From the 1940’s to the 1970’s, many mainstream Protestant leaders made a marked shift to the political left. They moved from theologies of Christian realism toward liberation theologies, and from the politics of cold war liberalism toward an increasingly radical thought and practice. My dissertation uses Christianity and Crisis magazine as a case study for exploring these changes. Methodologically it blends cultural, intellectual, and social history with insights from cultural studies and theories of cultural hegemony. It identifies shifting theological paradigms at C&C, drawing on the journal’s text and selected interviews. And it relates these shifts to broader cultural and sociopolitical issues, drawing on the journal’s (frequently detailed) treatment of the issues, recent historical scholarship, and debates about cultural hegemony in historiography and cultural studies. This is the first major study of C&C, and it contributes to broader scholarly debates about (1) the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, the dominant force at C&C at least until the late 1960’s; (2) the process through which liberation theologies became influential for many North American Protestants; and (3) the general nature of hegemonic processes in U.S. culture, especially as they relate to the hegemony of the ‘Protestant establishment” since World War II.