Religious liberalism in America has often been equated with an ecumenical Protestant establishment. By contrast, American Religious Liberalism draws attention to the broad diversity of liberal cultures that shapes America's religious movements. The essays gathered here push beyond familiar tropes and boundaries to interrogate religious liberalism's dense cultural leanings by looking at spirituality in the arts, the politics and piety of religious cosmopolitanism, and the interaction between liberal religion and liberal secularism. Readers will find a kaleidoscopic view of many of the progressive strands of America's religious past and present in this richly provocative volume. "The volume as a whole not only provides the reader with a variety of fascinating stories from the history of American religious liberalism, but also invites us to further reflect on what religious liberalism . . . is about. . . [This] volume is a good specimen of an integral approach to religious liberalism, not primarily focusing on Protestantism but paying attention to Judaism, Catholicism, and a broad variety of free religious movements as well."― Church History and Religious Culture , 94.1 2014 Leigh E. Schmidt is Edward Mallinckrodt University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and is affiliated with the Center on Religion and Politics. He is author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality . Sally M. Promey is Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Visual Culture at Yale University, where she is also Deputy Director of the Institute of Sacred Music. She is author of Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library . American Religious Liberalism By Leigh E. Schmidt, Sally M. Promey Indiana University Press Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-253-00209-9 Contents Foreword / Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, Acknowledgments, Introduction: The Parameters and Problematics of American Religious Liberalism / , Leigh E. Schmidt, PART 1. THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, 1 Reading Poetry Religiously: The Walt Whitman Fellowship and Seeker Spirituality / Michael Robertson, 2 The Christology of Niceness: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Jesus Novel, and Sacred Trivialities / Carrie Tirado Bramen, 3 Visible Liberalism: Liberal Protestant Taste Evangelism, 1850 and 1950 / Sally M. Promey, 4 Discovering Imageless Truths: The Bahá'í Pilgrimage of Juliet Thompson, Artist / Christopher G. White, 5 Where "Deep Streams Flow, Endlessly Renewing": Metaphysical Religion and "Cultural Evolution" in the Art of Agnes Pelton / Nathan Rees, PART 2. THE PIETY AND POLITICS OF LIBERAL ECUMENISM, 6 "Citizens of All the World's Temples": Cosmopolitan Religion at Bell Street Chapel / Emily R. Mace, 7 Spiritual Border-Crossings in the U.S. Women's Rights Movement / Kathi Kern, 8 "We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow": Racial Ecumenism and Religious Liberalism in the Harlem Renaissance / Josef Sorett, 9 Reading across the Divide of Faith: Liberal Protestant Book Culture and Interfaith Encounters in Print, 1921–1948 / Matthew S. Hedstrom, 10 The Dominant, the Damned, and the Discs: On the Metaphysical Liberalism of Charles Fort and Its Afterlives / Jeffrey J. Kripal, 11 Liberal Sympathies: Morris Jastrow and the Science of Religion / Kathryn Lofton, 12 Jewish Liberalism through Comparative Lenses: Reform Judaism and Its Liberal Christian Counterparts / Yaakov Ariel, PART 3. PRAGMATISM, SECULARISM, AND INTERNATIONALISM, 13 Each Attitude a Syllable: The Linguistic Turn in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience / Lindsay V. Reckson, 14 Protestant Pragmatism in China, 1919–1927 / Gretchen Boger, 15 Demarcating Democracy: Liberal Catholics, Protestants, and the Discourse of Secularism / K. Healan Gaston, 16 Religious Liberalism and the Liberal Geopolitics of Religion / Tracy Fessenden, Afterword and Commentary: Religious Liberalism and Ecumenical Self-Interrogation / David A. Hollinger, Contributors, Index, CHAPTER 1 Reading Poetry Religiously The Walt Whitman Fellowship and Seeker Spirituality MICHAEL ROBERTSON In his introduction to this volume, Leigh Schmidt notes that when the freethinking feminist Voltairine de Cleyre wrote about progressive currents in American religion of the 1890s, she highlighted three exemplary movements: Unitarianism, Theosophy, and Whitmanism. There is no shortage of scholarly examinations of the first two of these, but Whitmanism, remarkably, has gone largely unstudied. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James remarked with thinly disguised dismay on the religious appreciation of the recently deceased Walt Whitman. "Societies are actually formed for his cult," James wrote; "a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn; ... and he is even explicitly