The impact of Horace Bushnell on American religion has been well documented, but the cultural significance of his life and thought has not been fully appreciated. A Congregationalist and pioneering ecumenist, Bushnell has been cast as the father of evangelical liberalism by theologians and religious historians. His numerous published sermons and treatises on child nurture, religious language, and the atonement were widely read during the nineteenth century and made him a celebrated and often controversial figure. Though vehemently opposed to Darwinian naturalism later in life, he nevertheless oversaw the collapse of Calvinist transcendence into the confines of historical and cultural development—which has been the definitive characteristic of liberal Protestant spirituality since the 1870s. Yet, during an age of social transformation, is Bushnell better understood as a laissez-faire liberal or an organicist social conservative? Better still, how might we characterize the relationship between his mediating theology and ambiguous social thought?
