The Uncertain Future of the Religious Left [View all]

[trotsky]

https://daily.jstor.org/the-uncertain-future-of-the-religious-left/

...By the end of the nineteenth century, liberal religion’s optimism, ecumenism, and commitment to social reform were on the ascent. But this rise was swiftly curtailed by the two world wars and the transhemispheric existential crisis that followed. By the mid-twentieth century, Christian evangelicalism had eclipsed liberal Christianity as the predominant form of public religious expression in the United States.

While many commentators have attributed the Christian right’s political dominance to its theological clarity, one shouldn’t discount the wide appeal of liberal religion’s tenets. Liberal religion is not, writes Matthew Hedstrom, “the final stage on a progressive path toward secularity,” but rather, according to Gary Dorrien, “a rational and experiential third way between overbelief and disbelief.” Dorrien, however, is skeptical of liberal religion ever becoming the preeminent form of American religiosity, since its partisans must always “sail against the values and politics of the dominant culture.”

Between its countercultural tilt and its theological plasticity, liberal religion has never been entirely comfortable within the confines of the church. Sometimes this has resulted in outright skepticism, as when John Murray—the reluctant founder of the first Universalist congregation in America—resisted being ordained a minister in the late 1700s. Or when Ralph Waldo Emerson abandoned the Unitarian ministry, in 1832. At other times, however, this institutional discomfort has inspired immense creativity.

...According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s most recent study of patterns of belief and affiliation in American religious life, the religiously unaffiliated now comprise nearly a quarter of the U.S. population. For the first time in history, they are the nation’s largest religious bloc, with white evangelical Protestants a distant second. While some congregations have thrived in the twenty-first century, the steady erosion of church memberships is unlikely to abate. It’s difficult to imagine, for instance, a reversal of “the secularization of Sunday” that resulted from the loosening of restrictions states had historically used to regulate Sunday activities.

Kinda makes you wonder if it's "religious liberalism" or just liberalism in general, which some people graft onto their religious beliefs. Pushing religion as the basis runs the danger of alienating our country's largest religious bloc, as the article notes.