352 - Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States

Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States

By Robert Booth Fowler

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1989. 185 Pp. $12.95.

This is an important analysis by a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. It deserves a wide audience, particularly those who are interested in the changing relationship between Christianity and American culture. Fowler argues that American culture has been and continues to be marked by liberal values, including the emphasis upon individual rights and individual fulfillment. These values, he maintains, are both necessary for American society's vitality and ultimately vacuous in providing people with meaning and purpose. Enter then religion, which provides a haven of community amidst the prevailing individualism of American culture. Fowler describes the paradox of a Christianity that, at least, stands in tension to individualistic liberalism and a liberal political ethos that needs the communitarian impulse of Christianity to remain viable. These are "the unconventional partners."

Fowler joins other voices in implicitly calling for churches to recognize their distinctively Christian and religious identity in modern American culture. He also provides new insight into the complexity of what it means to be the church in a liberal society that prizes individual freedom. This is a book that illumines not only theoretical problems, but informs the worship and witness of a congregation.

John M. Mulder, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky.