Embattled Ecumenism

From The Christian Century:

 

 

Embattled Ecumenism, by Jill K. Gill

Reviewed by Randall Balmer

 

 

In her remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and, especially, the National Council of Churches during the 1960s and 1970s, historian Jill Gill refuses to advance a singular cause, but no argument is more persuasive than a couple of lines she drops quietly on page 322: “One might assume that church leaders would have adopted a moral approach from the beginning,” she writes. “But they did not.” That strategic failure may have been responsible more than anything else for the rupture between the leaders of mainline Protestantism and the people in the pews.