The Episcopal church’s bishops voted to take the word “obey” out of the wife’s marriage vows in 1922. See https://www.nytimes.com/1922/09/13/archives/brides-no-longer-need-say-obey-episcopal-house-of-bishops-votes-to.html.
The Presbyterian church (PCUSA) ordained its first female elder in 1930. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_E._Dickson.
Horace Bushnell, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch all advocated for a utopian “social gospel” by means of statism in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The Second Great Awakening privatized the faith in the North and South in the first half of the nineteenth century; in the second half of the nineteenth century, the North became aggressively secular, favoring the “social gospel,” while Christians in the South went Fundamentalist, bringing about the “Great Retreat” from culture and politics. Christians entered the twentieth century as “less than conquerors,” as Douglas Frank’s book title puts it.
Liberalism has been with us a long time. It did not just slide in as part of the post WW2 consensus. The real change took place after 1865. The real post-war consensus undermining historic American identity is the post-War-Between-the-States consensus.
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