Liberalism/Modernism, Protestant (c. 1870s–1930s). A late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century movement seeking to preserve the Christian faith by adjusting traditional Christianity to developments in modern culture. Liberalism, in the general sense of a movement desiring freedom from tradition, has been a recurring impulse throughout the history of Christianity. Within American Protestantism the term liberalism or modernism refers more precisely to a theological movement in the late nineteenth