Between World War I and World War II, the World Day of Prayer (WDP) expressed Protestant women's Christian cosmopolitanism that combined rituals of prayer with a liberal program of social activism and humanitarianism. The WDP began as a way to unite Protestant women together across organizational denominational lines as women's missionary societies entered a period of decline in the 1920s. The WDP raised awareness of home and foreign missionary work and took up a collection to support designated home and foreign mission projects, but it quickly emerged as a site for ritual creativity. The planning committees and prayer service facilitated Protestant women's efforts to replace a traditional understanding of missionary work with a cosmopolitan Christianity that coupled American women's spirituality with a liberal program supportive of racial diversity and internationalism. The prayer services became sacred spaces to enact “unity in diversity,” even though this was always more an ideal than a reality. Churchwomen used the evident dissonance between a universalist vision of a united Christian world and the realities of racial, religious, and national difference to generate discomfort in the prayer services and to deepen participants' spiritual experiences. While the interwar era is understood as a period of theological schisms and Protestant declension, a gendered analysis of Protestantism through the World Day of Prayer shows that it was also a period of religious transformation as churchwomen formulated a modern social gospel that paired spirituality and action in ways that would shape Protestant churches for the next several decades.

Developed in the early 1950s by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology was part of the larger postwar therapeutic culture that blended religion and psychology in a search for mental well-being. Unlike contemporaneous self-help gurus such as Norman Vincent Peale and Harry Overstreet, however, Hubbard painted a much bleaker portrait of modern life, one rife with forces of psychological and social control. Railing against communists, homosexuals, and feminists as well as against the decay of the family and the rise of the welfare state, Hubbard argued that Americans suffered from a waning sense of ontological security, living in a world that provided no support for self-identity. Hubbard refused, however, to shrink from such changes and lapse into nostalgia for a pre-modern, pre-technological world like Peale and others did; instead, he offered a way for individuals to appropriate the dynamism of modernity for themselves. As advanced industrialization erased distances between societies, revolutionized transportation, and computerized information systems, Hubbard reimagined the self as spiritual being possessing precisely those powers to manipulate time and space and to remake the world at large. Borrowing freely from Eastern religious ideas, cybernetic theory, and German idealism, Hubbard produced a philosophy that was staunchly libertarian, spiritual, and future-oriented, one that tapped into Cold War fears about psychological manipulation and waning personal autonomy and into dreams about the immanent power of human beings.

This article argues that gospel hymnody was integral to the construction of modern evangelicalism. Through an analysis of the debate over worship music in three denominations, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America, from 1890–1940, I reveal how worship music was essential to the negotiation between churchly tradition and practical faith, between institutional authority and popular choice that characterized the twentieth-century “liberal/conservative” divide. While seemingly innocuous, debates over the legitimacy of gospel hymns in congregational worship were a significant aspect of the increasing theological, social, and cultural divisions within denominations as well as between evangelicals more broadly. Gospel hymnody became representative of a newly respectable, nonsectarian, and populist evangelicalism that stressed individualized salvation and personal choice, often putting it at odds with doctrinal orthodoxy and church tradition. These songs fostered an imagined community of conservative evangelicals, one whose formation rested on personal choice and whose authority revolved around a network of nondenominational organizations rather than an institutional body. At the same time, denominational debates about gospel hymnody reveal the fluid nature of the conservative/liberal binary and the complicated relationship between evangelicalism and modernism generally. While characterizations of “liberal” and “conservative” tend to emphasize biblical interpretation, the inclusion of worship music and style complicates this narrow focus. As is evident through the case studies, denominations typically categorized as theologically liberal or conservative also incorporated both traditional and modern elements of worship.

This article uses the career of Francis Weninger—an Austrian Jesuit who traversed the United States preaching mostly to German audiences—to trace the development of Roman Catholic approaches to African American missions from the end of the Civil War to the rise of Jim Crow. The study proceeds in two parts, each of which addresses three themes. The first half treats Weninger's work among American Germans, examining the historical context, mission strategy, and revivalistic activity involved in Weninger’s work among his fellow immigrants. The second half details Weninger's evangelistic efforts among African Americans, reversing the order of these themes: first, it describes his activity, then, his strategy and motivation, and, finally, how Weninger's work fits into the broader context of Catholic race relations. The paper shows that the activism of Francis Weninger, the most significant Catholic advocate of missions to African Americans during the key time period in which the American Catholic church adopted an official policy of racial segregation, helped both to stimulate and to define later Roman Catholic initiatives to evangelize African Americans. Weninger modeled his approach to evangelizing African Americans directly on his work among German immigrants, encouraging both groups to establish their own ethnically and racially segregated parishes.