Positive confession and prosperity gospel

Since the middle of the twentieth century a great many Eastern religions and New Age practices and beliefs have been absorbed into Western society. Almost simultaneously, preaching and teaching that emphasizes health, prosperity, and happiness are available to all Christians have infiltrated many evangelical churches. These churches are usually found under the banner of the Word of Faith movement and tend to be independent or have a loose affiliation with other churches with a similar message. The closeness to which individuals and churches adhere to the doctrines and practices of the positive confession movement (or prosperity gospel as some have called it) spans a broad spectrum ranging from those with marginal associations with the movement to those who fully embrace and center their lives on the Word of Faith message and its tenets. Therefore, one must use care and look beneath the Word of Faith label to determine the biblical soundness of their respective teachings and practices. Many preach a faith message that is doctrinally sound.

The acknowledged founder of the Word of Faith movement was Kenneth Hagin who had a spiritual vision during the 1950s that he described in How To Write Your Own Ticket With God. Hagin wrote that Christ had revealed certain things to him during vision, and this revelation became the foundation for the teachings and practices of positive confession.

…you can receive anything in the present tense, such as salvation, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, healing for your body, spiritual victory, or finances. Anything the Bible promises you now, you can receive now by taking these four steps…

Step 1: Say it…In my vision, Jesus said, “Positive or negative, it is up to the individual. According to what the individual says, that shall he receive.”…

Step 2: Do it…Jesus dictated to me during my vision. “Your action defeats you or puts you over. According to your action, you receive or you are kept from receiving.”…

Step 3: Receive it…It is like plugging into an electrical outlet. If we can learn to plug into this supernatural power, we can put it to work for us, and we can be healed…

Step 4: Tell it…Jesus said to me, “Tell it so others may believe.”…

…You said if anybody anywhere would take these four steps, they would receive from you anything they wanted.[1] [emphasis in original]

The principal teachings of positive confession are that there are both positive and negative aspects to confession. It is believed that the pleasant circumstances of life can be enjoyed through expressing positive statements that align with specific scriptures. The unpleasant is avoided by refraining from negative statements. Effectively, what a person says is the determinant of what he will receive and what he will become. Therefore, positive confession is a tool with which one can banish poverty, disease, sickness, and other afflictions of life.[2] The growth and success of churches in the positive confession movement have occurred because it is very appealing to most people in modern America’s prevailing culture and fits well with its humanistic emphasis on self-esteem, self-improvement, success, and materialism.

However, positive confession is doctrinal deviation and fails to align with a proper and complete biblical understanding of faith at several levels. Advocates of positive confession effectively treat God (and His Word) as a mechanical dispensing machine. They may soften the message, but it is essentially saying that one need only to select the right scripture verse, speak the right confession, act upon it, and receive you request.

Teach the entire gospel

Proper interpretation of the Bible requires that we consider each scripture in light of all other scriptures relating to a specific matter. Paul was very specific when he gave this instruction to the Corinthian church.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. [1 Corinthians 2:12-13. KJV] [emphasis added]

In other words, the best support and understanding of a particular scripture occurs when comparing it with other applicable scriptures—comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. Matthew Henry described the alternative when he wrote, “…if the principles of human art and science are to be made a test of revelation, we shall certainly judge amiss concerning it.”[3] Advocates of positive confession are in great error when they teach that the words spoken by Christians can somehow serve as mechanical triggers to release positive or negative outcomes in their lives. Sound doctrine cannot be built on isolated portions of scripture taken out of context but must be built on the total teaching of God’s Word.

One must ask how the adherents to the teachings of positive confession would have fared during the first three hundred years of the persecuted Christian church scattered throughout the Roman Empire. How do believers in positive confession reconcile the disconnection between what they teach and the lives of the apostles? All the apostles were greatly persecuted and eventually executed except John who was exiled to Patmos. Paul was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and imprisoned numerous times and eventually beheaded. He died with the thorn still in his flesh which he had asked God to remove three times.

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. [2 Corinthians 12:7-9. KJV]

The truth of God’s word applies universally to all cultures and all ages. Nevertheless, positive confession appears to appeal to and find ready acceptance where people are already living in an affluent society. It is also apparent that positive confession’s teachings do not have the same acceptance in those parts of the world where faithful Bible-believing Christians continually face extreme poverty, persecution, and possible martyrdom.[4]

God’s will

God’s will must always be superior to a believer’s wants and desires. Yet, the positive confession doctrine states that the believer can have whatever he says. To decide which of these two irreconcilable positions is correct or must be amended, we look to the scriptures. We have already mentioned Paul’s thorn in the flesh. In that situation, God’s will was higher than Paul’s need for the removal of the thorn. Paul received two things because he accepted God’s will above his own—pride was crushed and the power of Christ rested upon him. Even as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane the night prior to his crucifixion that the cup might be removed, His desire deferred to the will of the Father when he said, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine, be done.” [Luke 22:42. KJV]

The desires of the believer’s heart are important to God, and He may bless accordingly. However, as we pray for our desires, we must also seek to know His will regarding those desires. James said, “Ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.” [James 4:15. KJV] But there are occasions when believers may not know what to pray for. In those situations the believer needs to continue to pray and recognize the Holy Spirit makes intercession for him according to the will of God. Here we must heed Paul’s words for he said that when we do not know what we should pray for “…the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” [Romans 8:26b-27. RSV]

Pride and self are difficult adversaries and firmly rooted in the free will of man. The seductive doctrine of positive confession, unchecked by seeking the will of God, adds considerable fuel to the quest for desires and pleasures burning in the heart of man.

Positive confession v. importunate prayer

In one sense, positive confession distances the believer from the Father. Over time it often becomes easy for practitioners of positive confession to slip into a mode of prayerlessness through repetitious quoting of scriptures and confessions as opposed to seeking God’s desire for their lives. Too often we see Christians (not just positive confession adherents) approach God the way many children approach their parents. “Hey, Dad. I need several things. Here’s my list, and make it quick, will you? I have plans and won’t be around for a while. We’ll talk later.”

Importunity has many synonyms including several that have undesirable connotations: demanding, persistence, supplication, entreaty, appeal, petition, plea, insistence. Yet, Jesus emphasized the importance of importunate prayer. Its importance is revealed in Christ’s parable of the persistent friend who came asking for bread at midnight. Christ summarized his teaching in a single verse, “And I tell you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” [Luke 11:9]. In Luke 18:1-8 we see the parable of widow who constantly sought justice from an unjust judge. Christ’s teaching in this parable was that the believer ought always pray and not lose heart.

The believer may not understand the “why” of unanswered prayers, and God’s reasons for not answering may never be known. Yet, Jesus encouraged importunate prayer. It is not a sign of a believer’s doubt or impatience with God. When we approach God with humility, love, and deference to His yet-to-be-revealed will, importunate prayer is a reflection of the believer’s obedience and faith.

Positive confession in a fallen world

Advocates of positive confession imply that its adherents will reign as kings in this life. Kings dominate, and the implication is that believers practicing positive confession are not be dominated by circumstances such as poverty and sickness. Although perhaps unconsciously, the kings of this world have become the role models for many in the positive confession movement. As a consequence, their desires naturally tend to focus on the things that worldly kings value and seek.[5]

The primary role model of the Christian should be no other than Christ. And the life of Christ incarnate was far from the trouble-free life of those Christians seeking dominion on this earth. “…The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” [Luke 9:22. RSV] Christ makes clear that the way of His followers must be the way of the cross, and the way of the cross requires death to self.

But pain, suffering, and death to self appear to be foreign concepts to many in the modern church and especially to those caught up in the positive confession message. Although we live in a fallen world, many try to use the Bible as a “get out of pain and suffering free” card to be used as needed and which gives the believer an aura of self-sufficiency. But self-sufficiency is the deadly enemy of the surrender of self to God. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “This full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like…”[6]

Positive confession v. the sovereignty of God

A favorite verse of positive confession adherents is found in John’s gospel, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” [John 14:13. KJV] Taken alone, it seems to imply that God has abdicated his sovereignty. But it has been noted above that Paul admonished Christians to compare spiritual things with spiritual things. Therefore, what John wrote in Chapter 14 must be tempered and understood by what he said in Chapter 5. “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” [John 5:14, 15. KJV] [emphasis added] Therefore, a request must be within God’s sovereign will. God’s will limits the authority of the believer. However, the positive confession movement focuses on commanding or compelling God and little time or thought is devoted to discovering His will regarding a request.[7]

Positive confession – Enemy of contentment

Another favorite verse of positive confession adherents is found in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” [Philippians 4:13. KJV] But Paul was not talking about “doing or commanding circumstances to change” but “being.” Paul had learned to be content in whatever situation he found himself. Whether in abundant prosperity or extreme need, he had learned to be content through Christ’s strength. But, for many in the positive confession movement, contentment is not an option when life deals them a season of hardship, sickness, financial reverses, or other trials. Yes, these needs should be matters of prayer. We should ask and believe, but we do not demand or command. And if the answers don’t come, we must not berate ourselves for our supposed failure to believe, utter the right commands, or pull the right levers to operate our mechanical God. Like Paul, we must be content knowing Christ’s strength will lead us through the valley.
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In the first chapter of this series it was stated that the diminution and/or abandonment of the Bible as the infallible and inerrant truth of God is occurring in varying degrees in many evangelical denominations, churches, fellowships, and organizations across America. In this chapter we have examined the Word of Faith movement that arose in evangelical churches during the 1950s.

Many of the Word of Faith ministers and members are highly valued and much loved brothers and sisters in Christ. As is the case in all evangelical churches, others in the movement are Christian in name only and have brought great harm and reproach to the church of Jesus Christ through the positive confession gospel’s false beliefs and doctrines.

No man has a perfect understanding of the mind of Christ and His Word. However, we are charged to study God’s Word to show ourselves approved. Upon sober reflection following a holistic study of the scriptures, many Christians who hold to the view that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God have found the beliefs and teachings of the positive confession movement violate the biblical rules of interpretation.

Although many in evangelical churches may hold varying interpretations of numerous doctrinal issues, most differences have minimal eternal consequences. However, the beliefs and teachings of positive confession mirror anti-biblical elements of the New Age and Eastern religions. In many instances these beliefs and teachings have caused great harm and reproach to the Kingdom as some believers have lost out with God or have drawn away the great truths of God’s word.[8]

Whatever the failings and errors of the positive confession and prosperity gospel, we must reiterate that the Bible is a message of faith and contains many great truths which affirm that in our day God does heal our bodies, provides for our needs, that believers are given authority, and that a disciplined mind is important for victorious living. But all biblical truths must be examined, understood, and followed in light of the total teaching of scripture.[9]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Kenneth E. Hagin, How To Write Your Own Ticket With God, Kindle Cloud Reader, (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Rhema Bible Church aka Kenneth Hagin Ministries, 1979).
[2] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, August 19, 1980, p. 2. http://ag.org/top/Beliefs/Position_Papers/pp_downloads/pp_4183_ confession.pdf (accessed October 6, 2015).
[3] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1960), p. 1805.
[4] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, p. 8.
[5] Ibid., p. 6.
[6] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, ( New York: Harper One, 2002), pp. 607-608.
[7] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, p. 7.
[8] Ibid., p. 9.
[9] Ibid.

The great contest between God and Satan is for the allegiance of men and women. At stake are their eternal relationships with God. Mankind is fallen and lives in a fallen world. In order to restore a right relationship with God and live eternally with Him, man must accept the atoning sacrifice made by God’s Son on the cross at Calvary. But Satan does not sit idly by and let that happen. The earth is Satan’s lair and reflects his spirit. The spirit of the world has plagued mankind since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden. It has been Satan’s tool of choice by which he attempts to prevent or destroy man’s relationship with God. In Chapter 1 it was said that the spirit of the world is Satan’s chameleon—always refining its outward allure to match the demands and desires of the present culture, but however it transforms itself to please man, it remains unchangeably corrupt within. Whatever the outward manifestations of the spirit of the world are in any age, at its core we find humanism—the ultimate deception by which Satan attempts to displace God in the heart of man and his affairs.

In the course of human history the spirit of the world has predominantly presented itself in two forms: spiritual humanism and secular humanism. Both promote an exaltation of self. For the last three hundred years in Western civilization, the humanistic spirit of the world has shown its secular face, and it was secular humanism that presented the greatest challenge to the American church (See Chapter 10). According to Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers of the late seventeenth and all of the eighteenth century, the ideal society was to be achieved through the never-ending progress of man and society. The tools of progress were science and reason which are used in an attempt to destroy faith in a supernatural God. But secular humanists failed to understand the true nature of man which Alexis de Tocqueville described over 180 years ago.

…the imperfect joys of this world will never satisfy his heart. Man alone of all created beings shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense longing to exist; he despises life and fears annihilation. These different feelings constantly drive his soul toward the contemplation of another world and religion it is which directs him there. Religion is thus one particular form of hope as natural to the human heart as hope itself. Men cannot detach themselves from religious beliefs except by some wrong-headed thinking and by a sort of moral violence inflicted upon their true nature; they are drawn back by an irresistible inclination. Unbelief is an accident; faith is the only permanent state of mankind.[1]

This natural inclination of man to religion and the hope that it offers presented a problem for the secular humanists. Therefore, Satan did what he always does when challenged by the truth. He resurrected a counterfeit called spiritual humanism to satisfy man’s irresistible yearning to know God.

In the twentieth century secular humanism’s promises died in the ashes of two world wars and the Great Depression. In the 1960s there was a growing alienation and restlessness, particularly among the young. Although man’s faith in progress and reason still dominates the leadership and institutions of Western civilization, many became disillusioned and sought elsewhere for answers to the basic questions of life. For those disheartened by the religious barrenness of secular humanism, Satan resurrected spiritual humanism, painted a modern face on this ages-old spirit of the world, and dressed it new clothes to fit the spirit of the age. Out of spiritual humanism was born the New Age movement.[2]

Just as secular humanism touches every institution and facet of modern life, spiritual humanism endeavors to conform every aspect of human experience and society to its counterfeit solutions which draw upon various pagan cultures, ancient traditions, Eastern religions, and modern-day psychology. To implement these solutions which claim to address the ills of modern man, New Agers promote the tenets of spiritual humanism in their “…desire to create a better society, a ‘new age’ in which humanity lives in harmony with itself, nature, and the cosmos.”[3]

The New Age movement is multifaceted and often appears contradictory, but there are common elements that connect the highly diverse array of New Age organizations and their agendas. The fundamental underlying goal is the complete revolution of society in the United States and ultimately the entire world to create a one-world federation and “planetary citizenship in the global village.”[4]

To properly describe spiritual humanism (and the New Age movement) as it attempts to entice men and infiltrate the evangelical church, we must look at the common elements of its philosophy and beliefs in comparison with the Christian worldview. To make this comparison we must examine how well the two worldviews identify and align with truth in answering the basic questions of life. These questions fall into three categories: Creation – Every worldview must begin with its ultimate origins. Where did the world come from? Who are we? How did we get to the present day? Fall – How does the worldview explain evil and suffering? What has gone wrong? Redemption – If life is to have meaning, purpose, and hope, it must address the consequences of the fall. How does each of these worldviews propose to reverse the fall, that is, to set the world right again? Without consistent answers to these questions, a worldview can offer no hope for redemption.[5]

Creation

Few men or women have more clearly or succinctly contrasted Christianity and humanistic philosophies of all varieties than C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian writers and apologists of the twentieth century. He began by dividing humanity into two groups: one that believes in some kind of God (theists) and the other that does not (atheists and agnostics). The next division separates those that believe in God by the type of God they believe in. Lewis separates this group into two categories. The first group believes their god(s) (typically polytheistic) is beyond good and evil. This system of beliefs is called pantheism which is compatible in varying degrees with the beliefs of most Eastern religions. The second group believes their God (usually monotheistic) is “definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not another.”[6] Christianity resides in this second group.

In the Christian worldview, God existed before the universe was created, and then God created the universe and all that is within including the laws that govern that creation. God did not create man out of need. Rather, it was a will to love, an expression of the very character of God, to share the inner life of the Trinity (i.e., relationship). Man’s chief end is to glorify God (worship, reverence) through love and obedience (devotion, Godliness) while communing with God forever. Unlike all of the other elements of His creation, man was created with a free will. But creating man with a free will meant the possibility of rejection of God and His love. In other words free will carried with it the potential for rejection of God, but free will was necessary for the possibility of love.

Monism of the Eastern religions differs from creationism of Christianity. Monism’s view is that there is only one kind of ultimate substance and that reality is one unitary organic whole with no independent parts.[7] With monism as its foundation, Eastern religions teach the doctrine of pantheism in which humans progress through multiple reincarnations in their journey toward their divinity and ultimate oneness–a state in which one is oblivious to care, pain, or external reality.

In pantheistic Eastern religions, there is no personal and loving God (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism) but a Divinity that is attributed to “…a nonpersonal, non-cognitive spiritual force field.” Ultimate pantheistic reality (truth) is a “unified mind or spiritual essence pervading all things.” The supreme goal of Eastern religions centers on a reprieve from the burden of self by losing the individual spirit as it unified with the pantheistic One. Again, the pantheistic God is not a personal Being (no consciousness or desires) but a nonpersonal spiritual essence of which everyone and everything is a part.[8] Pantheists believe God animates the universe and that the universe is almost God. If the universe did not exist, then God would not exist. Therefore, everything in the universe is a part of God.

In summary, pantheism teaches that God is everything and everyone. Therefore, everything and everyone is God. They attempt to use the Bible as support for their belief and point to David’s words in Psalms. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up unto heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” [Psalm 193:7-8. KJV] But David is speaking of God’s omnipresence. God is everywhere but he is not everything or in everything. If pantheism were true, everything is God (including man) and worthy of worship. But things worshiped apart from God are idols, and the Bible clearly and frequently warns against idolatry.

Fall

In the Christian worldview, mankind’s free will allowed man to think and act in ways that are contrary to God’s will and plan for His creation. When man violated God’s laws (truths) through disobedience, it was called sin, and as a result decay and death entered and affected not only man but all of God’s creation. The problem of evil and suffering results from man’s rebellion and subsequent separation from God.

In pantheistic Eastern religions, sin and separation arise because “…we don’t know we are a part of god. We think we’re individuals with separate existences and identities. This is what gives birth to greed and selfishness, conflict and warfare.”[9] In other words, the individual is separated from the One, that nonpersonal spiritual essence, and sin and suffering result because the person has not merged himself into or been absorbed by this godly essence or substance. However, in the Christian worldview, sin and suffering arise because of man’s rebellion which causes a broken relationship and separation from God, not because he fails to see himself as a part of God.

Redemption

Man’s rejection was not a surprise to an omniscient God. He knew that man would sin before He created him. God still loves man but was separated from him by sin because God is just and holy. Justice requires man to atone for his sin, but he was incapable of righting the wrongs of his rebellion. Because God is a loving God, He created a way through His son, Jesus Christ, which allows man to bring order to the chaos caused by his separation. Therefore, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross made possible man’s redemption and return to a right relationship with God. But man continues to have free will and must choose to accept or reject Christ’s work of salvation.

Since Eastern religion pantheists believe that man and all of creation are part of god, their solution to the problem of evil and suffering in the world is reunite the individual with the god within. The impersonal, uncaring god of the pantheists does not love mankind or care about their sufferings. Help must come from the Eastern religions and New Agers who offer seekers assistance in being reunited with the impersonal universal spiritual essence/force which they believe we are an insoluble part.[10]

One practitioner has described New Age spirituality as an internal experience through which one answers the inner call of his or her Spirit—the god within. The internal experience is achieved through a combination of humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions, and Eastern religions.

The inner calling is your Spirit. Your Spirit is the part of you that is connected to and is a part of God. Your Spirit is the part of you that calls for you to take action and claim your joy, your bliss, and your abundance. It is the real you and your Spirit demands to be heard. This is what your journey is about. It’s finding that inner calling, answering it, and releasing the authentic YOU into the world![11] [emphasis in original]

To answer the call of one’s spirit and be reunified with the god within, Eastern religions and New Age pantheists offer an amazing variety of tools, practices, and techniques to help people recover a sense that they are all gods: spells, chants, transcendental meditation, crystals, centering, tarot cards, diets, self-esteem, guided imagery, positive thinking, yoga, visualization, and many more. Unfortunately, the distance between these practices and some of the things that occur in some American evangelical churches are not that far apart as we shall see in the chapters to follow.[12]

New Age movement

Following years of studying Eastern mystic religions, Randall Baer became a professional New Age teacher, holistic health practitioner, and activist. Before age 30 he had written two widely acclaimed books published by a mainstream publisher, developed a large teaching and research facility, and was a headliner on the New Age lecture circuit. Following a horrifying New Age experience with devouring darkness and demons, Baer was able to recover from the encounter, extricate himself from the New Age movement, and become a Christian. In his Inside the New Age Nightmare, Baer defines and describes its seductions.[13]

Baer labels the New Age movement as a product of spiritual humanism whose cornerstone is the belief that “…man is divine in nature, and is therefore essentially “God” or an enlightened “God-man.” Secular humanism displaces God with “…scientific rationalism, self-generated truth, and self-generated destiny” whereas spiritual humanism “…assigns man to a throne that spans the heavens and the earth in a divine heritage of universal lordship, omnipotence, and self-created glory.” While secular humanism denies Deity and proposes that man can find true meaning in life through exalting his own intellectual, creative, and moral powers, spiritual humanism affirms Deity in which man is deemed a race of cosmic gods with god-like powers.[14] However, both branches of humanism rely on man, through his own abilities and nature, to ascend and occupy the throne of self that is built on a foundation of either reason and science or self-proclaimed divinity from where he proposes to rule over a self-created heaven on earth.

Secular and spiritual humanism are two faces of Satan’s spirit of the world which work hand-in-hand to subvert man’s relationship with God. During the years 1870-1930, the American church surrendered to secular humanists much of its power and authority to direct and influence culture. Beginning in the 1960s, the culture was eventually conquered by secular humanists and faith was substantially driven from the public square and confined within the churches and the muffled voices of its members. Subsequently, Satan has intensified his attack from within American evangelical churches. As evangelical churches have accommodated the world as a means of survival, a measure of spiritual humanism has infiltrated many of these American churches. Therefore, it is imperative that evangelical Christians identify and understand the beliefs and practices of spiritual humanism and the New Age movement if they are to effectively combat those forces.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 346-347.
[2] Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 263.
[3] Randall N. Baer, Inside the New Age Nightmare, (Lafayette, Louisiana: Huntington House, Inc., 1989), pp. 87-89.
[4] Ibid., pp. 82-83.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 134
[6] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 2002), pp. 39-40.
[7] “monism,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1963), p. 547.
[8] Pearcey, Total Truth, p. 147.
[9] Ibid., p. 148.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mignon V. Supnet, Spirit 101, (Self-published, 2012, 2013), p. 18.
[12] Pearcey, Total Truth, p. 148.
[13] Baer, pp. v, 55, 63.
[14] Ibid., p. 84.

In the 1920s the fundamentalists abandoned the culture to the modernists and humanist secularizers, and they also lost control of the large mainline churches in the 1930s. The mainline modernist Protestant establishment had won the war with the fundamentalists to be the church’s voice, but they were in the twilight years of their power to set the tone for American culture. The liberal churches’ triumph coincided with the advent of the Great Depression, and they assisted in setting the political course for the nation in those troubled times. In 1908, the highly humanistic and socialistic tenets of the liberal churches’ defunct social gospel movement had been codified in the Social Creed of the Churches by the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.[1] Many of these recommendations were resurrected and implemented as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. However, the America over which the triumphant humanists, secularizers, and liberal churches presided remained in turmoil through 1945 and beyond.

As end of World War II approached, there were momentary feelings of euphoria, goodwill, and hope for a more cooperative world order among the soon to be victorious allied nations. But when the gates of the death camps swung open at the end of the war to reveal the horrors of Nazi atrocities, those illusions quickly melted away as the realities of war exposed the heart of mankind and his capacity for evil. J. N. Robert’s summarized the post-war search for answers as to the “why” of Nazi Germany.

In many ways, Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe; the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of the Nazis had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way, about which there was little that was irrational except the appalling end which it sought.[2] [emphasis added]

The post-war world remained puzzled at Germany’s “collective derangement” given its veneer of rationality and scientific and cultural progress. That “something” that had been wrong at the root of the civilization over which the Nazis presided was evil. But the evil found at the root of its civilization spread far beyond Germany’s borders. Much of the world also worshiped the same gods of rationalism, science, materialism, secularism, and progress. They had assumed the nature of man was basically good, but the realities of the war removed humanism’s mask of goodness to reveal the hideous face of evil. And the source of that collective evil resides in the heart of every person who ever lived.[3]

Following two world wars separated by the Great Depression, mankind was having second thoughts about managing its own affairs through reliance on the naïve claims of Enlightenment philosophies and their humanistic prescriptions. Therefore, following World War II, God was back “in style,” and America was seen as His most favored evangelist.

The end of World War II saw the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism as a substantial force in American life. Even Catholic writer Ross Douthat, a severe critic of much of Protestantism, called evangelical Protestantism a “…postwar revival of American Christianity, which ushered in a kind of Indian summer for orthodox belief.”[4] These were neo-evangelicals who still held to fundamentalist views of the Bible but sought to escape from their separatism and engage the culture with a “redemptive vision that would not only embrace individuals but also social structures and institutions.”[5] There were several key players that led the revival of American Christianity during this period, but first it is helpful in understanding the neo-evangelical era following World War II to briefly examine the demographics and social conditions that supported and encouraged this reemergence of evangelical Protestantism but also sowed the seeds that led to its decline beginning in the late 1960s.

Douthat’s Indian summer of evangelical Protestantism closely overlays the birth and growing-up years of the Boomer generation which most historians mark as beginning at the close of 1945 and lasting through the end of 1964. During those years, six areas of significant shared events and formative experiences shaped the Boomer generation and what they became in the late 1960s and beyond: child rearing techniques influenced by Benjamin Spock instilled a spirit of permissiveness; a progressive, humanistic educational model based on John Dewey’s teachings; the advent of television and its attendant acculturation of children; the exceptionally large and dominating Boomer cohort; unparalleled prosperity; and a burst of technological advances. Each of these influences and their outworking can be seen in the Boomer personality that emerged by the middle to late 1960s.[6]

The large size of the Boomer cohort did not cause the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism, but it certainly fueled its growth. It is estimated that between seventy-six and eighty million Boomers were born between the end of 1945 the end of 1964. The birth rate per year during that nineteen year span averaged 24.3 live births per 1000 in population. This compares to 19.9 for the sixteen-year period 1930 through 1945 and only 15.8 for the thirty-six year period from 1965 through 2000.[7]

Just as remarkable as the rapid population growth was the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in both numbers and stature in American culture. The number of Americans who were formally affiliated with a church or a denomination increased steadily: 43 percent in 1930, 49 percent in 1940, 55 percent in 1950, and 69 percent in 1960, perhaps the highest in all of American history.[8] Church construction increased from $26 million in 1945 to $409 million in 1950 and more than doubled again to $1 billion in 1960. When polled about who was doing the most good in the nation’s common life, 46 percent of Americans named the clergy whose favorable numbers far exceeded those of politicians, businessmen, and labor leaders.[9]

American evangelical Protestantism was vigorous and energized in tens of thousands of churches in thousands of cities and towns from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. This vitality was both denominationally and locally driven through revivals, Sunday schools, literature, conventions, and conferences. There were also voices rising on the national scene in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s that would use the new medium of television and other mass media to further the cause of evangelism both nationally and locally. The two most prominent revivalists in the 1950s were a Catholic Bishop and a Baptist preacher.

The Catholic Bishop

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) was an experienced radio broadcaster on the Catholic Hour during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1951, Sheen was an auxiliary bishop for New York when he was asked to fill a thirty-minute slot at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, typically considered a ratings graveyard. Within a few years Sheen became one of the first celebrities in the early days of television as his viewership eventually climbed to thirty million.[10] Sheen presented his message of apologetics mixed with moral advice to a vast audience comprised mostly of non-Catholics.

One of the failures of the today’s evangelical churches has been the abandonment of any hint of the clergy’s traditional authority as an accommodation to the egalitarian spirit of the age. When the lost in any culture seeks truth and answers to the daunting questions of life, they have little respect for or listen to a faith, Christian or otherwise, that by its appearance, actions, and preaching appears weak, insipid, and ineffectual. Bishop Sheen understood the need for an aura of clerical authority.

When the great apologist set out to bring the Catholic faith to a mass-market audience, he didn’t doff his collar and throw on blue jeans; instead, his prime-time performances drew much of their power from the way his costume and style hinted at an authority that transcended the spirit of the age.[11] [emphasis added]

This author was a young Protestant child of the 1950s who vividly remembers being spellbound by Bishop Sheen as he presented the powerful and timeless stories from the Bible and applied them in such a dramatic and sensible fashion to the problems of modern life, even those of an eight or nine year old boy. One writer described Sheen and the compelling nature of his program.

Sheen may have been the finest popular lecturer ever to appear on television…he was elegant, elevated, relaxed, often very funny…The show had a precise formula. Sheen, wearing his bishop’s cross, crimson cape, and skullcap, would stride into a parlor-like studio, pause, tell a humorous story, and then pose the problem for the evening…The problem analysis inevitably pointed in one direction—to humanity’s need for God, for Truth, for Divine Love.[12]

Although Sheen’s philosophy was very Catholic, he never mentioned the Catholic Church or its doctrine. He connected with his non-Catholic viewers because “…he somehow made a very particular form of Christian thought seem like the natural common ground for a pious but deeply pluralistic society.”[13]

The Baptist Preacher

In 1946, the dean of the Harvard Divinity School stated that the tradition of revivals had been entirely discredited by the hacks and hucksters of fundamentalism. However, just three years later a thirty-one year old Baptist preacher proved the dean and his liberal colleagues greatly mistaken. Billy Graham was born in 1918 and raised in rural North Carolina during the Depression. His father was a dairy farmer who had only three years of formal schooling. Once Presbyterians, they joined a dispensationalist church whose roots were unquestionably fundamentalist—both literalist in reading the scripture and apocalyptic regarding the end of the age. After attending several Bible colleges during the 1930s, Graham was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1939. He received his degree and met his future wife at Illinois’s Wheaton College in the early 1940s. Graham had a talent for preaching and traveled the revival circuit to hone his skills.[14]

In 1949, Graham’s eight-week tent meeting revival in Los Angeles attracted 350,000 and marked the beginning of his meteoric rise in the nation’s consciousness that has lasted into the second decade of the twenty-first century.[15] In 1957, Graham had been the most celebrated evangelist for almost a decade when he and his organization staged the famous 1957 Manhattan crusade which featured a 4000 member choir, 3000 ushers, and thousands of counselors for those who had made a decision for Christ. For sixteen weeks Graham preached to twenty thousand per night at Madison Square Gardens. On one mid-summer day the crusade was taken to Yankee Stadium and broke all attendance records when 100,000 attended. The crusade ended on Labor Day weekend with an open-air meeting surrounded by skyscrapers at 42nd and Broadway’s Times Square which attracted a crowd comparable in size to the one at Yankee Stadium.[16]

Recall that in the preceding chapter it was noted that during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial the New York Times had described the defenders of fundamentalist doctrines as freaks, queer fish, half-baked creatures, and having unregulated or ill-balanced minds.[17] Thirty-two years later, Graham was so popular and well-respected that the Times began printing the texts of Graham’s Manhattan crusade sermons. Other media took notice such as ABC who broadcasted hour-long segments of the revival.[18] Billy Graham had accomplished something remarkable in American Christianity. He had taken revivalism and its evangelical adherents from the wilderness and scorn to Main Street and respectability. Douthat described the magnitude of Graham’s accomplishment in the remarkable change of America’s attitude toward evangelicals.

…his style was something else—ecumenical, openhanded, confident, American. The revivalists of fundamentalism’s wilderness years were figures of fun for nonbelievers…and by the early 1940s revivalism itself seemed to be on the verge of dying out…But Graham almost singlehandedly revitalized the form, using it to carry an Evangelical message from the backwoods tent meetings to the nation’s biggest cities and arenas—and then overseas as well, to Europe and the Third World and even behind the Iron Curtain…Billy Graham had done the near-impossible; he had carried Evangelical Christianity from the margins to the mainstream, making Evangelical faith seem respectable as well as fervent, not only relevant but modern.[19]

The difference between Graham and the fundamentalists of an earlier generation was that he did not abandon but engaged the culture. What is all the more remarkable is that the source and substance of Graham’s message never changed to fit the mood of the times. Some may challenge this last statement by pointing to Graham’s big city crusades in which he cooperated not only with evangelicals but embraced mainline Protestants and Catholic leaders and referring those responding to the altar call to their churches where appropriate. But here Graham did not compromise his beliefs but seems to have followed the example of C. S. Lewis who also engaged the culture of the unchurched world through his World War II radio broadcasts later published as Mere Christianity.

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’…I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted (in writing Mere Christianity). But it is in the room, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in…

You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’[20]

Like Lewis, Graham was engaging the culture and bringing them into the hall. He was speaking to the spiritually lost in his big city crusades and television appearances, whether they were the unchurched or church members in name only. His mission was to win the hearts of his audience to Christ and deliver them to the door of a local church.

In their quest for relevance and dialogue, many modern evangelical churches have confused the hall as being the rooms. For them, the hall has become the final destination from which one never progresses theologically. Douthat pinpoints the source of this modern evangelical confusion, “In their attempts to woo the biggest possible audience, megachurch pastors have watered down Evangelical theology and ignored much of their own Reformation heritage.” [21] Sadly, a great number of America’s evangelical churches are living in the same hall as the megachurch experts who supposedly have figured out a better way to do church. However, their congregations long for the meat of the Word and the intimacy of fellowship with God to be found only in the warm and welcoming rooms of their particular faith.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 376.
[2] Ibid., p. 964.
[3] Larry G. Johnson, “This was done by ordinary people – Part I,” CultureWarrior.net, May 30, 2014. https://www.culturewarrior.net/2014/05/30/this-was-done-by-ordinary-people-part-i/ (accessed September 21, 2015).
[4] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 21.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 18.
[6] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 37.
[7] Ibid., p. 31.
[8] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 839.
[9] Douthat, p. 22.
[10] Ibid., pp. 22-23, 40-41.
[11] Ibid., p. 44.
[12] Ibid., p. 41.
[13] Ibid., quoting Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church.
[14] Ibid., pp. 33, 35.
[15] Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 839
[16] Douthat, pp. 32.
[17] Richard W. Flory, “Promoting a Secular Standard,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 405-406.
[18] Douthat, p. 32.
[19] Ibid., pp. 35, 37.
[21] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 1952, 2002), pp. 5, 11.
[21] Douthat, pp. 287-287.

Between 1870 and 1930, the modernist-liberal Protestant leadership was comfortably entrenched among the elite of American society, but their theological positions which they had readily conformed to the humanistic worldview of the secularizing activists were not representative of the majority of Americans who professed Christianity during that era. Some may suppose that the opponents of liberal Protestants were the original silent majority. But in reality, the conservative leaders of the once dominant populist evangelical churches were not silent but just didn’t have the cultural clout or platform from which to mount significant opposition to the liberal churches and their newly found secularist allies.

However, in 1910 twelve small volumes were published which were titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. The books outlined the five fundamental doctrines held by populist evangelical churches since their beginnings in the early 1700s:

1. The Bible is free from error in every respect.
2. The virgin birth of Christ.
3. The substitutionary work of Christ on the cross (Christ suffered and died as a substitute for man to satisfy God’s wrath against sin).
4. The physical resurrection of Christ following His crucifixion.
5. The physical second coming of Christ.[1]

Two and one-half million copies were printed and circulated. By 1916 the books had generated the beginning of a great controversy between two opposing camps in each of the large churches: the conservative fundamentalists and the liberal modernists. The Methodists, Episcopalians, and Disciples churches were stirred by the controversy. However, it was among the Baptists and Presbyterian churches that the struggle was most severe.[2]

One of the significant issues that arose from the controversy was the doctrine of Premillennialism. This doctrine states that the Jews will return to Palestine (the Jewish homeland where the nation of Israel was re-established in 1948) and Christ will come back to earth to rule in Jerusalem as king for a thousand years. In other words, this second coming of Christ will take place before (pre) the establishment upon earth of Christ’s thousand year reign (millennium). Christians who accept the doctrine place emphasis on teachings of the Bible concerning the last days. A great majority of fundamentalists accepted the doctrine of Premillennialism as do most modern evangelicals.[3]

A second issue deepened the schism between the fundamentalists and modernists. In many of the large churches in America, the less affluent members began to feel uncomfortable with the spiritual direction of their churches that were led by people of wealth, position, and prosperity and who generally welcomed the triumphant progress of modernism within the church. Those who disagreed saw the heart of their religion rapidly disappearing, especially in the formulistic worship of the fashionable churches. It was because of these concerns that the “holiness” movement arose in Methodist churches around 1880. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, taught that Christians should strive for perfection. In other words, Christians should try to live lives that were holy in accordance with biblical teachings. But most Methodists of the era were little concerned with Christian perfection, and as a result much worldliness had entered their church. The leading men in the Methodist churches and the majority of the churches’ prominent ministers did not favor the holiness movement and generally embraced the modernists’ views. Those who clung to the fundamentalist orthodoxy became uncomfortable and felt forsaken in the spiritually cold atmosphere of their churches. They began to withdraw and form new denominations and fellowships. At least twenty-five Holiness and Pentecostal sects were started between 1880 and 1926. In 1894, eight smaller Holiness groups combined to form the Church of the Nazarene. Others protesting the increasing modernism of the large churches include those that formed the Assemblies of God (1914), the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ.[4]

Although the modernist-fundamentalist conflict was centered on biblical doctrines, the controversy soon spread to issues of control over congregations, church hierarchy, seminaries, missions boards, denominational institutions of higher educational, publishing houses, and ultimately control of entire denominations. Denominational battles were caustic, bitter, and highly publicized outside of the walls of the churches and produced long-lasting animosities and alienation between former friends and colleagues. The secularizers and their legions of political, journalistic, and academic fellow travelers strongly supported the modernist clergy and their cause in defeating the fundamentalist movement which was woefully unprepared to adequately defend the historical doctrinal positions of the church and became easy targets for modernists’ contempt and scorn.[5] Two significant battles between the modernists and fundamentalists played out in the 1920s and early 1930s and for a season caused the fundamentalist churches and clergy to abandon American culture to the humanistic worldview of the secularizers and the modernist churches’ heresies.

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

This was the title of a sermon preached in 1922 by modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick while pastor of New York City’s First Presbyterian Church. In his sermon he took aim at the heart of the fundamentalists’ doctrines by expressing grave doubts about the historic foundations of the Christian faith including the virgin birth, the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the atonement, miracles, and Bible as the Word of God. Fosdick was America’s most well-known liberal preacher, and his sermon represented a major escalation of the war between the conservative fundamentalists and the modernist liberals. The sermon was so far removed from accepted Presbyterian doctrines that the local presbytery was forced to investigate. But Fosdick was well entrenched in the upper echelon of the East Coast WASP establishment. Fosdick resigned to avoid censure and became the pastor of the prestigious Park Avenue Baptist Church attended by John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Foundation was presided over by Fosdick’s own brother.[6]

Rockefeller was in complete sympathy with Fosdick’s “progressive” modernists views and saw an opportunity to drive fundamentalism from New York. As a result, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the construction of a new church for Fosdick which opened in October 1930. The church has a 392-foot tower (twenty-two stories) containing the world’s largest carillon with seventy-two bells including the world’s largest bell. The church is located on the Hudson River at 120th Street and was adjacent to Union Theological Seminary and near Columbia University and Barnard, all bastions of liberal higher education and theology.[7] Publisher Henry Luce put Fosdick’s face on the cover of Time magazine. The New York Times coverage was highly enthusiastic in its admiration of Fosdick and Riverside Church. The Times writer described Fosdick as “…a new type of minister [that] is swift and strong and dynamic…” and represents a religion that “…grows with the growth of human knowledge…There is nothing that reeks of old parchments or ancient books of creed.”[8]

Just as Riverside Church was about to open, the battle between fundamentalists and liberals was in full swing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian who had passed his doctoral examination in theology at the University of Berlin in late 1927. After a year in Barcelona, Spain as the vicar of a local German congregation, he returned to Germany in 1929. However, in 1930, with a Sloane Fellowship in hand, the brilliant twenty-four year old theologian traveled to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There he was to experience firsthand and write of the massive battle raging in the 1920s and 1930s between the liberals and fundamentalists.[9] To Bonhoeffer, it was obvious that the professors and students at Union heavily favored the liberal views of Fosdick. But Bonhoeffer was appalled at their lack of serious scholarship with respect to truth and academic inquiry. He wrote,

There is no theology here… They [Union students] talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria…They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.[10] [emphasis in original]

Bonhoeffer described the theological atmosphere at the seminary as hastening the process of secularization of Christianity in America. He found the quagmire of secularization also occurring in the liberal churches of New York City.[11]

Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation [of the gospel]…

The fundamentalist sermon that occupies such a prominent place in the southern states has only one prominent Baptist representative in New York, one who preaches the resurrection of the flesh and the virgin birth before believers and the curious alike.

In New York they preach about virtually everything, only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.[12]

During the battle with the liberal clergy and their churches, there were several noteworthy defenders of the historic faith within the Presbyterian church. One was Dr. Walter Duncan Buchanan, pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church, six blocks south of Union Theological Seminary.[13] Another defender was J. Gresham Machen. In 1929, under Machen’s leadership, Westminster Seminary was established in Philadelphia to counter the growing modernism found at the Princeton Seminary. The struggle for leadership continued in the Presbyterian Church USA for several years until the fundamentalists were eventually defeated at the General Assembly of 1935. The modernists’ victory occurred because ministers, otherwise sound in doctrine, valued peace more than truth. But several who were true to the historic fundamentals of the faith left to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.[14]

Scopes “Monkey” Trial

The second battle was occurred in the public arena and became known as the Scopes “Monkey” Trial during the summer of 1925. John D. Scopes was a school teacher who had taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to his students in Dayton, Tennessee. Tennessee was one of several states that had enacted laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw this as a test case which could lead to overturning these laws and hired famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes.[15]

Darrow was a celebrated liberal-progressive and professed agnostic. The prosecution had called in a big-name of its own—William Jennings Bryan, the former Democratic Party presidential nominee who lost his bids for the White House in 1896, 1900, and 1908.[16] For the ACLU, the Scopes trial was a carefully plotted confrontational strategy designed to arouse its cultural modernist and civil libertarian sympathizers. The lead attorney for the ACLU characterized the trial as “…a battle between two types of minds—the rigid, orthodox, accepting, unyielding, narrow, conventional mind and the broad, critical, cynical, skeptical and tolerant mind.” The national media coverage of the trial heavily favored the modernists who claimed to hold the intellectual high ground. The Baltimore Sun sent the famed writer and social critic H. L. Mencken to cover the trial. Over the course of the trial Mencken’s scathing articles created a lasting caricature of Bryan and the fundamentalists in the minds of many Americans. Mencken portrayed Bryan and his followers as “rustic ignoramuses” as opposed to Scopes’ defenders who were described as enlightened guardians of American civil liberties. Mencken portrayed Bryan as “…a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity…” and who was “…deluded by an almost pathological hatred of all learning.” When Bryan died just five days after the trial, Mencken privately gloated, “We’ve killed the s*n-of-a-b*t*h.”[17]

As the trial continued, ever larger numbers of journalists arrived at Dayton. The New York Times blamed the media circus on Bryan and his supporters.

No one need be astonished to read of the influx of queer fish at Dayton, Tenn. It would seem that every freak and fanatic not already there is striving to arrive by the next train…Mr. Bryan has given the signal to thousands of unregulated or ill-balanced minds that there is a chance for them at last. No one can yet measure the impulse and encouragement to erratic thinking which the Dayton trial is giving. It is a sort of notice, posted up so the whole nation can read it, of the breakdown of the reasoning powers…But the demonstrated immense attraction at Dayton for all sorts of half-baked creatures, is an indication of the mental and moral infection which has been let loose upon the land, with Mr. Bryan as its chief agent…[18]

Most people view the Scopes trial as a huge loss for Bryan and those who upheld the biblical standard of truth. But, Scopes was convicted and fined $100. Fundamentalism survived but withdrew from cultural conflicts for several years.[19] In time they re-emerged and the evangelical cause would once again flourish by mid-century. But the falseness of Darwin’s theories on evolution continues to weaken in light of continuing new discoveries and reasoned thinking.

Nancy Pearcey described the mindset of the religious conservatives after the Scopes trial and the cultural dominance of theological modernism.

They circled the wagons, developed a fortress mentality, and championed “separatism” as a positive strategy. Then in the 1940s and 50s, a movement began that aimed at breaking out of the fortress. Calling themselves neo-evangelicals, this group argued that we are called not to escape the surrounding culture but to engage it. They sought to construct a redemptive vision that would embrace not only individuals but also social structures and institutions.[20]

Just as the modernist had lost their saltiness, the fundamentalists hid their light as they abandoned the culture and its institutions, and the forces of secularizing humanism were freed to wreak havoc in American culture.

Following the cultural turmoil that began in 1960s, many modern evangelicals began centering their redemptive efforts on the individual, not through a powerful presentation of the truth and authority of the gospel but through accommodation and catering to his felt needs. These evangelicals had either forgotten or ignored Paul’s admonition to the Romans: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” [Romans 12:2. KJV] And as did the fundamentalists of the early twentieth century, they have increasingly abandoned the culture and its institutions during the late twentieth century and twenty-first century to the present day.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 388.
[2] Ibid., pp. 388-389.
[3] Ibid. p. 389.
[4] Ibid., pp. 389-390.
[5] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 67-68.
[6] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 101-102.
[7] Ibid., p. 102.
[8] Richard W. Flory, “Promoting a Secular Standard,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 406-407.
[9] Metaxas, pp. 94, 101.
[10] Ibid., p. 101.
[11] Ibid., p. 105.
[12] Ibid., p. 106.
[13] Metaxas, p. 101.
[14] Kuiper, p. 391.
[15] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 671.
[16] Ibid., p. 559.
[17] P. C. Kemeny, “The Destruction of Moral Reform Politics,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 230-231.
[18] Flory, pp. 405-406.
[19] Johnson, p. 671.
[20] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 18.

We have written of the Protestant hegemony that dominated America life and its institutions up to 1870. But the so-called “common faith” that supposedly blanketed all denominations and their particular characteristics was in reality a weak facade which hid an American Protestantism that was deeply fragmented as they faced the coming assault by the humanistic secularizers between 1870 and 1930. The Protestant church was divided by denominations, geography, race, ethnicity, organizational types and methods, and social class lines. As the Protestant church began to experience loss of social power, cultural authority, and institutional influence, these various differences became polarized around two competing visions of Christianity and resulted in a modernist-fundamentalist split in the late nineteenth century which reached its rancorous end by the late 1920s.[1] As it had been for two thousand years of church history, the central issue was the truth and authority of the Bible. Just as the forces of the anti-religious Enlightenment exploited the two hundred years of strife within the church following the Catholic-Protestant split that began in 1517, those same anti-religious forces dressed in the clothes of modern humanism and secularism also exploited the division between the liberals and fundamentalists between 1870 and 1930.

The Liberals

The nineteenth century American Protestant church continued to face an ongoing intellectual and cultural challenge of its faith and traditions by humanistic philosophies. These philosophies entered the church in the thirteen century and expanded dramatically throughout Western civilization during the era of Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century and all of the eighteenth century. Thus, the mindset of the Protestant leaders who became the modernists-liberals was decades if not centuries in the making and not of a knee-jerk response to rising humanism and secularism in the late nineteen century.

The two great challenges to biblical Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century were Darwinian evolution and higher biblical criticism which had been absorbed by thousands of American students studying at German universities during the nineteenth century. Higher criticism explained Christianity as a product of evolving religious customs and ideas. Scripture was not divine revelation but a contemporary understanding of God in an evolving human culture. If the Bible did not reflect the modern understanding of the current evolutionary state of culture, the critics deemed the scriptures as an unreliable source of truth and therefore full of errors.[2] The liberal-modernist response to these intellectual and cultural challenges of the late nineteenth century was one of “survival through accommodation.” Christian Smith described the liberal-modernist dilemma.

…liberal and modernist America Protestants were not in calm waters throwing traditional orthodoxy overboard for the fun of it. They were rather trying to lighten the boat’s load to see if they could somehow keep it afloat amid the skeptical, positivist, and Darwinian gale blowing westward from Europe…It was their confrontation with these forces that decisively shaped their options and choices. And it was their intermediary social positions—maintaining social positions within Protestantism while simultaneously forming intellectual and social alliances with secular modernism—that made them crucial players in the process of secularization.[3]

To retain a modicum of social power, cultural authority, and institutional influence in the wake of the onslaught of humanism and secularism, the late nineteenth century liberal Protestant leaders and their churches began embracing secular human sciences (psychology and sociology) to lend credibility and cultural relevance to their religious pretensions.

Out of the Reformation came the Protestant allegiance to salvation through one’s faith in God as opposed to the salvation obtained through the clergy, the church, and its extra-biblical requirements. In Chapter 9 it was noted that four major themes were evident in the development of the American evangelical church which continue to shape its characteristics, patterns, and contours to the present day. The first of these was the focus on an intense emotional conversion experience which went beyond the Lutheran and Calvinist interpretations of earlier centuries. In the nineteenth century there was an increasing emphasis on salvation through an individual’s personal surrender to God. But something happened during the nineteenth century to change what surrender meant. The meaning of surrender had changed from being saved for a future kingdom to being a therapeutic, liberating “…shedding of emotional burdens in service of the kingdom within.”[4] Put another way, the focus changed from an eternal relationship with God to the health and well-being of one’s self in this life.

This change was a key factor through which the liberal Protestant ministers and their churches aided and encouraged the secularization process during the six decades between 1870 and1930. It was during this period that liberals tossed the future kingdom out of their doctrinal boat and at the same time ceded the kingdom within to the secularizing forces and their newly emerging human science of psychology.

The roots of early American psychologists were found in Protestantism, but in the era of Darwinian science, those psychologists rejected the tenets of the Christian faith held by their fathers. Most of the early American psychologists were the sons of Protestant pastors or had begun their education in training for the ministry. Many of the peers of these early psychologists entered the ministry but had become fully committed to psychology and its prescriptions for the “kingdom within.” Psychology was seen as a way to make Christianity more “scientific.” In this process, religion was redefined through psychology, and as psychology became the cultural authority, it also became the standard for religious truth.[5] As discussed in the previous chapter, the liberal church fully embraced the “big lie” which is humanism’s concept of a dichotomy of truth—religious truth and all other truth which deals with secular matters. For liberal Protestants, biblical truth was no longer total truth by which is meant a unified and integrated claim about all reality.

The Social Gospel movement was the liberal church’s response to radical social leaders who sought secular sociologists’ solutions to the economic and social problems of the masses. The liberal leaders of the social gospel movement attempted to apply biblical teachings to the problems of society during massive nineteenth century industrialization and social changes as discussed in Chapter 11. In 1917, Charles Morrison, publisher of the Christian Century, wrote of the liberal understanding of how social conditions should be molded.

As a teacher of religion, my liberalism extends in other directions also…in the direction of where modern social theories are breaking up the crust of established custom and introduction of the principles of reconstruction which …are bound to give us a plan of living together far happier and more just than the social scheme to which long ages have grown accustomed.[6]

Just as the liberal Protestants had used psychology to redefine salvation as the therapeutic, liberating “…shedding of emotional burdens in service of the kingdom within,” the redefinition of salvation also required a broken society to be reformed. This reformation was measured by social progress in which grace flowed from God not to the individual but to a culture that embraces Christian values. Society’s progress would subsequently lead to a better environment and make possible the redemption of the individual. As a consequence of these beliefs by the Protestant branch of sociology, reformers set about to fix the broken environment through legislation and social action. However, the social gospel movement was doomed from its beginning because the liberal Protestant reformers had been thoroughly baptized in the non-biblical and erroneous humanistic view that man was inherently perfectible but remained a victim of his environment.[7] The Protestant liberals not only believed in the essential goodness of man, they also looked to government as the source for social progress to address the ills of society.

The second branch was populated by the academic sociologists who wanted exclusive control of the new science of sociology. They were hardened followers of the Enlightenment philosophies, avowedly hostile to religion, and worked ceaselessly to undermine religious faith.[8] Because liberal Protestant social gospel activists believed that the “science” of sociology was a crucial means of re-engineering society, they saw the academic sociologists as valuable allies in reforming society as long as they did not deny spiritual reality or interfere with the work of the Kingdom of God. The liberal Protestant leaders’ trust in the good faith of academic sociologists to cooperate and share in the efforts of reforming society did not arise out of their innocence or gullibility. Rather, their liberal brand of religion was not based on what was theologically true but what was practical, useful, and worked in inspiring human action and social harmony.[9] Although the liberal Protestant leaders wanted to place their “Christian” stamp on social progress, they were willing to forgo their label if reforms (however misguided and damaging in the long term) were achieved by the humanistic solutions of the academic sociologists. One writer described the development of the social gospel movement’s casual attitude regarding theological truth and their willingness to mix the secular with the religious in reforming society.

A fresh study of the teachings of Jesus and their application to the salvation of society produced an awakening of the Christian social conscience. The whole movement was caused by an interpenetration of religious and social thought in the mutual application of Christian principles to society and of social principles to Christianity.[10] [emphasis added]

But by the mid1920s, the social gospel movement was essentially defunct as a liberal means of reforming society.[11] Thereafter, the liberal church surrendered to the secular sociologists and contented itself with a marginal supporting role in the shadows of humanistic social reform. It would concentrate its efforts on its commitment to psychology and man’s kingdom within.

Perhaps the greatest champion of the liberal Protestant church’s incorporation of psychology was Charles Clayton Morrison. In 1898, Morrison graduated from Drake College, a Disciples of Christ college in Des Moines, Iowa. While at Drake, Morrison was heavily influenced by H. O. Breeden, another Disciples pastor that supported evolution and higher biblical criticism. After graduation, Morrison began pastoring a local church while doing graduate studies in philosophy and psychology at the University of Chicago. While at the university, he was heavily influenced by John Dewey and other professors who led him to accept evolution and higher biblical criticism. In 1908, Morrison purchased the Christian Century, a small bankrupt Chicago publication serving three hundred Disciples of Christ subscribers. Morrison soon transformed the local publication into a national “undenominational journal of religion.” While blending theology with psychology, the Christian Century became the most influential Protestant journal in America over the next thirty years.[12]

For Morrison and his liberal colleagues, theology was about God, sociology dealt with the outer life, and psychology dealt with the inner-self life. Therefore, psychologists were the experts for the inner-self life, not theologians. By the 1920s, psychology was fully accepted as a part of American life, and this acceptance was fully supported by the Christian Century to the extent that the journal had begun publishing articles about psychology without mention of religion. Consistent with the mantra of psychology, sin was redefined.[13]

…living under the influence of subconscious instincts, desires and habits when the time has come to pass under the higher rule of reason and conscience…” Jesus was referred to as “…a supreme psychologist, in that he sought to liberate and sublimate the native powers of man and use their energy for higher ends—forging passion into power, and the cunning of greed into the strategy of righteousness. If the old exhortations no longer appeal, it is because the time has come for understanding, for a wiser approach, for a more Christ-like insight and skill.[14]

By 1938, Morrison had been the editor of the Christian Century for thirty years. The journal had attained great cultural prominence but at the loss of much of its Christian character. Although indistinguishable from many of its secular peers, the journal was recognized as the preeminent voice of mainstream American Protestantism. One year later, Morrison stunned his colleagues when he wrote “How My Mind Has Changed.” In the article he described the secularizing consequences of the publication on American Protestantism in which he and his staff had “…introduced and popularized psychology with a language of instinct and personality, which displaced the Christian theological language of morality and grace.”[15]

I had baptized the whole Christian tradition in the waters of psychological empiricism (pragmatism), and was vaguely awakening to the fact that, after this procedure, what I had left was hardly more than a moralistic ghost of the distinctive Christian reality. It was as if the baptismal waters of the empirical stream had been mixed with some acid which ate away the historical significance, the objectivity and the particularity of the Christian revelation, and left me in complete subjectivity to work out my own salvation in terms of social service and an “integrated personality”…

There was a genuine satisfaction in the procedure of translating Christianity into terms of psychological experience. It generated an unction of its own. I was relieving people of a burden—the burden of having to believe the historical particularities of Christianity. I was engaged in “simplifying” religion, and surely this was a worthy service. That I was really oversimplifying it by leveling down its objective particularities to a psychological common denominator, did not for some time occur to me. But the cumulative effect of this procedure gradually began to register in my consciousness. I found that, having baptized the Christian verity (truth) in the water of psychological experience, something seemed to have been washed away from it—something that belonged to it as a part of my Christian “inheritance.” The tang of history had gone out of it. Its peculiarity had gone. Its objectivity as something given to me from beyond myself had been reduced to my own subjective processes.[16] [emphasis in original]

The liberal Protestant leaders and their churches who sought survival through accommodation of the spirit of the world brought poisonous compromise to the few remaining vestiges of their long-abandoned doctrines and faith and produced a profane and powerless church that had lost its saltiness and was “…no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.” [Matthew 5:13b. RSV]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 66.
[2] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 426.
[3] Ibid., p. 67.
[4] Keith G. Meador, “My Own Salvation,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 272.
[5] Ibid, p. 282.
[6] Ibid., pp. 281-282.
[7] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States,” (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp.426, 444-445.
[8] Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education,” The Secular Revolution, pp. 106-107.
[9] Ibid., pp. 109-112.
[10] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), p. 261.
[11] Smith, p. 29.
[12] Meador, pp. 273, 277-278.
[13] Ibid., pp. 280, 301.
[14] Ibid., p. 301.
[15] bid., p. 302.
[16] Ibid., pp. 269, 296-297.