Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism

169 Pages·1996·6.91 MB·English

by  Randall Balmer

GRANT US
COURAGE
This page intentionally left blank
GRANT US
COURAGE
Travels Along the Mainline
of American Protestantism
RANDALL BALMER
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay
Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi
Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1996 by Randall Balmer
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
The chapters in this book appeared in slightly
different versions in The Christian Century magazine between 1991
and 1994, and are reprinted here with permission.
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Balmer, Randall Herbert.
Grant us courage : travels along the mainline of American
Protestantism / Randall Balmer.
p. cm.
"The chapters in this book appeared in slightly different versions
in the Christian Century magazine between 1991 and 1994"—T.p. verso.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-510086-7
1. Liberalism (Religion)—United States—History—20th century.
2. Liberalism (Religion)—Protestant churches—History—20th
century. 3. Protestant churches—United States—History—20th
century. 4. United States—Church history—20th century.
I. Title.
BR526.B29 1996
280'.4'097309049-~dc20 95-16205
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 31
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Andrew
though born and reared in New York City,
may you soon discover the delights of the real America
beyond the Hudson
This page intentionally left blank
Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that
begets heretics. There are no heresies in a dead reli-
gion.
ANDRE SUARES, 1915
There's no there there.
GERTRUDE STEIN, 1936
It still impresses me no little that, in the whole New
Testament, Jesus goes to church—synagogue—not
more than twice by my count, and each time it gets
him into serious trouble.
REYNOLDS PRICE, 1990
These marginal sects depress Harry. At least the
moldy old denominations have some history to them,
JOHN UPDIKE, 1990
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
T
his book is the second in what I project as a multivolume series
on religion in America at the end of the twentieth century. The
first book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the
Evangelical Subculture in America (1989), looked at the many varieties
of evangelicalism. It was animated by the conviction that any responsi-
ble examination of the most important social and religious movement in
American history should begin at the grassroots, far away from the
televangelists and the cultural centers and the academies where pro-
fessors are forever spinning theories about one thing or another. In the
best Baconian tradition, I decided, my approach would be inductive
rather than deductive; I would draw my conclusions after I had amassed
the evidence, not before.
As I was completing work on Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and was
in the process of drafting a preface, I learned that scholars actually had a
name for this method: ethnography, the study and description of people,
their habits, customs, and points of difference. I managed, as I recall, to
shoehorn the word ethnography into my preface, and I felt enormously
satisfied about doing so, even though I had been following my instincts
all along, not some methodological formula.
This is another book of ethnography (yes, I do feel better). I cannot
claim to be a sociologist or an anthropologist or a seasoned field re-