Culture Changers
The Christian Century’s Amy Frykholm interviews historian, David Hollinger, regarding “the contributions and successes of ecumenical Protestants in their mid-20th-century encounter with diversity.” Guided by the commitments to their “own theological tradition,” Protestant leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, Hollinger says, paved the way for America’s current reverence for cultural and racial diversity. The “ecumenical leaders took a series of risks, asking their constituency to follow them in antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist and multicultural directions that were understandably resisted by large segments of the white public, especially in the Protestant-intensive southern states,” Hollinger notes.