Edward J. Larson’s scientific contributions

... Mainline Protestants have had an uncomfortable relationship with politics in the United States since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when conflicts over slavery gave way to rising tensions in the early twentieth centuries between increasingly-distinctive "fundamentalist" ("conservative") and "modernist" ("liberal") wings of American Protestantism. These wings were defined by disagreements over issues ranging from increasing numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants arriving from Europe to Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species (Balmer and Winner 2002;Herberg 1955;Hollinger 2013;Larson 2006). While schism and conflict have been omnipresent in the history of U.S. Christianity, a schism which is especially important to the history of the mainline denominations is the splintering of these wings of American Protestantism in the 1920s and 30s (Balmer 2006;Marsden 2006). ...

Reference:

All Are Welcome: Inclusion and Mainline Protestantism in the United States