Rethinking the Protestant Left
Mark Hulsether
November 11, 2025
Of course things are far worse today, but when I began my Ph.D. work in 1988, the academic job market was already terrible and universities were already under sustained attack. I knew I was unlikely to find a tenure-track job unless I entered a top program and studied a reasonably trendy topic. However, I wanted to stay on my home ground in Minneapolis, and I had funding to do so in the American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. I had discovered that David Noble who with George Lipsitz then anchored Minnesota’s program, was an ideal mentor for me. If I couldn’t count on a job in any case, why not set my course there?
My dissertation topic was rooted in a matrix of activism and cultural critique on the Christian left—which however counter-intuitive this sounds amid assumptions about liberal Protestant decline after 1970, was at a high tide in the 1980s. I thought that, if necessary, I might leverage my studies into a career amid this matrix. I had not yet registered how much success neoconservatives would soon have in crippling it. They pursued many of the goals that the Trump coalition does today, although in these years they did not favor such overtly thuggish tactics that barely even make a pretense of intellectual honesty.
Meanwhile I wanted to understand where this matrix had come from. I had personal knowledge of parts of the story. Studies in Mexico and at Yale Divinity School had made me—at least by Midwestern Lutheran standards—an early adopter of feminist theory and the sort of left Christian praxis undergirding revolutions in Central America. But having been born in 1957 and raised in rural Iowa, I had missed civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests, to say nothing of earlier decades. Also, I had discovered that my best bang for the buck as a scholar came from studying histories that shaped the first decades of my life, before I understood what was going on, plus a few previous decades that had shaped my parents.
The resulting book, Building a Protestant Left (1999), analyzed transformations in the ideas and praxis of a cohort of left-liberal public intellectuals who began in the 1940s at the heart of Cold War liberalism but morphed into far more counter-hegemonic stances by the 1970s, especially on issues of race, gender, and US empire. I used the journal Christianity and Crisis (C&C) to bring the study into focus.
In my preface, I expressed my hope that the book could bridge various gaps. Some of these were in generational memory. (Here I wrote something that makes me feel old: my students had “no personal memories before Ronald Reagan’s presidency.”) Many were between the field of US religion, as then configured, and wider studies of US culture and society. At Minnesota my project gained different—in important ways thicker—historical contextualization than it would have elsewhere, as well as deeper grounding in cultural theorists like Nancy Fraser, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, and Raymond Williams.
Then there were contradictions internal to C&C’s cohort, which had moved through intense ideological conflicts. Many of them were over the Vietnam War (a main event for old-timers) and Black Power (close behind). But equally important were the rise of neoconservatism, key leaders of which had earlier been in C&C’s inner circle, and decades-long disagreements about Zionism and Palestine. Especially consequential in the long run were conflicts about feminist and queer politics. To say blandly that C&C was always left-liberal and became increasingly counter-hegemonic is true as far as it goes, but it also masks much complexity and internal contestation.
In this context I wrote: “My greatest fear, as I send this long-developing book into the world, is that I have tried to bridge so many gaps that I am left standing not with feet planted solidly on both sides but in the middle over a chasm.” Was I fighting on too many fronts? Would I be chewed up by conflicts in C&C’s world, left with no posse to back me up? Later I returned to this sentence, commenting that the legacies of my work and the tradition I studied “remain to be seen.”
In retrospect, I am not sure what to say about seeds that did and did not grow.
Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake, after C&C folded in 1993, when I expanded my dissertation to cover its full career. My dissertation stopped in the 1970s, since the journal’s key transformations were in place by then and much of what came after was still in recent memory. I wrote little about C&C’s institutional history, focusing on its evolving intellectual patterns and place within a wider ensemble of relations. My new chapters threw off these proportions. Moreover, some people around the journal took offense at my account of why it folded—including senior colleagues I needed as allies for my book to find a wider readership and for its central interventions to gain traction.
The book’s synthetic strengths have ramified, in some contexts of reception, as one step forward but one backward. Not only was I addressing people on different sides of all those chasms. I also needed to move quickly to be reasonably thorough, since C&C had “fingers in many pies.” It addressed a huge array of emergent trends for decades. This was enlightening to study but spread the book thin for influencing wider scholarship on various sub-topics. For example, C&C’s career significantly complicates the notion that liberal Protestantism has been in general decline since 1970 (despite also enjoying general hegemony as Protestant secularism!). C&C’s bitter debates about Palestine give context for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and underline how there has never been any firm Zionist consensus in US Christianity. Its evolving relations with other fractions of liberal Christianity (Catholics, center-left evangelicals, Golden Rule Christians, global ecumenists with their radicalizing missionaries) do a whole range of analytical work. Even on well-trodden ground like debating Reinhold Niebuhr’s changes, documenting 1960’s activism, and analyzing neoconservatism (and McCarthyism before it), approaching through this journal adds fresh perspectives.
That’s a select list, and just as it was hard to fully unpack such issues within my book’s structure, so also it is hard to summarize them here in microcosm.
Sometimes I wonder if I could have organized thematically or spun subtopics into stand-alone articles. Should I have quadrupled word counts on selected issues and moved that way, instead of starting concise and proceeding to compress? Would it have helped more people? (I have similar questions about the mixed blessings of concise synthesis in my Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States, as well as various articles.)
But it is too late for a do-over. I thank the editors for inviting these reflections, and I invite younger readers to take a look and see if there is anything there for them. Few of the issues that C&C addressed have gone away. Nor have people in left Christian traditions disappeared. (Yes, they are a minority, but we often underestimate how much that has always been true). We can learn from their experience in the current moment.