This is the first significant book-length biography in over 50 years of Washington Gladden, a minister, journalist, and reformer whose message of religious liberalism came to define modern Protestantism in the United States. Although largely forgotten today, Gladden was one of the most well-known pastors of his time and a leader of the social gospel and progressive movement. Mislin chronicles Gladden’s early years bristling against the culture of a pious small town in upstate New York, his personal and family struggles during the Civil War, and his eventual professional success that came by providing a religious message for a society struggling with skepticism about organized religion, massive economic inequality, rampant corporate malfeasance, and widespread racial and religious bigotry.

Through this book, Gladden’s life emerges as both a model for the fusion of progressive political, social, and religious commitments, as well as a cautionary tale of the potential perils for those who critique society from inside elite institutions.