Book cover with PHS Live participants Gene Zubovich (top) and Nancy Taylor
At a recent PHS LIVE session, Presbyterian Historical Society Executive Director Nancy J. Taylor interviewed Dr. Gene Zubovich about his book, “Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States.”
Zubovich’s history tracks the influence and growth of American liberal Protestantism, from the 1920s to just before the outbreak of World War II, the post-war climate in the 1940s and the Cold War Era. He highlights various distinctive features of each generation’s liberal protestant leaders, the primary focus of each era and the schisms and divisions that occurred in the movement as the years progressed.
To start the session, Taylor prompted Zubovich to speak about what inspired him to write the book.
“I found this really interesting, intellectually vibrant and politically active world of liberal Protestantism…a generation of leaders from the 1920s to the 1960s who I think had a really transformative impact on the United States and on the world more broadly,” Zubovich said. From the establishment of the United Nations and the implementation of the Social Security and Wagner Acts to the American Civil Rights Movement and anti-war protest, this group was very active in a variety of social and political events.
Taylor then asked Zubovich to speak on the “World Order Movement,” a concept of Zubovich’s that offers a blanket categorization of the initiatives of various denominations in the 1940s that were all moving in the same direction to promote a world government. These initiatives began during wartime, when the denominations “found that even though they couldn’t agree about the war itself, if they looked past the war, they could come to a common understanding…about what the international order should look like once the war ended,” Zubovich said.
As the religious groups participating in the World Order Movement organized rallies, protests and letter-writing campaigns, it became apparent that the general population was much more receptive toward Protestant activists who were intent upon reform within the United States. In this way, American liberal protestants began to gain even more influence; simultaneously, several grassroots movements, led by folks such as Methodist leader Thelma Stevens, bolstered the ideals being preached by those involved in the World Order Movement.
The PHS Live conversation then moved toward the Cold War, communism, Marxism and the notion of the “bipolar world” that ran opposite the ecumenical movement, including the 1948 meeting of the World Council of Churches.
Zubovich spoke about the development of the Fundamentalist evangelical movement, which grew from an active opposition to the ecumenical Protestant movement of the previous decades. After explaining that the modern evangelical movement began in 1942, the same year as the World Order Movement, he said, “From the very beginning, evangelicals take a kind of mirror opposite attitude toward a lot of the causes that ecumenical Protestants [support]…They’re forthrightly against human rights, they’re forthrightly against the United Nations—they’re skeptical of these initiatives, they think of them as too secular, as stepping stones toward atheism and Communism.”
Zubovich’s book takes a new approach to the history of the Fundamentalist evangelical movement. Rather than focus attention solely on the ecumenical-evangelical rivalry, “Before the Religious Right” examines divisions within the liberal mainline ecumenical community itself.
“I think that to understand the polarization [of American politics] … you have to look at the ways in which changes within liberal ecumenical Protestant politics structure and shape the increasing polarization and divisions, first in American religions and later in American politics,” Zubovich said.
His research at PHS in preparation for his new book wasn’t his first experience in the national archives of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In 2012, he received a Research Fellowship from the society that allowed him to travel to Philadelphia.
“I’ve done a few of these talks,” Zubovich expressed, “but it’s special to come back to the place where my PhD dissertation—which then became the book—got started.”
When asked about collections he utilized for his book, Zubovich responded, “I went to over 42 archives, but the Presbyterian Historical Society was by far the most important of these.” While there, he accessed the records of the Federal and National Council of Churches, which proved to be a centerpiece of his research.
The session closed with audience questions. Zubovich is starting to work on his second book project, which will investigate how Americans exported their polarizing politics across the world, from the 1960s to the present.
“Before the Religious Right” is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.