This dissertation examines attempts by American religious liberals to put a religious cosmopolitanism into practice between the years 1875 to 1930. Liberal religious practices aimed to create “citizens of all the world's temples” who eschewed provincialism in preference for cosmopolitan breadth. The dissertation focuses on four key practices: congregational dedication ceremonies, educational practices such as Sunday school curricula, the translation of holidays including Christmas and Easter into universal seasonal festivals, and the creation of compiled bibles from the “sacred scriptures of the East” and the classics of European literature. Each of these practices reveal ways in which American religious liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained rooted in their natal Christian and Protestant backgrounds while at the same time aspiring toward a broader and more eclectic religious perspective, one that can best be described as “cosmopolitan.”

Drawing on contemporary studies of cosmopolitanism, the dissertation makes an analogy between cosmopolitanism in relation to national identity and religious liberalism in relation to particular religious commitments. It considers the ways in which religious liberalism's emphasis on both universalism and eclecticism mirrors political cosmopolitanism's transcendence of national particularisms in favor of human universals.

The cosmopolitan liberals considered in this dissertation include radical Unitarians, Ethical Culturists, progressive Jews and Christians, and independent liberal religionists who chose not to affiliate officially with any of those bodies. Their congregations and societies found the greatest success in America's metropolitan areas, including the long-standing liberal havens of cities such as Boston and New York, as well as newer cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Tacoma, Seattle, or San Francisco. Rather than look at the religious practices of individuals, this dissertation shifts the focus to the religious societies and congregations in which liberals gathered. This emphasis permits a close consideration of the specific practices that religious liberals used in their attempts to balance Christian particularism with a nascent cosmopolitanism.