371 - Modern American Religion, Volume Two: The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941

Modern American Religion, Volume Two: The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941

By Martin E. Marty

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991. 464 Pp. $27.50.

This is Marty at his best. The University of Chicago religious historian depicts the interwar years as an era of conflict, especially within and among the groups that sought to define a public religion to mold American social institutions. One question loomed: Will America remain Protestant and Anglo-Saxon? Answers entailed bitter struggles between Blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, wets and drys, right-wingers and left-wingers. And the combatants also fragmented within: Protestant fundamentalists and modernists, Protestant liberals and realists, Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists, Catholic Francoists and anti-Francoists, Catholic progressives and conservatives.

Marty finds ironic cause for gratitude. The multiplicity of conflicts neutralized each other. An enemy in one fight was an ally in another, which is one reason the conflicts took such few lives, and no one managed to impose a conclusive answer to the big question. A book about public religion, not private devotion or congregational fellowship, it yields light on public issues that linger in the 1990s.

E. Brooks Holifield, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.