Religious Liberals and Conservatives
Beyond the dramatic diversity brought by initial waves of immigration, Minnesota’s religious landscape began early in the twentieth century to take on the shape of theological tensions between liberal and conservative Protestants, including tensions in terms of a Christian approach to other religions. These lines would harden later in the century, but several key moments are worth noting for their implications.
Protestant Liberalism
As noted elsewhere, there may have been a wide range of Protestant denominations in the nineteenth century, but all stayed relatively close to an evangelical focus on personal religious experience, biblicism, and missionary zeal. As the century wore on though, Protestants began to split not only along denominational lines but also along theological lines in response to theological liberalism that began to suffuse across Protestant denominations. Several interrelated factors led to this liberalism. The first was biblical criticism, an approach to the biblical study taking root in seminaries that subjected biblical texts in their original languages as historical documents written from within the intellectual contexts of bygone eras. Divine inspiration could still course through the Bible, but from this vantage, that inspiration filtered through the dark glass of human witness and authorship. The work of interpretation became a conscientious process of sorting the grain of eternal truth from the chaff of historic human limitations. This paved the way for many Protestants to engage rather than contest modern intellectual currents, science, and new technologies. Especially among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Methodists, who prioritized ministerial learning, people in the pews increasingly encountered sermons that drew on biblical criticism but also that squared with many of the literary, scientific, and philosophical sources of authority.
Most relevant for our purposes, liberal Protestants also gradually developed a more generous posture toward non-Christian religions. While a narrower band of Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers, and others had been long rethinking the creeds of Christianity in light of the manyness of religion, in the later decades of the nineteenth century, more mainstream Protestants began to think seriously about the singularity of Christianity’s truth. Global missionaries had become serious students of the languages, cultures, and religions of the people they were among, as concerned with the education and health of peoples around the world as with converting them from imagined religious error. Conversion was as much about witness and persuasion, as it was about realizing that Protestant Christianity could complete the religious trajectory of Buddhists, Confucians, Muslims, and others, rather than replacing error with truth.1
These Protestants had Jewish and Catholic allies in this cosmopolitan engagement with religious liberalism. In 1885, a rabbinical conference gave further shape to the Reform Movement, producing the Pittsburgh Platform which reconsidered the relationship between Judaism and the religions of non-Jews. And within the American Catholic Church, Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland led efforts to engage new Christian denominations other than the Roman Church. In some respects, new forms of enthusiastic engagements with modernity were internal to each tradition, but they were increasingly cross-pollinated in an effort to address the economic and social inequalities and the rampant materialism of a capitalist economy and urbanizing industrial world.
