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.

The remarkable strength and vitality of the American church from its very beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620 until the mid-nineteenth century can be attributed to its success in resisting Satan’s two-fold attack that has plagued the church throughout its history since its birth 2000 years ago. The first attack comes from within through attempts to corrupt the doctrinal truths of the Bible and undermine unity within the body of Christ. The second attack arises from without through the assimilation and accommodation of worldliness in the church including the contra-biblical relationships between the church and state.

The humanistic spirit of the world became a cultural force that swept over the American Beulah Land during the last half of the nineteenth century. The enormous changes that occurred in the six decades between 1870 and 1930 profoundly transformed the way Americans thought and acted in all spheres of American life. By 1870 the nation had been guided for 250 years by a central cultural vision infused with the collective Judeo-Christian worldviews of the great majority of Americans since the Pilgrims undertook to establish a colony “…for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith…”[1] Protestant cultural authority was at its peak in 1870, but a brief sixty years later it had been relegated to the shadows within every institution of American life, despairing of approval and hoping only for an occasional hint of recognition from the new masters of American culture. The once prevailing Christian Protestant dominion had surrendered substantially all of its social power, institutional influence, and cultural authority and did so without much of a whimper. For the first time in American history a vast schism had developed between the religious and secular. How did this tragedy happen? Was it accidental or planned?

Who were the humanist secularizers and what was their agenda?

Christian Smith edited a book titled The Secular Revolution in which he and other authors describe the secularization of American public life. In the Preface of the book Smith identifies the instigators and their motives with regard to the enormous transfer of cultural power in America between 1870 and 1930.

…American public life was secularized by groups of rising scientific, academic, and literary intellectuals whose upward mobility—made possible by expanding industrial capitalism and an enlarging state—was obstructed by the Protestant establishment. Seeking to increase their own cultural authority and class autonomy—and to reinforce their own intellectual identities—these knowledge elites struggled to displace Protestantism’s authority and to advance themselves as new, alternative cultural authorities…What these secularizers were actually pursuing was not primarily a neutral public sphere, but a reconstructed moral order which would increase their own group status, autonomy, authority, and eventually income.[2] [emphasis added]

Smith divides these secularizing activists into two groups: intellectual elites who were members of the knowledge class (the scientific, academic, and literary intelligentsia of their day) and the romantic intellectuals comprised mostly of journalists, independent writers, and artists. The secularizing activists were found in many different groups and at different time periods during the six decades under discussion and were not all alike. Generally, they tended to be skeptical, free-thinking, antagonistic toward traditional authority and conventions, and sought the privatization or extinction of religion. But regardless of their individual motivations and priorities, they had all had drunk deeply from the well of the Enlightenment philosophies of humanism, materialism, positivism, and naturalism.[3]

What were the humanist secularizers assumptions and tactics?

A second question arises as to how these secularizing activists were so successful in wresting control of the culture from the Protestant establishments. Smith notes seven contributors to the secularization process.

• The source of all real knowledge is assumed to the product of science as defined by the aforementioned Enlightenment philosophies of humanism, materialism, positivism, and naturalism. Religion was no longer thought of as having a role in defining “true knowledge.” It had become irrelevant except for the supernatural, personal preferences, and values, all of which were outside of science and the production of new knowledge.

• Institutions of higher education began favoring “objective,” a-religious, and irreligious concepts of knowledge and marginalized religious concerns of morality and values.

• Mass primary and secondary education was transformed into a supposedly “neutral” arena which banished any discussion or practice of religious matters.

• The guardianship of public culture was removed from Protestant to secular hands as liberal political theory privatized religion and made it irrelevant to public deliberation.

• In the judicial sphere, secularists erected a strict wall of separation in which religion no longer had a voice in defining and guiding normal human relations as they involved the state.

• Secularists established a “naturalistic, psychologized model of human personhood” to give a new understanding of the human self and his care. The Protestant conception of man and his spiritual and moral health were banished as credentialed therapists and psychologists replaced the clergy in defining the nature of man.

• The centralization of corporately-owned print broadcast media caused a move away from religion-friendly reporting practices to a supposedly “objective” and “neutral” brand of journalism. As a consequence, religious and other perspectives oriented towards objective truth and biblical values were marginalized.[4]

Why were the humanist secularizers so successful in such a short period of time?

We have spoken of the Protestant domination of American life that had been achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps a more accurate description is the Protestant domination of American life by the evangelical populist churches, particularly the Methodists and Baptists which together had approximately fifty-five percent of all adherents to the Christian religion in the United States by 1850.[5] One may rightly ask how the secularist steamroller so easily and completely flattened 250 years of Protestant cultural supremacy in a relatively short span of sixty years between 1870 and 1930.

The American church following the end of the Civil War was at the height of its power and authority but was ignorant of and unprepared for the spirit of the world about to invade, overwhelm, and subdue it and the culture. The attack on the American church came from without in the form of various Enlightenment philosophies centered on humanism which rapidly captured the institutions of American life. Because the church did not recognize the spirit of the world in its generation, it was unprepared and failed to adequately defend the faith and American culture for which it was responsible.

The big lie: Duality of truth

The spirit of the world is a deceptive, lying spirit. When Satan attempts to deceive someone who is familiar with the truth, he chooses a more subtle attack in which a little truth is mixed with the lie to make it more palatable. Christian America of the 1870s revered the Bible and its truth and would not easily relinquish its beliefs in favor of an obvious lie. Satan chose to convince Christians that truth did not flow from a single authority but that there were two sources of truth—religious truth and all other (secular) truth newly revealed in an enlightened age of science and reason. In the secular segment were matters of the brain in which science and reason were located. These truths were considered to be public truth, objective by nature, and applied to everyone. The truths derived from science and human reason must be applied to the physical sciences, social sciences, politics, economics, and all other segments in the public life. The religious half of humanism’s dichotomy of truth was limited to matters of the heart in which its truths are oriented to the supernatural, are religiously based, and involve issues of value and personal morality. These include matters that are considered to be personal beliefs, non-rational, subjective, and have no basis in fact in the natural world and therefore privatized which is to say they have no voice in the affairs of the other spheres of American life.[6]

The church accommodates or ignores the big lie

Christianity’s declaration is and always has been that it is total truth—a unified and integrated claim about all reality. But in the early twentieth century, both liberal and conservative branches of the evangelical church embraced different elements of the concept of a dichotomous truth. On the one hand, liberal churches readily embraced the dichotomy of truth. The remaining conservative evangelical churches chose to ignore the big lie promoting a dichotomy of truth and isolated themselves from the culture at large.

Even though conservative evangelical churches ignored the big lie and withdrew from the culture at large, Nancy Pearcey convincingly presents a strong case that certain characteristics, trends, and patterns within the populist or conservative evangelical church existing from colonial times caused them to unconsciously accept certain elements of the humanistic heart/brain dichotomy of truth in which the religious realm is limited (and also trivialized) to matters of value and private preference.[7] As a consequence, the evangelical church has become powerless and lethargic because it does not recognize and understand the humanistic spirit of the world that continues to prevail in America since the 1870s. This has occurred because of a growing ignorance among evangelicals of Bible knowledge, the failure to challenge a hostile culture, and because of an accommodation of the spirit of the world within the churches.

One of the central purposes of this book is to expose the prevailing spirit of the world that has invaded the church. Only when the church understands the nature of the enemy and his attacks can it mount an adequate defense of the faith. This understanding will come only when the church recognizes the prevailing spirit of the world at work in the present generation. John warns against the world and what it has to offer, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the father but is of the world.” [1 John 2:15-16. RSV] Here we see the spirit of the world is centered on self, pride, power, human wisdom, fleshly desires, and anything else that stands against God, the Bible’s teachings, and His people.

In all of church history the spirit of the world has been its arch-nemesis whether the assaults came from within or without. Satan is the cunning master of deceit and temptation and continually refashions the spirit of the world so that it will appear as a new thing to be unconsciously accommodated and absorbed by the less vigilant of each generation. But, the spirit of the world remains unchanged beneath a shroud of lies and deceit. Whether absorbed by the church or an individual, it is similar to a narcotic that entices and thrills for a season but eventually enslaves and kills. Pearcey cut to the heart of the matter when she said that Christians are called to resist the spirit of the world but to do so we must first recognize the form it takes in our present day.[5] If the church is to survive and once again become a cultural force in America, the church body and its leadership as well as individual Christians must recognize and resist the spirit of the world in whatever form it takes in the church and in the culture at large.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Henry Steele Commager, ed., “Mayflower Compact,” Documents of American History, Vol. 1 to 1865, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 15-16.
[2] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 27.
[3] Ibid., pp. 1, 33-34.
[4] Ibid., p. 3.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 259.
[6] Ibid., pp. 20-21.
[7] Ibid., pp. 119, 255.
[8] Ibid., p. 118.

Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the Chaldeans, and into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and he shall take it… For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have only done evil before me from their youth: for the children of Israel have only provoked me to anger with the work of their hands, saith the LORD. [Jeremiah 32:28, 30. KJV]

Industrialization and societal change

J. M. Roberts in his definitive The New History of the World described the large-scale industrialization of the Western world that began in the late eighteenth century and lasted through most of the nineteenth century. He wrote that the magnitude of societal change produced by industrialization was the “most striking in European history since the barbarian invasions”…and perhaps the “…biggest change in human history since the coming of agriculture, iron, or the wheel.” These events included great strides in agricultural production, increasing population, technological advances, replacement of human and animal labor with machines, increasing specialization, production in larger units, and centralization of the means of production.[1]

The magnitude and rapidity of societal change described by Roberts was massively unsettling. The social fabric of whole societies was stretched or torn as populations shifted from agrarian life to crowded cities, new schools developed and educational requirements changed, and new social classes emerged as property and wealth were reshuffled to reflect new economic realities. During much of the nineteenth century, dislocation and human suffering were enormous and devastating to whole generations who experienced life in bleak industrial cities, exploitation of labor (particularly that of children and women), and loss of centuries of order more specifically defined as a loss of place and purpose.

Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, humanists’ claims of superior scientific knowledge and advancement spread seeds of doubt as to the truth and authority of God and His Word. Humanism offered answers different than those of Christianity to address the turmoil caused by rapid societal changes. The nineteenth century’s icons of the humanistic faith included Karl Marx and his The Communist Manifesto (1848) which promoted a godless communistic social order; Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species (1859) which presented the evolutionary origins of life devoid of a creator; Christopher Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895 and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. at the beginning of the twentieth century whose views elevated man’s law above God’s law; John Dewey and the progressive education movement which began in the 1890s and supported a humanistic philosophy of education in which man was not fallen but perfectible; and William James who divorced psychology and the study of human nature from the doctrines of the Bible in his Principles of Psychology (1890).

Although the Church reeled under enormous challenges, it did not quietly cede Western civilization to the flood waters of industrialization and false Enlightenment philosophies. From the earliest days of the industrial revolution, Christianity invaded the cities to not only save the soul but provide for earthly needs and address societal ills for the hurting masses. Compassion was the Christian innovation in all of history and an example of Christ’s concern for the hurting and sick. The new poverty of urban life in gritty industrial cities was perhaps no greater than that of the pastoral agrarian hovels of prior generations except for the loss of the soul. But the church’s efforts to recapture urbanized souls competed with the voices of the Enlightenment and its philosophy of humanism whose deceptive definitions of man and his purpose sought to poison his consciousness and relegate him to animal status with no soul and therefore no need of God.

But the answers given by the theories and theorists of humanism were far surpassed by Christian men and women whose lives were spent in unparalleled works of compassion. Nineteenth century icons of the Christian faith are too numerous to cite, but three will serve as examples of the church’s efforts. Lord Shaftsbury worked tirelessly for decades in Parliament to pass many bills that improved the lot of English children.[2] George Muller, a German who became a missionary to England in 1829, established his first orphanage for girls in 1836, and by the time of his death in 1898, eight thousand children in numerous orphanages under his direction were being educated and cared for.[3] The Salvation Army, founded in London in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth, provided worldwide relief for millions of the poor and destitute. Although General Booth died in 1912, his and his wife’s work continued and expanded into more than one hundred countries by the end of the twentieth century.[4] These are just few of the thousands within the church that immersed themselves in the grit and poverty of the nineteenth century to address vast societal changes which produced enormous human suffering and deprivation.

Trouble in Beulah Land

In America, the societal disruptions caused by industrialization were also beginning to be felt by the mid-nineteenth century but were somewhat lessened by the rapid westward expansion of the nation. However, the geographical and cultural divisions in America and the church caused by the Civil War increased the magnitude of societal disarray during the last half of the nineteen century and beyond. Restoration and unity of both the nation and church did not come easily, and it was decades before signs of healing would appear. The Northern and Southern churches continued to have different interpretations of the war and its outcome. Northerners viewed theirs as a righteous victory and themselves as guardians of the ideals embodied in the Constitution which were based on the same principles as found in Christianity.[5] Following the war main-stream Northern churches tended toward rectifying other ills of society through a growing involvement in matters of social justice but with a consequent loss of focus as it “…switched its emphasis from perfecting the inner man to social justice.”[6]

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the nation struggled with Reconstruction, a political system mired in patronage; rapid growth of large industries; an influx of large populations of foreign immigrants; migration from family farms to factories; and a host of other challenges to civil society. By the 1880s the intellectuals of the era birthed numerous reform movements. Many of the intellectuals came from mainstream Christian religions but virtually none from the Baptists, traditional Methodists, and others that held to a more fundamental understanding of the doctrines of Christianity. The mainstream Protestant reformers had generally absorbed the humanistic view that man was inherently perfectible but remained a victim of his environment. Therefore, these reformers set about to fix the broken environment through legislation and social action. With rare exceptions, the reformers came from families of wealth and privilege that had never experienced the poverty and hardships of life.[7] But the Protestant religious elite not only embraced a nonbiblical understanding of the nature of man, they also abandoned the poor to the responsibility and care of a secular state. The Protestant reformers looked to government as the solution as opposed to the church whose proper role was to minister to the poor (see: Matthew 25:35-40).

The larger social gospel movement arose from the early efforts of mainstream Protestant ministers to reform society through social justice. Having long abandoned the Bible’s claim of inerrancy in favor of higher criticism, they now saw it as merely a moral guidebook. And having dispensed with the importance of biblical doctrine, it was an easy step to have greater toleration and acceptance of the beliefs of other religions.[8] In the liberal churches, deeds had triumphed over doctrine which was contrary to the essence of the Reformation message.

Secularization of culture and decline of the church

In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville toured America for nine months to determine the source of its exceptionalism. His conclusions published in Democracy in America pointed to the centrality of religion, and Christianity in particular, in America life of the early 1830s. He believed that the spirit of Christianity was so completely identified with freedom that to think of one without the other was impossible. He saw Christianity and freedom as being in joint reign over the nation, and he believed America to be the most enlightened and free nation in the world because the Christian religion had the greatest real power of the people’s souls. And by Christianity in America, Tocqueville meant the Protestant religion with which the great majority of Americans identified themselves.[9]

In 1870, Protestantism was still the dominant power in culture and controlled the most important social institutions and much of private life. The republic was seen by many as a “triumphalist Christian America” as the Christian moral order had been institutionalized in almost all spheres of society. But the ensuing decades after 1870 witnessed a substantial decline in the Protestant establishment’s social power, institutional influence, and cultural authority.[10]

Christian Smith attributes this decline to two dramatic transformations in American society. The first was the ascendance of the humanistic view of knowledge and science in which religion could have no voice in defining “true scientific knowledge.” The second transformation occurred as Christian higher education was supplanted by a secular mass public educational system whose philosophy of learning and inquiry was markedly different from the Christian worldview. These twin transformations led to the eventual displacement of the Protestant cultural ethic in the “…nation’s scientific establishment, universities and colleges, public schools, judicial system, and mass media.”[11]

In the legal field, the “science of law” developed supposedly predetermined abstract principles to replace a judge’s mostly Protestant sense of justice. By 1910, “legal realism” allowed judges to base their decisions on secularized standards of justice and on changing social conditions as well, both of which viewed Protestant morality as being irrelevant. Publishers were no longer as strongly concerned with the Protestant establishment’s cultural sensibilities, conventions, and worldview. Publishers gravitated toward opinions and views of a newly emergent group of elite, young, and dissident literary intellectuals. [12] These various secularizing movements eventually cast their spell on all of American popular culture. Discarding generations of wisdom and infatuated with supposedly new freedoms, popular culture bowed to the new gurus of cultural authority found in Hollywood, the arts, advertising, journalism, and the social sciences. Whatever vestiges of Protestant influence that remained by 1930 continued to be scrubbed from American public life in the decades to follow.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 708-709.
[2] Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004), pp. 142-143.
[3] Ibid., pp. 132-133.
[4] Helen K. Hosier, William and Catherin Booth, (Uhrichsville, Ohio: Barbour Publishing, Inc., 1999), pp. 3, 192, 201.
[5] Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., A Shield and Hiding Place – The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies, (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 129-130.
[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. 244.
[7] “Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life,” The Secular RevolutionLarry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp.426, 444-445.
[8] Ibid., pp. 497-498.
[9] Alexis De, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 340, 343, 345.
[10] Christian Smith, “Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life,” The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 27.
[11] Ibid., pp. 27-28.
[12]Ibid.