Pentecostal Ecumenism: The Legacy of David Du Plessis

This article retrieves the historical ecumenical endeavours of David Du Plessis – the South African who ended being an American citizen and the Assemblies of God credentialed minister. From the Afrikaans community of the Apostolic Faith Mission to the World Pentecostal Fellowship, Du Plessis laboured extensively for the acceptance of the Pentecostal and Charismatic faith into the world ecumenical formations such as World Council of Churches, mainline Protestantism and the Catholic Church. Rejected by his own denomination for ecumenical engagement, he blazed the way for the current Pentecostal ecumenical participation and ecumenism. He built the legacy that has enhanced Pentecostal and Charismatic experience and made it accommodated and understood in different ecumenical formations. The legacy he left behind includes opening doors for dialogues between Pentecostals and other Christian formations, demystifying Pentecostal fears of Christian brotherhood on a global scale, and creating some synergy between Pentecostals and nonPentecostals as the fulfilment of Christ’s desire that ‘They might be One.’ Although not a theologian, Du Plessis paved the way for theology of dialogue as a way of enforcing Christian fraternity especially in impacting communities with the love of Christ.

Prologue II

The Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin, ’97, who chaired the blue-ribbon committee that in 1952 answered William F. Buckley Jr. with the categorical conclusion that “religious life at Yale is deeper and richer than it has been in many years,” could recall more distant student days when Yale’s religious life was deeper and richer still. Coffin was a renowned preacher, was the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City (he had once been a leading candidate for the Yale presidency), and had done as much as anyone to shepherd mainline Protestantism from evangelicalism to theological modernism....

Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism

ABSTRACT This essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America

Far from being a newcomer, mainline Protestantism has played a number of roles in the Latin American religious drama. In the colonial era, it represented the dangerous Other vis-à-vis the political, social, and religious structures. In the late eighteenth century, Protestantism was identified with Enlightenment ideas that were perceived as dangerous to the colonial order. During the independence period of the early nineteenth century, Protestant churches confronted a number of challenges of the new republics: debating religious liberty, challenging Roman Catholic hegemony, settling the countryside, and forming leaders who supported politically liberal causes. Though often considered a foreign element representative of European and US sociopolitical interests, mainline Protestant churches have largely come into their own, breaking from missionary or immigrant roots to form their own ecclesial, educational, and interdenominational structures, to develop their own leaders, and to form vital theological perspectives within local and national contexts. For the past century, main-line Protestantism has represented an alternative theological and ecclesiastical voice to Catholicism and evangelicalism, seeking to address Latin America’s challenges of poverty, war, and corruption through their faith traditions.

A slow march forward: the impact of religious change on gender ideology in the contemporary United States

This chapter talks about the substantial decline of Mainline Protestantism and the tremendous growth of the religiously unaffiliated population. It examines how these cultural changes are related to the trends in gender ideology since the late 1970s, with a specific focus on the reversal in the trend towards gender egalitarianism in the mid-1990s, and the slow growth of gender egalitarianism throughout the 2000s. A constrained age period cohort model to several decades of data from the GSS General Social Survey is applied to evaluate the effect that religious change has had on gender ideology in the US. The results show that the decline of Mainline Protestantism has undermined progress towards gender egalitarianism, while the rise of the religiously unaffiliated seems not significantly related to trends in gender ideology.

Family Planning Is a Christian Duty

Throughout the 1960s, the Protestant mainline developed a theology of “responsible parenthood,” grounded in scripture and Christian thought that turned the use of contraception within marriage into a site of Christian moral agency. Responsible parenthood language offered religious responses to scientific advances and scientifically articulated social problems like population explosion. Protestant clergy, nationally and locally, deployed it to encourage birth control among married couples. These leaders were often members of what is called “mainline” Protestantism, encompassing such moderate, non-evangelical denominations such as the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Baptist Church, and the Episcopal Church. They eschewed fundamentalism and valued ecumenical cooperation, particularly among liberal white Protestants, building alliances through groups such as the National Council of Churches (NCC). While the number of mainline Protestants has declined since the middle of the twentieth century, in the 1960s mainline Protestants constituted a prominent voice in public conversations. Their influence was so great that much of what historians tend to see as secular was actually deeply inflected with liberal Protestant values.