Reinhold Niebuhr and others, the magazine Christianity and Crisis (C&C) achieved a level of influence far exceeding its small circulation. A forum for important writers ranging from Paul Tillich to Rosemary Ruether, from George Kennan to Noam Chomsky, from Margaret Mead to Cornel West, from Lewis Mumford to Daniel Berrigan, C&C for half a century commanded great respect in left-liberal circles, both religious and secular. In Building a Protestant Left, Mark Hulsether uses the history of C&C as a case study to explore changing ideas about religion and society in the latter half of the twentieth century. He follows the twists and turns of this story from Niebuhrs Christian realist positions of the 1940s, through Protestant participation in the complex social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to the emergence of various liberation theologies - African American, feminist, Latin American, and others - that used C&C as a central arena of debate in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout, Hulsether places these changes in the context of postwar cultural and social history, relating C&Cs theological and ethical positions to the broader social and political issues that the journal addressed.

Public Religion for and against the U.S. War Machine

One of the books under review here dramatizes how “God and Country” ideologies of the early Cold War gained public traction; the other shows how such ideologies lost credibility (at least for many people) across the 1960s and 1970s. One documents how mainline Protestant leaders moved toward pointed criticism of U.S. policies, after having offered broad support during the 1940s and 1950s; the other shows how government, business, and civic leaders mobilized their own religious campaigns, largely because they felt that churches were not supportive enough. Jonathan Herzog agrees with his protagonists that the Cold War was a religious conflict—a battle between godly democracy and godless communism—and seems pleased to recycle well-known evidence about his fellowcombatants, along with some new findings he adds to the discussion. He marshals his evidence with flair, and if he has one fresh idea for scholars, it is about the role of civic leaders (as opposed to church professionals) in manufacturing the crusade. For anyone who has underestimated the Cold War’s religious-ideological dimensions—or, perhaps more likely, has discounted evidence about it marshaled by “mere church historians”—Herzog offers a wake-up call to reassess the weight of religious discourse amid the cultural, sociopolitical, and military factors that shaped these years. Meanwhile, Jill Gill analyzes critics of U.S. foreign policy. Like Herzog, she traverses well-charted terrain; but her intervention is somewhat fresher since scholars have lately been noticing that reports of the death of liberal Protestantism are exaggerated, and she brings interesting evidence to this discussion. Indeed, insofar as it has become fashionable to notice how a Protestant impulse

Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (review)

Nathans’ analysis tends to prioritise text over performance or reception, and tends not to consider the demands of genre (farce, afterpiece, melodrama) on the possibilities of representation, but her book demonstrates the wealth of the theatrical and performative commentary on race and slavery in this period, and outlines some significant developments in the course of it. University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) Sarah Meer

Book review: John Carlos Rowe (ed.) Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 280 pp. ISBN 0—5202—2439—6 (pbk)

Since at least the 1980s, one major network for cultural studies in the US has been the interdisciplinary field of American studies. This fine collection reflects and extends recent trends among leaders of this field, as articulated from the vantage point of California (since it emerged from the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine), and from a group weighted more toward literary scholars than the historical or social scientific wings of the movement. The central focus is on racialized subcultures, approached using a range of cultural studies categories and with special attention to colonialism/neocolonialism. Contributors take pains to distance themselves from earlier American studies scholarship that largely worked within a national frame of reference and searched for distinctive aspects of a dominant national culture – aspects that often had limited relevance for women and various minorities except as forms of hegemony and oppression. The term ‘post-nationalist’ accents and extends such distancing, which has preoccupied American studies at least since the 1970s; the term implies no necessary lack of appreciation for national policies or nationalist imaginaries, whether at the level of the United States or of racial/ethnic movements. Positively, post-nationalism signals attention to the interplay of global, national and local identities, to comparative work, to migrations and diasporas that cut across national borders, and to cultural encounters in contact zones shaped by the forces of racism, nationalism and global economics. Contributors criticize theories that celebrate globalization, treat it as something new, or deploy the concept of hybridity to abstract from practical issues of power. They realize that their institutional affiliations and their distinctive interests in Latinos and Asian Americans reflect their base in California, and they call on colleagues in other places to set priorities appropriate to their own contexts. Related to such locally grounded commitments, and adding much extra intellectual stimulation to the volume, each chapter includes a syllabus that suggests how one might deploy its ideas in a course. Chapters are mixed in subject and approach, as is a collectively written introduction which includes significant internal tensions. Developing the volume’s top recommendation for building on earlier American studies scholarship, John Carlos Rowe relates cultural studies to work on ‘internal colonization’ by scholars such as Richard Drinnon and Michael Rogin. Jay Mechling calls for renewed attention to religious identities at levels from the personal through the subcultural to the dominant national culture. Others take up topics that have been less explored in past decades. An especially successful chapter by Shelley Streeby compares popular narratives about Joaquin Murrieta (from police gazette                               5 ( 2 )

17.95

Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and the Village Voice all have recently published front-page articles focussed solely or in part on Cornel West (Boyn ton 1995, Wieseltier 1995, Reed 1995) Earlier this year West was profiled in The New Yorker (Berube 1995), and since the 1993 publication of his best selling Race Matters many other popular journals have discussed him (e g , Anderson 1994; White 1993) It is difficult to think of any contemporary North American intellectual with major interests in religion who commands wider public attention neither a scholar who speaks from the stand-point of religious faith nor an external analyst of religion Moreover, West blends both roles Thus his blend of neo-pragmatist philosophy and neo-Gramscian cultural analysis is an extremely important bridge between religious studies and inter-disciplinary cultural studies, and between both of these wings of the academy and the public West is among a handful of scholars regularly cited in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as well as inter disciplinary forums such as Social Text and Critical Inquiry In addition, as