2
Part I:
The Historical Context of Niebuhr's Christ and Culture
When H. Richard Niebuhr published his classic work, Christ and Culture, in 1951,
mainline Protestantism was the unofficial state church of the United States. Christ and Culture
was written at a time when liberal Protestantism dominated public life in North America. The
fragmenting effects of the secular ideology of liberal individualism that would later shatter the
unity of liberal theology had not yet become dominant in North America. The social-oriented
liberalism of the first half of the Twentieth century was about to explode into what Lonnie
Kliever aptly called "the shattered spectrum:"
3
that is, black theology, feminist theology, Latin
American liberation theology, gay liberation theology, process theology, and so on. This would
take place in the 1960's, but it had not yet happened in 1951. Other Christian perspectives were
still not mounting a significant public challenge to neo-liberal Protestant hegemony.
Fundamentalism had gone underground and could easily be ignored. The Roman Catholic
Church was in a defensive, isolationist mode, with Vatican II still a decade away. The boomer
generation was coming of age, the economy was growing, Protestant churches were full and
liberal Protestants had concluded that even though the Kingdom of God had been delayed, the
New Deal was not a bad substitute, all things considered. Mainline, neo-liberal Protestantism
thought of itself as mainstream Christianity. Christ and Culture clearly bears the marks of its
origin in the mind of one of the leaders of mainline Protestantism and therefore of North
American culture in general.
3
Lonnie Kliever. The Shattered Spectrum: A Survey of Contemporary Theology. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press,
1981.