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. http://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.

America the exceptional

John Quincy Adams expressed the sentiments of many of the Founders when he wrote of the importance of the Bible and Christianity in the nation’s founding.

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity…From the day of the Declaration…they (the American people), were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of their Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of conduct.[1]

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 the American church’s success in countering Satan’s twofold attack as previously described. The European reformers had begun the reformation process. The American church’s continued devotion to the Bible as the final authority of truth greatly influenced the formation of the political structure of the United States. As a result, America became most successful nation in the history of the world, and soon after its founding, many nations recognized the exceptional nature of the American Republic.

A Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States in 1831 to find out the reasons for America’s success. For nine months he traveled throughout the nation to observe all facets of life in America and wrote of his findings in Democracy in America.

On my arrival in the United States, it was the religious atmosphere which first struck me. As I extended my stay, I could observe the political consequences which flowed from this novel situation. In France I had seen the spirit of religion moving in the opposite direction to that of the spirit of freedom. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.

…America is still the country in the world where the Christian religion has retained the greatest real power over people’s souls and nothing shows better how useful and natural religion is to man, since the country where it exerts the greatest sway is also the most enlightened and free.[2]

Tocqueville’s first-hand account provided ample evidence that America’s exceptionalism was the result of the centrality of religion and especially Christianity in American life during the nation’s founding and first fifty years of its history.

How does one judge whether or not a nation is exceptional? Generally, a nation may be judged as exceptional when it is stable, prosperous, and free. Those marks of an exceptional nation are produced when a specific set of ideas and philosophies produce institutions and policies that are conducive to those qualities of stability, prosperity, and freedom. The critical element standing between a nation’s institutions and policies and the qualities a nation exhibits are the ideas and philosophies upon which the nation is guided. The ideas and philosophies that guided America were based on the Bible and Christianity and produced a nation that was the envy of the world.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to repeat an earlier caution. Although the scriptures are the wellspring of all truth, the church must not discard the wisdom and experience of generations of our Christian forefathers nor reject the church’s rich history and knowledge gained over the centuries which are invaluable to a right understanding of scriptures. The successes and failures of the church through the centuries serve to illuminate, explain, and confirm the Bible’s teachings.

As has been shown in previous chapters, Satan’s primary attack on the church centers on undermining the truth and authority of God’s Word and occurs both within and without the church.

The church is attacked from within – doctrinal errors and heresies

The church’s first challenge came almost immediately following its birth and came through challenges to the truth of biblical doctrines (dogma, creed, beliefs, principles, teachings).
Over the entire course of church history, various doctrinal errors and heresies sought to discredit, corrupt, or deny the inerrant Word of God. Over the centuries the church eventually elevated man’s reason to be equal or superior to the authority of the Bible in many areas which led to sin and corruption. The Reformation promised sola scriptura—the Bible alone. But the doctrinal embellishments and practices of the pre-Reformation church clung tenaciously to the reformed churches in Europe. The American colonists were eager to cast off these man-made hindrances and looked to the scriptures alone as to their authority in building “a pure and stainless church” undefiled and unencumbered by centuries of man’s wisdom and corruptions of doctrinal purity. As a result, church authority built on man’s reasoning and opinions no longer dictated church practices and defined doctrine apart from the scriptures.

The church is corrupted from without – mixing of church and state

Beginning in the fourth century, the church abandoned its proper scriptural role in society and relationship with governments and rulers which allowed the church to wield the sword of the state and the state to meddle in church affairs. This mixing of church and state lasted for more than a thousand years and was not entirely cast off by the Protestant reformers.

The most distinguishing feature of the Reformation Lutheran church was the power given to the state. Luther supported the principle that the state should be above the church. However, Calvinists took the opposite view and denied that the state had any power over the church. Calvin believed the church had power over the state. Both responses were nonbiblical as to God’s design of the roles of church and state in society and the relationship between them. The church must let the state bear the sword of state but at the same time admonish the state when it overreaches its proper biblical position and role in society.[3]

Because the first settlements of New England were small, isolated, and highly motivated by their desire for religious freedom, of necessity they tended toward governance through theocracy. At the beginning of the 1700s, those colonies founded upon religious purposes continued as theocracies but in a less stringent manner. The Great Awakening and the subsequent multiplication of new sects and denominations continued to lessen the influence of church-dominated civil governments which had substantially disappeared by end of the Revolutionary War or soon thereafter. With the ratification of the Constitution, a new relationship between church and state was established and was closer to the biblical model than had ever occurred in the history of the church.

The church is corrupted from without – the humanistic spirit of the world

The church had also been attacked from without as it absorbed many of the tenets of humanism. But, the colonists’ adherence to scripture alone as their source of authority stood as a bulwark against humanistic doctrines and influences. In spite of the American church’s resistance for over two hundred years, humanism became its greatest challenge during the latter half of nineteenth century and continues as such to the present.

To understand the devastating effects of humanism on Christianity and the nation, a brief examination of humanism’s meaning, origins, and history is necessary. This examination is important as it will give a better understanding of the forces of humanism at work in the modern church as well which will be discussed in later chapters. Because humanism has been such a central force in causing the decline of the church, some comments from prior articles bear repeating.

The humanistic spirit is of Satanic origin and has been present within human society since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden. It is the spirit of rebellion of man against God. The ancient Greeks made it a philosophy, and eventually humanism banished God altogether and placed man at the center of all things.

The Renaissance (generally dated as being the 1300s through the 1500s) was considered a rebirth or revival of learning and a time of transition between the Middle Ages and modern times. Beginning in Italy, it marked the humanistic revival of the classical influence of Greece and Rome that led to the flowering of the arts, literature, and modern science.[4] The Renaissance and post-Renaissance cultures were profoundly affected by the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers and thinkers who lived many centuries earlier. But along with the advancement of mankind, the humanistic emphasis fundamentally changed the way man thought of himself. He had become the center and focus of life in contrast to the biblical revelation of man’s position and relationship with God.[5]

Elements of this redefinition of man invaded the church as early as the thirteenth century through the thoughts and writings of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an outstanding Catholic theologian whose influence still dominates many within the Catholic Church.
Aquinas believed that man revolted against God and was fallen but not completely. He believed the will was fallen but the intellect was not. Therefore, in addition to the Bible, men could rely on human wisdom as well as the teachings of non-Christian philosophers. As a result philosophy was separated from the Bible and freed man to act autonomously.[6]

Aquinas revered the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Through Aquinas’ efforts, elements of Aristotle’s non-Christian philosophy began to be accepted by the church as a source of authority alongside the Bible. In searching for answers to the questions about life, Aristotle emphasized the meaning of individual things (the particulars) as opposed to biblical absolutes and ideals. Because Aquinas’s unfallen human reason was now autonomous and equal to revelation, many of the pronouncements of the church were based on pagan Greek and Roman philosophies, and eventually these became more important than many teachings of the Bible. But man’s fall was complete including his reason. Therefore, if one begins with man’s intellect to determine truth about the particulars (things, actions, e.g., a person’s individual acts) instead of the absolutes found in the Bible, there are no fixed standards for determining values, morals, and laws. In other words, there is no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong.[7]

Humanism’s entry into the church in the thirteenth century led to an increasing distortion of biblical teaching. When the authority of the church became superior to the teaching of the Bible, fallen man was told he was able through his own reasoning to return to right relationship with God by “meriting the merit of Christ.”[8] In time this focus on understanding the meaning of the particulars without benefit of God’s revelation dominated all spheres of life.[9]

Renaissance humanism continued to strengthen and cries for a complete separation of man’s reason from God’s revelation prepared the way for the rise of modern humanism during the Enlightenment in which man declared himself to be a totally independent being and denied God’s existence.[10] France was humanism’s epicenter, but all of Western Europe was affected. The era of Enlightenment is generally considered to have lasted from the late 1600s through all of the 1700s. Although a relatively short period, the Enlightenment has had monumental destructive consequences for the church that continue to the present day. The Enlightenment produced a strong intellectual confidence in the power of human reason which was reflected in its doctrines of progress, rationality, secularism, and political reform.[11]

This witch’s brew distilled from the swirl of the intellectual ferment and political turmoil of the Enlightenment era produced the philosophy of modern humanism in which all authority must be continually questioned, moral values do not arise from fixed ideas of right and wrong, and man is declared not fallen but perfectible and continually progresses through the accumulation of knowledge from scientific advances and human reason.

In 1949, Dr. Corliss Lamont wrote The Philosophy of Humanism in which he defined the humanistic philosophy by listing a number of propositions that gave humanism’s explanation of the universe, man’s nature, and treatment of human problems. The following are some of Dr. Lamont’s key tenets: All forms of the supernatural do not exist. Nature is the totality of being. Man is the evolutionary product of Nature. There is no conscious survival after death. Through reason and the scientific method, man can solve his own problems. Human values are derived from man’s earthy experiences and relationships and therefore are not absolute or universal. Happiness, freedom, and progress in this world are the highest goals of all mankind.[12]

It was the humanism of the French philosophers’ that built the framework for the disaster known as the French Revolution. Shouts of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” became the reality of “monarchy, anarchy, dictatorship” all within the space of a little over a decade. However, it was the ideas and philosophies derived from the Bible and Christianity that guided the American Founders, led to the Constitution, and produced the greatest nation in the history of the world. Historian Paul Johnson wrote of the core difference between the two revolutions.

The essential difference between the two revolutions is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event. That fact was to shape the American Revolution from start to finish and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being.[13]

Consequences for the nation if the pillars of Christianity are overthrown

John Jay co-authored the Federalist Papers and was the first Chief-Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He described the consequences to America should it ever allow the overthrow of the pillars of Christianity upon which the nation was founded.

To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness, which mankind now enjoys…Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government—and all blessings which flow from them—must fall with them.[14]

Over two hundred years later Jay’s caution appears to have been prophetic for the forces of humanism and secularism have chipped away at the pillars of Christianity for the last 150 years to such an extent that our civil freedoms and republican forms of government are near collapse in twenty-first century America.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 340, 343, 345.
[2] William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, (Coppell, Texas: Fame Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 18.
[3] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 184, 200.
[4] “renaissance,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1963), p. 725.
[5] Francis A. Schaffer, How Should We Then Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 1976), pp. 40, 51.
[6] Ibid., pp. 51-52.
[7] Ibid., pp. 52, 55.
[8] Ibid., p. 56.
[9] Ibid., pp. 60, 71.
[10]] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 101.
[11] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D. C.: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), pp. 348-349.
[12] Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, Eighth Edition, (Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1997), pp. 13-14.
[13] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 116-117.

To understand the dominant Protestant paradigm and its characteristics that existed in 1870, we must understand the main currents of Christianity in America that began with the Pilgrims and developed through the three Great Awakenings. The first current began with the early Reformation churches planted in America in the early seventeenth century. These were the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians (Anglican), but their religious fervor and commitment cooled as native-born second and third generation colonists replaced their European-born parents during the last half of the 1600s. The second current grew from the stirrings of revival that blossomed within the church during the 1720s. These stirrings became a renewal movement called evangelicalism and birthed the First Great Awakening that began in the 1730s. Evangelical churches emphasized a revivalist style of preaching, personal conversion, personal devotion and holiness, and individual access to God which deemphasized the importance and authority of the church.[1] Separate from these two currents was another group known as confessional churches which did not participate in the revivalist movements but emphasized their official and churchly characteristics. Confessional churches included Catholics, Lutherans, German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Old Side Presbyterians.[2]

The evangelical movement developed two branches of its own. The populist churches were strongly revivalist, appealed to the common people, did not emphasize doctrine, and were strongest in Southern states. These churches were mostly Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and “Christian” churches. Although evangelical, the second group was more rationalist and scholarly. These churches were found mostly in the north and included the evangelical segments of Congregational, New Side Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches and are generally viewed as having a traditional emphasis on theology and scholarship.[3]

The populist wing of evangelicalism became the dominant branch of Christianity in America by the end of the American Revolution and establishment of the American republic. In 1760, the Anglican, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches accounted for more than forty percent of all American congregations but declined to less than twenty-five percent by 1790. However, the number of populist churches grew dramatically. The Baptists grew from forty-nine churches in 1760 to 858 by 1790. The Methodists went from having no churches to over 700 congregations during the same thirty year period. Gordon Wood wrote of this period, “The revolution released more religious energy and fragmented Christendom to a greater degree than had been seen since the upheavals of seventeenth century England or perhaps since the Reformation.” Others called the period a “…Revolutionary Revival.”[4]

Nancy Pearcey lists four major themes in the development of the American evangelical church which continue to shape its characteristics, patterns, and contours to the present day.

…the focus on an intense emotional conversion experience; the celebrity model of leadership; a deep suspicion of theological learning, especially as embodied in creeds and confession; and an increasingly individualistic view of the church, which borrowed heavily from the political philosophy of the day.[5]

Focus on an intense emotional conversion experience

Populist evangelicals saw spiritual emotion as a necessary antidote for spiritual coldness during the First Great Awakening. Although the rise of rise of the evangelical church occurred at a time of spiritual coldness within the dominant, state-oriented churches, it must be remembered that America remained a highly religious enterprise even as a wave of spiritual coldness settled on its churches in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The means of renewal of the church became a contentious battle between the revivalists who demanded a heart-felt, on-the-spot decision for Christ and those churches who traditionally favored gradual growth in one’s faith through participation in rituals and teachings of the church. One emphasized a new birth; the other “Christian nurture” through faith and holiness.[6] But the rationalist-contemplative-scholarly wing of the American church had had its day. The evangelicals prevailed, birthed the Great Awakening, revitalized the church from its spiritual coldness, prepared the way for the Revolution, and changed America forever.

The appeal to emotion was also an important ingredient during the Second Great Awakening. Here the evangelicals’ target was pervasive sinfulness in the new nation and not, as George Whitefield had said a half century earlier, the ministers and people of New England who “…rest in a head knowledge, and are close Pharisees.”[7] The spirit of the age had changed from spiritual coldness preceding the First Great Awakening to brazen sinfulness of the citizens and former soldiers within the newly-formed nation. Additionally, most of the hardy and unlearned pioneers, adventurers, and outlaws that populated the expanding western territories did not have the civilizing influences of schools, churches, governments, and families. For these rank sinners on both sides of the Appalachian Mountains, salvation was a decision, not a process, and emotion was an essential ingredient in making an effective religious appeal. “You grab people by the throat with an intense emotional experience to persuade them of the power of the supernatural—then you tell them to stop drinking, stop shooting each other, and live straight.” The intense emotional experience used by the early evangelicals in converting people to faith in Christ was highly effective.[8]

The emotional aspects of living the Christian life have always been a central element in the lives of believers and the church body. However, when believers and the church body focus substantially on emotion alone, they foster a neglect of theology and doctrine which inevitably leads to emotional shallowness and manipulation by man.

The celebrity model of leadership

George Whitefield is the first and best example of a celebrity-style leader that emerged from the early evangelical church. In contrast to the reserved, somber preaching style of his day, Whitefield’s preaching was flamboyant, animated, passionate, and sought to inspire mass audiences of lost sinners rather than instruct a congregation of the faithful even though he counted many of those as “close Pharisees.” Although Whitefield relied on self-promotion and publicity to spread his message, this was necessary to reach the multitudes in a sparsely populated rural environment, make them aware of their sin, and lead them to repentance and acceptance of Christ as their savior.

Charles Finney was a celebrity-style leader like Whitefield. Finney took the camp meeting style preaching to the cities in the first half of the nineteenth century during the midst of the Second Great Awakening. His preaching was less revivalist and more calculated in presentation. A former lawyer, Finney always dressed in a suit, presented a message that was polished, refined, and targeted the professional and middle classes. Revivals following the early years of the Second Great Awakening were more of a planned event than a spontaneous move of the Spirit. Finney believed the results of revival were not to be left to chance but depended on the correct use of the appropriate means.[9] Although Finney was more refined than Whitefield, he was just as passionate about his message, and a recurring theme in that message centered on the abolition of slavery in America. For Finney and many others in the first half of the century, it was a cause whose time had come. And Finney used every means appropriate to spread that message.

Since the emergence of evangelicalism in the early 1700s, the celebrity-style of leadership has been very effective in enlarging Christ’s kingdom in many venues and environments where pastors, local churches, and other Christian organizations could not reap the same results. Those that cast stones at all celebrity-style leaders in the church should read biographies of George Whitefield, John Wesley, and others who devoted lifetimes to the cause of Christ amidst hardship and sacrifice. However, with some notable exceptions, the celebrity-style leaders in the modern church bear little if any resemblance to those giants of the First and Second Great Awakenings.

A deep suspicion of theological learning, especially as embodied in creeds and confession

The heightened emotional element and attacks on non-evangelical churches in the first two Great Awakenings eventually tended to give rise to charges of anti-intellectualism in evangelical churches. In their efforts to arouse churches and their members from the prevailing spiritual lethargy prior to and during the Great Awakening, evangelical preachers often characterized the pastors and congregations of the wealthier, intellectual, confessional, and state-oriented churches as elitist and bound by needless rituals, traditions, and creeds.[10]

Whatever the shortcomings of those churches in that season of American church history, the early evangelicals painted with too broad a brush and in the larger sweep of history did lasting damage to all segments of the church and particularly to the evangelicals themselves. They instilled a lasting suspicion of theological learning, doctrine, creeds, and the history of the church. Evangelicals are much the poorer for their rejection of the knowledge to be gained from the writings and teachings of the great minds of the Christian past which are invaluable to understanding of scriptures. Evangelicals that label church history as irrelevant to the message of the modern church have not benefited from a study of the great successes and failures of the church through the centuries which serve as priceless lessons that both illuminate and elaborate upon the Bible’s great themes and teachings.

An increasingly individualistic view of the church

Eighteenth century American evangelicals exhibited a particularly strong individualistic view of the church. The origins of this view are found in the Reformation’s chant of the “priesthood of all believers” which removed salvation from the jurisdiction of the king, priest, or church and placed it squarely in man’s own hands. This spirit of individualism was carried across the Atlantic with the Puritans whose churches adopted the congregational as opposed to the episcopal form of church government. With the rise of the First Great Awakening, populist evangelicals carried this concept of individualism to a new level as it began attacking church authority. From there the drive for individualism eventually undercut the natural authority of learning and scholarship and led to an anti-intellectual mindset among many in the church.[11]

Coinciding with the individualism manifesting itself within the church, there arose a growing sense of individualism in the political realm. The colonists had prospered and grown fond of the freedoms they had gained due to benign neglect from their distant homeland. As Great Britain roused itself and began tightening its authority and control over its colonies, the colonists’ grievances began to multiply as they saw many injustices in the newly imposed restraints and requirements. Soon these grievances and objections turn to phrases such as “inalienable rights” which were not bestowed by kings or parliaments and led to revolution.

The symbiotic relationship between religious and political individualism was instrumental and necessary in preparing the colonists for the American Revolution during the eighteenth century. However, the lingering and exaggerated individualism within the church in the nineteenth century became very destructive because the church did not adapt its response to changes in Satan’s tactics in attacking the church. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the spirit of the world now promoted a humanistic worldview centered on man and cloaked in the robes of science and reason. Exalting self and resting on a false view of God, man, and freedom, the new humanistic individualism eventually seduced and compromised the individualism of its religious and political predecessors.

Remnants of eighteenth century political individualism absorbed by the church continue to affect it today and has produced fragmentation within the body of Christ (between the church, pastor, and laity), undermined the unity of families as one’s religion became a matter of individual choice, and encouraged a “do-it-yourself” religion with regard to sin, salvation, and living the Christian life.
______

The American church from the early colonists through the mid-nineteen century was highly successful at warding off the spirit of the world, but Satan changed the demeanor of the spirit of the world by the middle of the nineteenth century. The dominant Protestant evangelicals did not recognize those changes and clung to their eighteenth century muskets as the European forces of humanism took aim at Christianity with their nineteenth and twentieth century cannons of humanism. As a result, the church was unprepared to resist those new challenges and thus failed to adequately defend the faith and the central cultural vision (collective Christian worldviews) of the Founders. Consequently, the America church progressively surrendered its social power, institutional influence, and cultural authority between 1870 and 1930.

It has been 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the last major sustained spiritual renewal in America. Under significant and sustained attack for more than a century, the American church has arrived at a time of crisis and is in danger of being overwhelmed by modern government and culture. The responsibility for the church’s weakness and the deterioration of American moral culture lies primarily at the door of the church. With the next chapter we begin a transition from a historical perspective of the church to events and circumstances beginning in the mid nineteenth century and lasting to the present day that have led to the afflictions, failings, and weakness of the modern American church and caused its demise as a moral force necessary to stem the decline of American culture.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), pp. 253, 256-257.
[2] Ibid., p. 257.
[3] Ibid., p. 256.
[4] Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.185-188.
[5] Pearcey, p. 274.
[6] Ibid., p. 269.
[7] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), p. 54.
[8] Pearcey, p. 263.
[9] Ibid., pp. 265-266, 287-288.
[10] Ibid., p. 265.
[11] Ibid., p. 270.

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah…[Isaiah 62:4. KJV]

For all of its history, a principal battle for the Christian church has been the preservation and defense of biblical truth. For centuries the European church fought among themselves and with their respective governments or kings all the while accumulating wealth, power, and worldliness. Following centuries of neglect, compromise, and corruption of the sustaining power of pristine biblical truth, the decline of the church worsened as it came under the influence and eventual domination of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought and its religion of humanism. For many of the faithful, Europe and the state churches had become wicked Babylon and a new colony at the edge of the vast American wilderness was seen as a Beulah land, a new Jerusalem favored and blessed by the Lord. And so it was to be for a season.

It all began as a tiny ship approached the shores of a primitive continent called America. Historian Paul Johnson in his massive A History of the American People called the arrival on December 11, 1620 of an old wine ship at New Plymouth as “…the single most important formative event in early American history.” The Mayflower contained a mixture of thirty-five English Calvinist Christians including some who had lived in exile in Holland to escape religious persecution in England. All were going to America for religious freedom. They were Separatist Puritans who had despaired of reforming the Church of England and its episcopal form of government and heavy influence of Catholic teaching. They were accompanied by sixty-six non-Puritans. The two groups contained forty-one families.[1]

The Pilgrims weren’t the first colonists to arrive. In 1607 the first English colony was established at Jamestown by gentlemen-adventurers, indentured servants, and landless men attempting to better themselves. The best men of the Jamestown colony brought with them English traditions of fair-mindedness, freedom, reverence for the common law, and a sense of government that looked to the common interest and general needs of society. But the Puritans of Plymouth were completely different as to personality and motivation. Johnson described their various members as “…the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints…immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous…creative too but ideological and cerebral, prickly and unbending, fiercely unyielding on occasions.”[2]

Paul Johnson’s belief in the singular importance of the Pilgrims’ arrival as the formative event in early American history rests on the monumental influence of the Pilgrims in shaping future generations of Americans. The Pilgrims established the model for faith, family, community, and governance which was followed to a large degree by Americans over the next two hundred years. They came not as individuals but as a community and not primarily for earthly gain but to create God’s kingdom on earth. This sense of community was formalized in a remarkable document signed barely three weeks before their arrival. Having endured two months of a winter voyage in the turbulent North Atlantic amid the discomforts of a tiny and crowded ship, forty-one heads of households gathered in the main cabin of the ship and signed the Mayflower Compact which pledged them to unity and the provision of a future government.[3]

In the Name of God, Amen…Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country…Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politic, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.[4] [emphasis added]

Here we see that the Mayflower Compact represented far more than just a commercial venture based on a secular civil arrangement to secure unity and a form of governance for the moment. The Pilgrims had solemnly and mutually pledged in the presence of God and each other to a “civil Body politick” under “just and equal laws…[for the] furtherance of the glory of God.” This simple document foreshadowed a theme that reverberated throughout the colonies over the next 150 years and led to the American Revolution. It put forth the idea that a just and equal society must rest on the foundation of religious faith. It recognized that government flowed from the governed—under God. It also recognized that there was a close connection between government and religious faith.[5] But for a time the colonists struggled to discover how the church-state relationship was to be properly constituted and limited according to the tenets of the Bible.

The Pilgrim Separatists were a humble people and often viewed as radicals because of their desire to separate from the Church of England as opposed to most Puritans who wanted to stay in the church and reform it from within. This second group formed the great migration of English Puritans beginning in 1628 upon the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many were able men with wealth and social position. Twenty thousand had crossed the Atlantic by 1640 and resided in the Salem area. They would not separate from the Church of England but wanted separation from its corruption. If they could not reform the church in England, they would bring the church to America and change it to their liking. One of those changes was borrowed from the much despised small band of radical Pilgrim Separatists—the congregational form of church government.[6]

The English Puritans had arisen in 1560 within the Anglican Church and sought reforms to bring about “a pure and stainless church.” When the Church of England did not respond favorably to the Puritans ideas of reform, many sailed to America during the first half of the 1600s. Sherwood Eddy called those early years of colonial Puritanism “…the finest expression of spiritual life that Britain or America or Continental Europe had at that time.”[7] But by the end of the 1600s and beginning of the 1700s, interest in the colonists’ hard-won Christian legacy was eroding due to a decline of religious fervor and to a lesser extent because of the assault by the forces of deism and the Enlightenment. The ardor and commitment of the religious life of the early seventeenth century colonists had settled down into a moralistic Christian routine by the end of that century and into the early eighteenth century.[8] Eddy described the dismal condition of the church.

There was a gradual loss of the sense of sin, and the idea of God’s sovereignty became a means of oppression by the ecclesiastical oligarchy…The children of the hardy pioneers became softer and more worldly. The unregenerate second generation were allowed to remain in the church as members though not in full communion. Thus originated the halfway covenant with a mixed membership of a more all-inclusive church that had lost the purity of a separated regenerate sect.[9]

In 1740, one hundred and ten years after the arrival of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, evangelist George Whitefield wrote, “Boston is very wealthy. It has the form but has lost much of the power of religion. Ministers and people are too much conformed to the world. There is an external observance of the Sabbath. Many rest in a head knowledge, and are close Pharisees.” [10]

Whitefield’s remarks about worldliness in the church would also apply in varying degrees to the remainder of the American colonies. The decline in religious fervor that had enveloped the American colonies reached its nadir by the early part of the eighteenth century. But the decline of religious life was dramatically reversed as new religious forces exploded on the scene in the 1730s and caused a revival and resurgence of Christian churches. As these forces combined and grew over time, it became known as the Great Awakening and was the major formative event that crafted the worldview of the founding generation.[11] Sherwood Eddy captures the importance of the American religious awakening during the eighteenth century upon the Revolution and later writing of the Constitution:

Throughout the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, the religious and the secular life of America could not be separated. The very ideals of political freedom had grown out of the principle of religious liberty of the Reformation and out of the experience of the Pilgrims, Puritans, and protesting colonists. It was in the churches of Boston and Virginia that revolutionary meetings were held. The clergy of the free, dissenting, and popular churches were preaching liberty as a religious principle. The pulpit inspired the Revolution and summoned the faithful to patriotic service and to the realization of the American Dream.[12]

Following the American Revolution (1776-1781) and efforts to form a new nation, there was a second ebbtide of religious fervor and an increase in secularism and irreligion, especially in the decade of 1790s. America’s spiritual and moral decline threatened the survival of the new republic. As a result of coordinated and concerted prayer among the American churches, the Second Great Awakening crossed the Atlantic in the late 1790s and resulted in a spiritual and moral regeneration and initiated other civilizing influences on the young nation. These influences included popular education, Bible Societies, Sunday schools, the modern missionary movement, and ultimately sowed and nurtured the seeds that led to the abolition of slavery.[13] Just as the Great Awakening was the formative moment in American history preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible, the Second Great Awakening was the stabilizing moment that saved the new nation from political and moral destruction and whose effects lasted until the 1840s.

The Third Great Awakening began in 1857-1858 and has been called by many names including the Businessman’s Revival, the Layman’s Revival, and the Union Prayer Meeting. But it is most widely known as the Revival of 1857-1858. Much like the central theme of the Protestant Reformation, this revival was about personal religious transformation from which society greatly benefited. It must be remembered that the ordering of society and the addressing of its social ills must begin with the individual and an ordering of his soul in right relationship with God. This must certainly be the greatest impact of the Revival of 1857-1858 as the nation was soon to be immersed in its greatest struggle for survival.

The Third Great Awakening was the sustaining moment that prepared the nation to endure the national conflagration of the Civil War and made possible its survival in the war’s aftermath. The efforts to abolish slavery in America began even before the nation’s Founding as a result of the moral suasion of Christian people who saw slavery as morally unacceptable within the biblical worldview. The Revival caused men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming struggle in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 28-29.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 29.
[4] Henry Steele Commager, ed., “Mayflower Compact,” Documents of American History, Vol. 1 to 1865, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 15-16.
[5] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp. 27-28.
[6] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 328.
[7] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), pp. 48, 56.
[8] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D. C.: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), p. 333.
[9] Eddy, p. 55.
[10] Ibid., p. 54.
[11] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Press, 2011), pp. 123-124.
[12] Eddy, p. 115.
[13] J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,” http://articles.ochristian.com/article8330.shtml (accessed November 26, 2010); Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, pp. 410-411.

The Reformation churches establish themselves in Europe

The outworking of the Reformation was unique within each country in continental Europe, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. The extent of reform depended on the strength of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church and the attitudes of the populace toward the church in each of the affected countries. It also depended on which branch of the Reformation churches became the most influential in the affairs of reforming the church. Some may have been directly influenced by the work of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and other early reform leaders while other late-comers to the Reformation were influenced by the followers of those early leaders.

Although the reformers readily affirmed their allegiance to “the scriptures alone” as the authority of the church and living the Christian life, it was far more difficult matter to shed centuries of church practices that conflicted with or undermined faithful adherence to the scriptures. Therefore, the implementation of the reforms in the new Protestant churches often carried with it many of the old ways of doing the business of church. By 1550, the church in the west had settled into three branches: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism (Christianity allied with the state), and Calvinism (theocracy). The branches were similar in that each was a compulsory religion, had strong ties with the state in one way or another, and attempted to use the state to impose a religious monopoly.[1]

In countries with a strong Catholic-state alliance, Protestantism made little if any headway. Spanish royalty was predominantly Catholic and virtually exterminated Protestantism through the Inquisition in the 1550s. Protestantism in the Italian states was shunned by the aristocracy and was of small concern and consequence. France was ruled by a Catholic monarchy but the aristocracy became divided because some sections of France were ruled by Huguenots which comprised over ten percent of the nation’s population that heavily favored Calvin’s brand of reformation. After three internal wars separated by intermittent periods of peace, the Huguenots of France won official tolerance for their faith by the 1590s. However, this was short-lived as the monarchy was Catholic and subsequent leaders embraced a more severe interpretation of papal power and cancelled the edict. In 1559 the Scottish nobility sided with Calvin’s disciple John Knox and rose up against Catholic domination. Protestantism became the state religion of Scotland in 1562. In the Netherlands, Protestant resistance against the Catholics began in the 1560s. As the religious divisions and conflicts grew across Europe, the common theme of the church (whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic) was to look to the sword of state for assistance. As a result, civil and international war became the norm until the late seventeenth century.[2]

The origin of the bonds between church and state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came about whenever one of the three contenders for the allegiance of a nation’s citizenry successfully allied itself with the bearer of the state’s sword. Similar to the mass conversions to Christianity under Constantine in the fourth century Roman Empire and the Christianizing of the barbarians during the middle ages, membership in Protestant churches during those early years of the Reformation was largely the result mass conversions. When the ruling entity (a prince, city council, or state) decided to join the Protestant reformation movement, the ruling entity brought all of the people within their domain into the churches. These mass conversions were mostly of membership in name only and not true conversions and commitments to Christ. As with earlier mass conversions in the church’s history, the Protestant mass conversions brought much worldliness into the church.[3]

The years between 1520 and 1562 were a time of bloody martyrdom for the Protestants. But the worst was to come between 1562 and 1648 when Protestants fought for their very survival.[4] In a belated and half-hearted effort to reunite the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestants, Pope Paul III called for a council to consider reforms within the church in the little town of Trent in the mountains of northern Italy. With two interruptions of several years each, the council lasted from 1545 until 1563. The council developed a creed and a new catechism (religious instruction) for the church. The religious abuses that had caused much of the trouble for the church were corrected, and provision was made to better educate the clergy. Although great reform had been accomplished, the essential character of the church remained unchanged which was considered a triumph for the papacy.[5] The efforts of the Catholics at Trent revitalized the church following the shock of the Reformation and spurred its efforts to stamp out Protestantism. Between 1562 and 1618, the Calvinistic Protestants suffered the greatest martyrdom. In 1618, the Lutherans were also dragged into the conflict with the Catholics. The Catholic-Protestant wars eventually ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia which fixed much of the boundaries of Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism in Europe to the present day.[6]

The Reformation in England

We have reserved for last a discussion of the struggle between Catholics and Reformation-era Protestants for dominance in England. The progress of the Reformation and rejection of papal authority generally was a grass roots affair in every country as most rulers were aligned with the Catholic hierarchy. But the Reformation in England was unique in that it became the first nation-state to reject papal authority but not the church’s doctrine or form of worship.

Henry VIII was eighteen when he became king of England in 1509 and ruled for thirty-eight years until his death in 1547. Henry became embroiled in a controversy with the papacy because of his desire to divorce his long-time first wife and marry Ann Boleyn (second of six marriages) with the hope of producing a male heir to inherit the throne. Failing to receive a timely reply from the Pope, the powerful monarch took matters into his own hands and pushed the Parliament to rubber-stamp the necessary legislation which decreed that Henry was the supreme head of the Church of England. His actions were not meant as a rejection of Catholicism for he had previously rejected Luther’s concept of the church. But Henry’s proclamation of royal supremacy over the church effectively separated the English church from Rome and led to the dissolution of monasteries and the confiscation of church property which Henry sold to the aristocracy and gentry.[7]

Henry’s view of the Church of England (also called the Anglican or Episcopal Church) was that it was still Catholic in doctrine but now rested on the supremacy of the king and his descendants. Henry’s wished for heir (Edward VI) was born in 1537 to his third wife. Edward assumed the throne at age nine upon Henry’s death. Edward lived to be only fifteen and was succeeded by a half-sister in 1553. During his short reign Reformation sentiments grew throughout England. Queen Mary was thirty-seven when she ascended the throne but ruled only five years until her death. Her pronounced Catholic sympathies pushed for a reversion to papal authority. She was called “Bloody Mary” because of her burning of Protestant heretics. Mary’s younger half-sister Elizabeth I became queen in 1558 at age twenty-five and ruled England for the next forty-five years. Elizabeth’s returned the Church of England to the model that matched her father’s position on the supremacy of the monarchy over the church. Many Catholics were martyred not because their beliefs were considered heretical but because they were judged as traitors to the crown by rejecting the supremacy of the crown over the church.[8] Although Henry thought Luther a heretic, many Protestants believed Henry’s rejection of papal authority was a step, however feeble, in reformation of the church. [9]

It appears that the English Reformation was the result of royal intrigues and politics of government, kings, and queens. But perhaps reformation is too strong a word for what had happened in England. The Church of England considered itself neither Protestant nor fully Catholic for the changes were more political and organizational than religious and doctrinal. As a result, unrest and desire for freedom from the strictures of the Church of England continued for a long time after the Reformation had run its course and become settled in other countries. Those members of the Church of England who pushed for a more thoroughly purified were called Puritans. They objected to the rites, ceremonies, and episcopal form of government of the Church of England, they wanted to remain in the church and work for reform from within. Separatists were those who believed the process of reforming the Church of England was hopeless and chose to separate from the church altogether. The Separatists were called Congregationalists or Independents and eventually founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620. Nine years later the Puritans followed and establish a reform-minded outpost of the Church of England at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[10]

Back in England, their brother Puritans continued to suffer persecutions since the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. But in 1640, Presbyterian Puritans gained the majority in Parliament and executed two of the chief leaders from among their persecutors, one an Archbishop leader and the other a member of the aristocracy. King Charles took exception to the actions of Parliament and soon plunged England into Civil War. Against the King, the nobles, and country gentlemen stood the Parliament and their allies comprised of shopkeepers, small farmers, and a few men of high rank. The war lasted nine years and ended with Charles I’s execution.[11]

For a time there was a great measure of religious freedom in England including those calling themselves Nonconformists and Dissenters. But the English people soon become dissatisfied with the rigidity of Puritanism and brought back Charles II, the son of Charles I who was executed in 1649. Puritan reforms were now pushed aside by Parliament now strongly dominated by Anglicans. Charles II died and was succeeded by his brother, James II, whose great obsession was to restore Catholicism in England. James II sought aid from Louis XIV of France in his endeavor, but the Protestants found their champion in William III and Mary who came from Holland in 1688 and drove James II from the throne in 1688. The following year religious toleration was granted to all dissenters including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers. The only exceptions were Roman Catholics or those denying the Trinity.[12]
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Although presented in a highly abbreviated manner, the first seven chapters illustrate the enormous importance of biblical doctrine (dogma, creed, belief) to the church during the first sixteen hundred years of its history. And this importance is evident through Satan’s relentless attacks on biblical truth over the centuries. The church has often made its authority equal or superior to the Bible in many areas which has led to error and corruption within. Also, the church was attacked from without because it had absorbed much of the humanistic worldview. And since the fourth century, the church had perverted its proper scriptural role and relationship with rulers and governments. All of these attacks had one central purpose—that was to challenge and discredit the truth of the inerrant word of God as revealed in the Bible.

As America’s colonists were primarily of English origin, so too was their religious heritage and experience. Religious persecution by the English kings and queens and the Anglican Church was the paramount reason which led to the establishment of at least half of the American colonies. The colonists’ experiences in England and their 150-year history in American formed the unique nature of Founders’ religious impulse that significantly prepared them for their rebellion against the effronteries of the English crown.

Hopefully, this brief history has given a general understanding of the foundations, circumstances, and experiences which informed the new American church as to the importance of their reliance on biblical truth in living the Christian life and which also guided the Founding generation in establishing a nation based upon biblical principles. But to a large measure this reliance on the Bible has been progressively abandoned by the church and nation since the late nineteenth century.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 288.
[2] Ibid., pp. 290-293.
[3] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 205.
[4] Ibid., p. 244-245.
[5] Ibid., pp. 233-234.
[6] Ibid., pp. 244-245.
[7] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 579-580.
[8] Ibid., pp. 581-581; “Henry VIII,” Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-VIII-king-of-England (accessed August 10, 2015).
[9] Kuiper, pp. 223, 229.
[10] Ibid., pp. 249-251.
[11] Ibid., p. 251-252.
[12] Ibid., pp. 253-257

Calls for reformation within the church occurred over several centuries and produced a complex series of events that challenged the authority of the church hierarchy. Calls for reformation began with the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteen centuries and continued with Wycliffe, Hus, and the Brethren of the Common Life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1517, he called into question certain practices of the church and sought to change them. Initially his actions were not meant to divide the church but to rid it of the practices that many in the church felt were doctrinally contrary to the tenets of the New Testament. What many define as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 may be more correctly viewed as a step (although the major one) in a centuries-long process that eventually led to the irrevocable separation of the Western church into its Catholic and Protestant branches.[1]

Martin Luther

Luther (1483-1546) received a Master’s degree from the University of Erfurt. Subsequently, he began studying law but changed to theology. In 1507, he was ordained a priest and began tutoring in the university at Wittenberg. He was transferred back to Erfurt in 1509. During a trip to Rome in 1511, Luther observed the low state of religious and moral convictions of the church in Rome at the time, and his opposition to church hierarchy grew. Although he remained a loyal Catholic, Luther concluded that the road to salvation was best gained by fleeing the world. He began living the acetic life of a monk in a monastery and attempted to earn salvation by his good works. Try as he might he remained oppressed by a sense of his utter sinfulness and separation from God. Sitting in his monk’s cell near the end of 1512, Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans. He read Romans 1:17, “The righteous will live by faith.” He pondered those words for a few moments and then was astounded by the magnitude of their meaning. He was overwhelmed with joy as he realized he was saved by faith and not works.[2] The crushing burden of sin and separation from God had been lifted.

Between the time of his conversion in 1512 and the ninety-five theses nailed to the Wittenberg door on October 31, 1517, Luther continued ponder the many abuses in the church and preached and spoke against them. According to one authorized history of the Catholic Church, it was not Luther’s intent to leave the church, and “…much of what Luther believed and taught was authentic Catholic doctrine that had been distorted by abuses and incorrect practices.”[3]

The recent development of the printing press made it possible for Luther’s theses to be quickly known throughout Germany. Within four weeks they had been translated into many languages and carried to every country in western Europe. As a consequence, the sale of indulgences was almost completely stopped. Over the next three years Catholic officials made numerous efforts to silence Luther. But the war of words continued unabated between Luther and his followers and those defending the Catholic Church and papal authority. In 1519, theologian Johannes Eck challenged Luther to a debate in Leipzig, Germany. Although the debaters were evenly matched in learning and speaking ability, Eck eventually forced Luther to admit that some of the teachings of John Hus had been unjustly condemned by the Council of Constance.[4] As you may recall, Hus had been burned at the stake by the church 104 years earlier because he had strongly opposed the sale of indulgences and taught many ideas that became central teachings of the Reformation.[5] Luther now stood openly with Hus who had been officially condemned as a heretic by the church. At this point the reconciliation between Luther and the Roman Catholic Church was impossible.[6] In 1520, Luther published three treatises which rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and the popes as well as the sacraments of the church with the exception of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and repentance. Luther was excommunicated in 1521 because he would not retract his statements regarding the Catholic Church’s dependence on good works and the practice of selling indulgences to gain remission of sin and salvation.[7]

In Roman Catholic orthodoxy, there are seven sacraments (ceremonies or rituals). Protestants embrace both the Lord’s Supper and water baptism as ordinances of the church but differ significantly with Roman Catholics as to their meaning and practice. Luther, and like most Protestants since the Reformation, did not reject the need for penance (repentance), but he rejected the Catholic doctrine that penance was dependent on its sacramental elements. For Protestants, this disagreement stands at the heart of the Reformation as found in Romans 1:17 along with the scriptures alone as the source of the church’s authority.

In Luther’s day the sacrament of penance was the center of controversy with regard to Catholic practices. The heart of penance was the priestly act of absolution (forgiveness) which was the pardoning of sins and release from eternal punishment for those sins. Absolution involved three requirements of the penitent sinner: contrition, confession to a priest, and satisfaction. The priest would decide what the penitent must do to receive satisfaction such as saying a number of prayers, giving alms, fasting, or pilgrimage to some shrine. In time the church permitted the penitent to make payment of a sum of money and receive a document call an indulgence that would release him from other penalties required for satisfaction.[8]

The practice of indulgences began at the end of the eleventh century when Pope Urban II permitted a penitent to join a crusade to the Holy Land as a substitute for any other penance required of the priests. By the end of the thirteenth century indulgences were granted to secular rulers for political reasons. By 1400, the sale of indulgences was a common practice in many local churches, and many indulgences were being sold for trivial sums for almost any occasion or merely given away. During Luther’s time, indulgences were being trafficked in a scandalous manner throughout the church. In his original ninety-five theses, Luther did not attack the indulgences granted by the church but the manner of abuses connected with their sale.[9]

Pope Leo X ruled the church from 1513-1521. Leo X assumed the papacy only two years after Luther traveled to Rome and within months after his conversion in late 1512. Leo X was deeply consumed with the paganizing culture of the Renaissance. Although he lived a blameless moral life, he was exceedingly worldly and had little interest in religion. His greatest interest was building the magnificent St. Peter’s Church at the Vatican in Rome. Because of its huge cost, the pope raised the necessary funds by the sale of indulgences on an unprecedented scale.[10] Four years after Leo X’s ascension to the papacy, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg which became the match that ignited the flames of the Protestant Reformation.

The writings of the Protestant Reformers addressed many of the failings of the universal church up to that point in history. Luther may have struck the match, but many other reformers had contributed much of the kindling that aided in spreading the flames of Protestantism. Even though there was a general consensus of the church’s authority centered on “the Bible alone,” the various reformers had different ideas on charting the way forward with regard to the finer points of interpreting scriptures as they related to doctrinal matters. It must be remembered that the reformers had been a part of the Catholic Church, and its doctrines and practices were not quickly, easily, or entirely abandoned. Also, most priests and the people were exceptionally ignorant of the Bible. The reform leaders faced the daunting task of both organizing the church and educating the Protestant faithful in their respective countries.

Luther did not believe that he and his followers had left the church. Rather, his efforts were meant to reform the church, and these efforts were quickly implemented in 1521. Luther’s first task was to translate the Bible into the German language which he completed in March 1522. He also began preparing training materials for children, developed a new hymnbook, and eventually guided the church in its statement of faith called the Augsburg Confession in 1530.[11]

Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin

Less than two months after Luther’s birth, Ulrich Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484, in Wildhaus, the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Zwingli developed his ideas for reform of the church independent of Luther’s influence. Inspired by Luther, Zwingli attacked indulgences in 1518 and soon church reform spread throughout Switzerland. A key difference between Luther and Zwingli lay in the idea of the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli believed the Supper was only a memorial ceremony in which the bread and the wine were symbols while Luther clung to the Catholic tradition that the body of Christ is actually present in the bread and wine. Meeting in 1529, Zwingli and Luther could not come to an agreement. Following Zwingli’s death in 1531, Protestants in Switzerland and southern Germany began following the teachings of John Calvin.[12]

Born in 1509 near Paris in northern France, John Calvin was twenty-six years younger than Luther and Zwingli. Although Calvin had studied for both the law and theology, he eventually chose the life of a scholar in Paris. In 1533, while at the university, he heard a speech by the university’s rector that mirrored the reform ideas of Erasmus and Luther. Rumors circulated that Calvin had written the speech, and he had to flee for his life. By 1535, Calvin had settled in Basel, Switzerland, and in 1536 wrote Institutes of the Christian Religion which has been called the Reformation’s greatest presentation of evangelical truth.[13]

With regard to the doctrine of predestination, Luther and Calvin were in agreement. This doctrine states that God has from eternity chosen those who are to inherit eternal life. The form of worship followed by the Catholic Church was retained by Luther except where expressly forbidden by the Bible, but Calvin departed from the Catholic form of worship in all ways as far as possible. With regard to relations with the state, Luther allowed the state to have many powers over the church. Calvin denied that the state had any power over the church. Rather, the church was to have power over the state. Both men believed education was very important and that the people should be well-grounded in the Bible and doctrinal matters. Although salvation by faith alone was a foundational doctrine for both Luther and Calvin, Luther placed the emphasis on the salvation of man by faith while Calvin believed the heart of the church stood on the doctrine of predestination which was focused on the glory of God. [14]

In spite of their differences, there were four fundamental elements common to all the reformers of the Reformation era. The reformers stressed the priesthood of all believers by which they meant that the believer gained salvation through Christ alone and not through the church or offices of the priest. In all questions of faith and morals, the Bible was the supreme and final authority. Also, the reformers looked back to the spirit and practices of the Apostolic Church as described in the New Testament as the model for church operation. This led to the view that the “church” was the community of believers and not the hierarchy of church officials and church government.
______

The church had traveled a seemingly incomprehensible path through 1500 years of persecution, victories, corruption, triumphs, and tragedies. Along the way the universal church had accumulated an inordinate amount of wealth, excess doctrinal baggage, and a large measure of worldliness. But in spite of the faults and corruption within the church, the sustaining inerrant truth of the New Testament and its doctrines was the church’s life preserver to which it clung, however tenuously, for a millennium and a half. The Reformation was a time of casting off of much of the church’s excesses, failures, and worldliness, but it would be a painful and imperfect parting for both Catholic and Protestant churches. Satan used the church’s distractions and disruptions to thrust into its breaches the humanistic dregs of the waning Renaissance of the sixteenth century and the ascending humanism of the era of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to further his efforts to destroy the church of Jesus Christ. To this we turn our attention in the coming chapters and set the stage for a look at the new American Church.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 157.
[2] Ibid., pp. 160-163.
[3] Alan Schreck, Ph.D., The Compact History of the Catholic Church, (Cincinnati, Ohio: Servant Books, 2009), pp. 73-74.
[4] Kuiper, pp. 165, 169-174.
[5] Ibid., pp. 145-146.
[6] Ibid., pp. 172-173.
[7] Schreck, pp. 73-74.
[8] Kuiper, pp. 158-159.
[9] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 233.
[10] Kuiper, p. 231.
[11] Ibid., pp. 184-185.
[12] Ibid., pp. 187-189.
[13] Ibid., pp. 189-191.
[14] Ibid., pp. 200-201.