Suchergebnisse

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.

America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)

American society over the past dozen years has undergone a general and continuing crisis. Almost everyone agrees on that point, but on the deeper meaning and significance of the crisis, on its origins and precise nature, there is massive disagreement. From all points of the political spectrum flow streams of mutually exclusive analyses and prescriptions.