Washington Gladden's Church: The Minister Who Made Modern American Protestantism - Paperback

by David Mislin (Author)

This is the first significant book-length biography in over 50 years of Washington Gladden, a minister, journalist, and reformer whose message of religious liberalism came to define modern Protestantism in the United States. Although largely forgotten today, Gladden was one of the most well-known pastors of his time and a leader of the social gospel and progressive movement. Mislin chronicles Gladden's early years bristling against the culture of a pious small town in upstate New York, his personal and family struggles during the Civil War, and his eventual professional success that came by providing a religious message for a society struggling with skepticism about organized religion, massive economic inequality, rampant corporate malfeasance, and widespread racial and religious bigotry. Through this book, Gladden's life emerges as both a model for the fusion of progressive political, social, and religious commitments, as well as a cautionary tale of the potential perils for those who critique society from inside elite institutions.

Author Biography

David Mislin, Assistant Professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University, is the author of Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Cornell, 2015) and a contributor to The Lively Experiment: Religious Toleration in America from Roger Williams to the Present (R&L 2015).