Reinventing Liberal Christianity
*Starred Review* Liberal Christianity has been fighting second-class status for decades, but Hobson believes it should and must be revived, because other strains of Christianity—orthodoxy, American Evangelicalism, fundamentalism—uphold neither the separation of church and state nor the liberty of conscience that, he asserts, God wills. Perhaps the most important element in reviving liberal Christianity, Hobson says, is the revival of the cultic aspect of Christianity—the sacraments, corporate and personal prayer, ritual—which means preventing theology, with its rationalist biases, from coming between worshippers and the actions and special language of cultic practice that unite the person and the church in faith. That such reinvention is possible he illustrates via a history of liberal Christianity that, while it is primarily concerned with liberal Protestantism, anchors that liberalism in the Pauline epistles. Centuries in development, liberal Christianity crystallized in the tumultuous seventeenth century in England and reached an apotheosis when the U.S. emerged as the first explicitly liberal state. That culmination was and has continued to be hotly contested by preachers and theologians, poets and even politicians, whose ideas Hobson explains with brilliant clarity, always pointing out particular thinkers’ weaknesses as well as strengths. The book is so engrossing and so illuminating that it is a must-read for everyone concerned with the future of Christianity and the liberal state. --Ray Olson