In the years following World War II, American Protestantism
experienced tremendous growth, but conventional wisdom holds that
midcentury Protestants practiced an optimistic, progressive,
complacent, and materialist faith. In
Original Sin and Everyday
Protestants, historian Andrew Finstuen argues against this
prevailing view, showing that theological issues in general--and
the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin in
particular--became newly important to both the culture at large and
to a generation of American Protestants during a postwar "age of
anxiety" as the Cold War took root.
Finstuen focuses on three giants of Protestant thought--Billy
Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich--men who were among the
era's best known public figures. He argues that each thinker's
strong commitment to the doctrine of original sin was a powerful
element of the broad public influence that they enjoyed. Drawing on
extensive correspondence from everyday Protestants, the book
captures the voices of the people in the pews, revealing that the
ordinary, rank-and-file Protestants were indeed thinking about
Christian doctrine and especially about "good" and "evil" in human
nature. Finstuen concludes that the theological concerns of
ordinary American Christians were generally more complicated and
serious than is commonly assumed, correcting the view that postwar
American culture was becoming more and more secular from the late
1940s through the 1950s.