Which Protestants?

Randall Balmer and Lauren Winner try the impossible in Protestantism in America: to lay out in 200 pages the history and current state of American Protestantism for an audience of students and general readers presumed to have no background in the subject. It is testimony to their lively writing and unusual synthetic skills that they come close to achieving their goal.

But the format forces them again and again to drop vital questions as soon as they are raised. The end result is a pastiche that covers all bases without shedding enough light on any one of them. The book will help direct newcomers to some pertinent facts and issues, but it will also confuse them about whether such a thing as "Protestantism" really exists. Sure, it's a word people continue to use, but it may be an anachronism, a nostalgic marker for something that used to exist. Balmer and Winner are so attentive to the vast range of so-called Protestant experiences and institutions that the category stretches like a balloon and pops between their fingers.

H. Richard Niebuhr wondered in the 1930s if Protestantism had ever existed at all as a coherent entity. The only thing Protestants ever had in common, he concluded, was anti-Catholicism. It disturbed him that it had never had a positive identity. Nowadays Protestants don't even have anti-Catholicism to keep themselves together as a definable movement. The real lineup of American Christian forces, as Balmer and Winner note in passing, is Catholic and Protestant liberals on one side, Catholic and Protestant conservatives on the other.