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.
