I will analyze the career of Bishop William Jacob WalIs (1885-1975) and argue that after World War I, many black Protestant clergymen remained socially active and intellectually engaged with modern scholarship. WalIs was an influential churchman in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church for over sixty years and combined two important religious traditions in his life and work that are usually considered quite different. The first was a type of African American Christianity that emphasized spiritual conversion. The second tradition, most notable in a Master’s degree earned at the University of Chicago in 1941, was a liberal Protestant tradition that emphasized human potential and progress. That combination was evident in Walls’ life and work in two ways: I) in his work of social uplift through churches, ecumenical, and secular organizations that he hoped would result in social reconstruction and reconciliation, and 2) in his interaction with modern scholarship and the debates of twentieth-century Protestantism that helped him formulate an intellectually disciplined Christianity. WalIs’ religious thought challenges conventional categories of American religious history, while his work provides a glimpse into the activity of the black Protestant Establishment as well as the interaction between the black and white branches of mainline Protestantism.