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Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism 1900 to the Present, edited by Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Eerdmans, 1998, 492 pp.; $28, paper

"If you label me, you negate me." I'm not certain who said this first, but I'm quite sure it was someone raised in California during the seventies. Nevertheless, there is a rising tide of far more nuanced reaction against modernity's rigid and simplistic categories. Individuals and movements, perhaps partly due to hubris and partly due to legitimate distinctives, wish to have their unique positions entered into the public record, defying neat and homogeneous taxonomies. To engage in a bald example of such type-casting, it is a case of the social historians taking revenge on their elders, the intellectual historians. It is time to abandon the one-dimensional mapping and acknowledge the diverse topography of the American Protestant landscape.

In his 1970 work, Righteous Empire, veteran American religious historian Martin Marty articulated what has come to be called the "two-party" thesis. According to that scheme, as Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., summarize it,

since the late nineteenth century two Protestant parties (the "private" party and the "public" party) have dominated the American religious landscape in much the same way as the Republicans and Democrats have dominated the American political scene.

Among others, George Marsden, especially in his Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980), strengthened this two-party reading of American religious history. But it was especially James Davison Hunter's binary opposition of "orthodox" and "progressive" types in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991) that fortified this thesis with alarmist rhetoric. It is this thesis, so dominant in the popular imagination, which the editors and authors of Re-Forming the Center wish to call into question.

The book grew out of an effort to move "beyond the two-party system of American Protestantism" and was the result of national conferences held in the summer of 1994-96. The editors note in their acknowledgments that while "one of us is currently a member of the United Church of Christ and the other is now a member of General Conference Mennonite Church," nevertheless

neither of us has ever been particularly beholden to any one denomination. … We also both tend to be more pietistic and ethical in our faith than doctrinal. This disposition has, no doubt, encouraged us down the road we have taken in this project.

Two agendas seem to guide this work: in addition to the historiographical, the theological. We may explore this collection of essays with that in mind.

The collection of 23 essays begins with general analysis and critique of the two-party thesis, moving to case studies which provide obvious examples of how the traditional typology fails to do justice to the pluralism of the American religious landscape. It is not simply a question of applying nuance to basically reliable though general categories, but of missing the trees for the forest. David Sikkink draws on recent studies to demonstrate the relative insignificance of the conservative/ liberal divide for the average American, including Christians. "Religious identities articulated in the language of expressive individualism," Sikkink suggests, "may tend to displace a concern for doctrine and truth, and to increase a concern for civility to ward and tolerance of other religious and secular groups." Shrugging off the distinctions which may have mattered to their grandparents with the expression, "I just say I'm a Christian," there is little that unifies the thought or identity of such people, but they represent a fairly sizable percentage.

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