good morning. welcome to mosaic. i serve at st.marks lutheran church in san francisco. welcome and good morning to you on this sunday. i am delighted to have a guest with us today, dr. david calendar. welcome. you have the preston hodgekins america professor. welcome. you have a lot to share with us about american protestantism, but you are also a history professor. >> that's correct. >> you are also affiliated with the berkeley center for the study of religion. >> that's right. >> tell us what you did at uc

berkley, area of history and this center. >> i thought u.s. history for about 25 years. i am retired now. one of the projects that i had was to try and advance the academic study of religion on the campus which had been a sort of hit and miss operation. a group of us thought we ought to do something about this. we have big grants and we now have this berkley center which works well, is very pluralistic. we study all kinds of religions. it is open for secular as well as faith commitment discussions. we like to say sometimes that the model of the center is released ink i don't know is too -- religion is too important to be left in the hands of the people that believe in it. >> your focus there. >> the contribution i have made is the study of american protestantism. i have been writing about that and i have been incorporated in

a number of their projects. i am convening a workshop, bringing in scholars to discuss history of protestantism later this year which is one of the several things that we do at the center. >> wonderful. we are going to come back to that in a minute and talk about american protestantism on the mosaic show.

welcome back to mosaic. with me today is dr. david hollinger from the berkley center for the study of religion. his area of focus is american protestantism but particularly in the last 100 years. what have been the changes in american protestantism but your focus with the topic. >> i try to get people to understand that the best approach to american protestantism in the last hundred years or so is to think of it as a two party system sort of like when we talk about american politics, we've got republicans, democrats, they're understood to be part of the same enterprise but rivals. from time to time they develop different outlooks on things. we talk about protestantism and we also have a two party system. the vocabulary for identifying it is a little bit more complicated. when we talk about two party system in politics we know what a republican is and we know

what a democrat is. the two party system in protestantism, the terms now used most often are evangelical and ecumenical. the earlier would be fundamentalist and modernist. earlier, liberal verses conservatist. >> how would you define those? >> an ecumenical protestant is somebody who takes a less literal outlook on skip scripture. evangelical is more literal and talk about the bible says what it means and means what it says. liberals, ecumenicals are more inclined to see room for

interpretation, see growth of protestantism, christianity over time as reflecting new wisdom for how to apply it. the evangelicals are firmer on what they would call orthodoxy, want to stick with something that's tried and true, the face of the fathers and all of that. there is a greater flexibility and openness. the ecumenicals, which is where the term comes from, ecumenicals are big on cooperating with other people, with other protestants, other christians, buddhists, muslims, hindus. the ecumenical approach is more copacious whereas evangelicals stay with the old faith, stick with the home truth. i might also mention that a vocabulary complexity of this is that the term main line is often used to talk about the people i am calling ecumenical protestants. the reason that's deceptive is

nowadays it's the evangelicals that are more main line in that they have much more media attention. they have much stronger political lobby. when the press talks about protestantism today, it's almost always evangelical protestantism. >> that's what people think about. >> that's right. main line was a term that caught on for what i am calling ecumenical protestants back in the '60s. the reason it caught on was because the class position of the ecumenicals was so much stronger. ecumenical protestants were stakeholders in national institutions. they were prominent in corporations, in foundations, in the congress, in the senate. as of 1960, if you in the united states were in a position to lead an institution, to have some influence over the direction of it, as late as 1960, you were

likely -- there are exceptions -- but you were likely to be nominally affiliated. on the other side, the people that felt left out in the 1940s, '50s, '60s but are now prominent, southern baptist, 7th day adventist. there is a party of the two clusters. they have different centers of gravity, don't much like each other and try to work out their relationship. >> what is the relationship between the two parties so to speak right now? >> well, right now it's, i think, more hostile than ever because the ecumenical main line protestants who have been quiet for a while have come out during the last year or so and

are really critical of the evangelicals for being so close to trump and being so tied to the republican party. >> so it is connected with the political climate. >> now there are other foundations for this. the ecumenical protestants are much better educated by and large than the evangelical protestants. that's not as sharp a difference as 50 or 60 years ago. there is a big difference there. the big thing right now to answer your question directly is politics. there have been several columns recently by leading ecumenical protestants. randle balmer is a very prominent episcopalian. he had a write up the other day day -- the way president trump

is behaving. that's where there is an example of deep disagreement among people who see themselves as part of the large community of faith but it's a real fight. >> do you have any examples of where the two parties are working together or cooperating together? >> yes. they are working together on the environment. they are working together on poverty. i hasten to explain that only some are working together. in the evangelical group you have somebody like jim wallace, he wants to cooperate with the ecumenical protestants but there are other groups in the evangelical party that are very suspicious of that. they think if you spend too much time talking about racial inequality, economic inequality, problems of the environment, if you spend too

much time talking about that, you will lose track of what really matters. abortion, same-sex marriage, and things like that. there are quarrels about that, disagreement. >> with those divisions, we will come back in a moment and see what else unites the protestants and look at the missionary senses in the last 100 years. welcome again to mosaic.

welcome back to mosaic. with me is dr. david hollinger. we are talking about american protestantism and one of the things we want to talk about is the whole missionary experience of our protestant churches and denominations in the last 50 or even really 100 years. some of your most recent research has been focused on the missionary experience. tell us about that. >> i am glad you give a chance

to talk about that because missionary experience was such a big deal for american protestants in 1910, 1940 even through the 1950s. now there is not as much attention to it exempt among evangelicals. they still have a robust missionary project abroad. the liberals, ecumenical protestants, main line protestants gradually pulled back from missionary project and moved into service activities. the experience of the two groups abroad turned out to have very deep effects on the whole course of american protestant history because what happens is the liberal protestants generally being a lot better educated than american and more liberal thee logically, whether he they go abroad in 1910, 1920, 1925, they are much more responsive to indigenous cultures and to

the society that they encounter abroad. they're influenced by this. one after another of these lutheran presbyterian methodist missionaries, they come back to the united states and say wait a minute, turning all the hindus and muslims into copies of the kind of christians that we have here in dallas, chicago, boston or wherever, that's not necessarily such a good thing. >> right. >> these people have their own societies and we americans can help them. we can be partners with them. we ought to move back from the idea of trying to turn them into copies of us. they then become more ecumenical. a while ago you and i were talking about this difference between a greater cooperation and about how liberals want to cooperate with a whole variety of people as well. that's not the way it affected evangelicals. evangelicals generally felt that the experience with the

heathens reinforced particularity. the liberals educated more broadly and more responsive to what they found in the field, they come back to the united states and go into their various churches, their denominational meetings, their public forums, and they say wait a minute, we need to do something differently. our society is too prudential. so many of the liberal protestant missionaries become cosmopolitan. they become enemies of american provincialism. so they take one american practice after another and they say wait a minute, this is too narrow. it got them in a good bit of trouble with a lot of the people in the pew. >> yeah. >> imagine, you come into a church in indiana and you are talking about what's going on in china. some pius soul gets up and says we did not send you to china to

come back to indiana and tell us how interestchinese are. so there are troubles that the missionaries have to work very hard to educate the people in their faith communities. what happens then is a crucial fact about what happens to liberal protestants in the united states is that the leadership of the ecumenical denominations gets more and more cosmopolitan. they think more and more globally. the people in a lot of the congregations are still thinking locally. they're not thinking globally. >> that's right. >> you have this tension between a cosmopolitan leadership and a more provincial base. >> because the congregations get attached to their missionary wherever they are. >> they do. >> they want that work to be done. >> they do. >> the whole missionary movement begins to critique itself it sounds like. >> it does because one of the plates that the liberal

missionaries have, they come back and say we need a whole different approach to foreign peoples. and they get into really serious arguments with the evangelicals. that's why this party of the two party system always needs to be kept in mind. these two groups constantly define themselves in relation to one another. so the kind of liberal protestant missionaries i am talking about, they're going to national meetings, writing in the christian century and other magazines about their views. the evangelicals hit the ceiling. their hearsay trials, efforts to throw people out, efforts to condemn them and many evangelical organizations established in the 1940s and 50s like fuller theological seminary, magazine christianity today, organization the national association of eve

english english al -- evangelicals. you have this constant back and forth and you have amongst evangelicals a separate institution building. >> the other important point that you mentioned is that the missionaries themselves come back and start to claim the political climate in life and politics in the u.s. >> they do. >> say a brief important word about that. >> this is something else that gets them into a lot of trouble with evangelicals because they're very far out on racial equality. if you look at the period before about 1960, relatively few angelo protestants were strongly involved in the african-american civil rights movement. relative few angelo protestants. the angelo protestants that were involved as allies of martin luther king were overwhelmingly missionary background. the more that the liberal

protestants got alive with the civil rights movement the more evangelicals say oh you are meddling with politics. studentsic with the gospel. -- stick with the gospel. we need to change people's hearts first. billie graham used to say that. the liberals say that's not enough. we have to change the laws, change institutions. that was an example of where american politics was affected by liberal protestants. >> you have talked more about also heareas of american life, foreign service for example, but we will have to come back to those in just a minute or so here on mosaic. we'll be back.

welcome back to mosaic. we are with dr. david hollinger. one of the books he's written is after cloven tongues of fire about modern liberal protestantism in american history. we are talking specifically now about the missionaries of these denominations, of these two parties and how they have influenced so much u.s. society. wewe were about to talk about influence of foreign service and foreign policy. these are missionary movements,

missionaries who are now affecting political climate decisions. >> it may be that the most important single consequence of the liberal ecumenical missionary project abroad was the creation in the united states during the 1940s, '50s, 60s and after of a substantial number of people who believed that the foreign policy of the united states should be oriented to the self defined interests of nonwhite decolonizing peoples. so the missionaries who spent time in india, africa, the middle east, they come back and say american foreign policy is too oriented to the old colonial powers. we are using the cold war for example as a context for being against arab nationalists or being against nationalists in southeast asia. the people who come out of the

missionary project and who advance these views, they do so partly in the public domain and writing ed pages in resolutions for their churches but they also express it in the foreign service, in the cia, in the state department. >> how do they? >> the way this works is when world war ii comes along the government of the united states doesn't have many people really fluent in foreign languages and who are deeply knowledgeable about what goes on in these societies. so the government sort of very quickly in 1941 and 1942 looks around for people who know about this. they find all the missionaries and children of missionaries. these people are fluent in chinese, japanese, arabic, vietnamese, all the different languages that were suddenly important strategically. >> sure. >> they get into government.

when there, they have all the quarrels because the establishment in the state department and much of the foreign service thinks of american foreign policy in relation to european allies. one of the guys i study and just have completed a book on this called protestants abroad, how missionaries tried to change the world but changed the united states also published by my publisher princeton two months ago, this is heavily about a number of individual in the government who try to change american foreign policy but generally fail. they generally fail. this one guy who was a former missionary to thailand is brought in right away in 1941 because roosevelt and joint chiefs of staff don't have anybody that knows about southeast asia. this guy immediately goes into war basically against the other state department guys on what

american foreign policy should be. he says you are too closely aligned with british empire, french empire, dutch empire. his name is kenneth landon. he says what we need is an alliance with indigenous people. he fights this all the way through the war. one of the most interesting things he does, this guy is the author of the document of earliest date in the pentagon papers released in 1971, all these documents about how the united states got foolishly involved in vietnam, this guy is the author of the earliest document which is 1946. what it is based on is ten days of conversations he has with hochi min. they develop this idea that the united states maybe should take

over vietnam as a protecter to protect from the chinese and russians like the united states had the philippines as a protector. >> what's motivating the missionaries to move the united states in this direction? is it their faith? is it their patriotism? what is it? >> the basic background, sort of starting point is classic christian liberalism. these people took the sermon on the mount realistically in christ there is no male or female, no slave or free. >> with the scriptures, you can take what you want and do with it. >> we will have to leave it there and encourage people to read this book. to hear more about the stories

and how they changed merge, protestants abroad by dr. david hollinger, thank you so much. you have been a wonderful guest. we appreciate you being here. thank you to reverend ron my beloved cohost and our producer. this is mosaic. welcome. recently our country has witnessed catastrophic devastation.

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morning... music, books, and more... but first... a new dance performance premiering in san francisco... skies calling welcome to bay sunday. we've got a lot happening this morning, music, books and much more. first, a new dance performance in san francisco called skies calling skies falling. margaret jenkins is here to tell us more about it. welcome. >> thank you so much. >> i love the title. explain how you came up with that and what is it about? >> skies calling, skies falling is really my dance company's response to where we are both politically and socially at this time in our country. we made this work kind of really in response to the results of the election. so we kind of use shock