Religion shapes societies, traditional and modern, in profound ways. US history is replete with references to religion, particularly Christianity, and how it attempted to, and actually did, shape the American society. Nicholas Pruitt's Open Hearts, Closed Doors joins the conversation on the intersection of religion, social reform, and immigration in twentieth-century America. In this book, Pruitt examines how Protestants juggled their support for multi-culturalism and their efforts to maintain their dominant position in America. Pruitt's conclusion is that their progressive stance over immigration effectively undermined that dominant position. These “cultural gatekeepers,” as Pruitt refers to them, jettisoned their nativism and worked with immigrants, but expected conformity to the tenets of a Protestant Christian nation.The book references the activities of Protestant coalition organizations socializing new immigrants at the nation's gates—Ellis and Angel Islands—as part of efforts to align pluralism with the ideals of a Christian America. The social gospel worked hand-in-hand with “evangelical nationalism” to make pluralism acceptable (p. 42). Americanization, to Protestants, could therefore only occur through evangelization and the expansion of Christian brotherhood. The Christian brotherhood in social life provided a base for immigrant support and ultimately resulted in the passage of the landmark Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Pruitt argues that the Protestants’ hold on the United States in the first half of the century began to slip as the twentieth century went on.Covering the years between the 1920s and 1960s, a period immigration historians associate with restriction, the book progresses chronologically, each chapter roughly dedicated to each decade. Pruitt opens each of the chapters with quotations that provide vignettes for Protestant views of immigrant America as both tolerant and paternalistic. The book also provides a gendered perspective to this development, as women were at the front of Protestant evangelism and mission in some denominations, against the backdrop of male clergy. They worked in settlement houses and helped to socialize women immigrants to conform to American femininity and national Christian ideals of the family.Reading the first pages provokes the question of the connection between Protestantism and the religious right, which Pruitt refers to as distant relatives of mainline Protestants. Also, Pruitt claims nativism expressed itself through “Protestant fundamentalism” (p. 56). It is only in the second chapter that Pruitt demarcates liberal evangelicals as the purveyors of the social gospel and immigrant mission, the focus of the book, from the fundamentalists and the modernists (p. 61). This clarification could have come up much earlier in the book. In contrast, Robert P. Jones, in The End of White Christian America, presents only the evangelical Protestants and the mainline Protestants as the two branches of white Christian America. The statement that immigrants supported the rise of the religious right with their non-Western evangelical and Pentecostal versions of Christianity also needs further clarification, seeing as evangelicalism and Pentecostalism were originally American (p. 181). In spite of this, Pruitt does a good job describing the ambivalence of Protestantism throughout the different periods of the twentieth century.Pruitt concludes well by stating that the Protestants’ “pluralistic bargain” resulted in “religious pluralism,” which though it robbed them of their dominance, helped them to reassess their mission and position in the United States. The quote in the conclusion that twenty-first-century immigration bore no theme of de-Christianization but of the de-Europeanization of American Christianity is noteworthy (p. 188). Philip Jenkins, in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, has similarly observed the recent shift in the center of global Christianity from the West to Africa and Asia. Consequently, the de-Europeanization of American Christianity occurs through an ongoing process of Africanization and Asianization.Delving deep into archives of churches and religious organizations, the sheer number of Protestant denominations Pruitt presents in this book can be a bit overwhelming for someone unfamiliar with American Christianity. It does, however, testify to the depth of his research and is useful for his argument which he deftly presents. Among other things, this book is successful for a couple of reasons. Situating Progressivism within Protestant religion provides an interesting perspective to the Progressive Era in US history. Furthermore, connecting Protestantism to American immigration control is indeed captivating. The book therefore is useful for scholars of immigration, religion, and twentieth-century America.
Ayodeji O. Abiona (Thu,) studied this question.