The evangelical commitment to social reform was a corollary of the inherited enthusiasm for revival. Reform was in a sense subordinate to revival in that it was usually considered to be effective only when it flowed from hearts transformed from self-love to love for others. “Christianity is a universal philanthropist,” declared a British preacher at the Evangelical Alliance, in a line of thought with which his American listeners would not disagree.
It trains the young; it feeds the hungry; it heals the sick. It rejoices in the increase of the elements of material civilization. But it maintains that all these agencies are subordinate. The divine method of human improvement begins in human hearts through evangelical truth, and it spreads from within outwardly till all is renewed.4
Yet social reform was not really a secondary consideration; at least it might not be dispensed with or substantially ignored. The assumption that Christianity was the only basis for a healthy civilization was basic to evangelical thinking—as essential as the belief that souls must be saved for the life to come. Virtue among the citizenry, as almost all political economists said, was the foundation of successful civilization, especially a republican civilization. Religion was the basis for true virtue; the purer the religion, the higher the morality. Christianity was the purest religion. The supposedly self-evident superiority of Western civilization and especially northern Europe was clearly due to the influence of Christianity and Protestantism in particular.5
Americans were proud of their own unique achievement since they had shown that the moral basis for national success could be maintained voluntarily without an officially established church. “In what sense can this country then be called a Christian country?” asked the Reverend Theodore Dwight Woolsey, retired president of Yale, in an address lauding separation of church and state. “In this sense certainly,” he continued, “that the vast majority of the people believe in Christianity and the Gospel, that Christian influences are universal, that our civilization and intellectual culture are built on that foundation, and that the institutions are so adjusted as, in the opinion of almost all Christians, to furnish the best hope for spreading and carrying down to posterity our faith and our morality.”6
The Northern victory in the Civil War had mixed effects on the reform impulse. On the one hand, the outcome seemed evidence of God’s endorsement of the sacred character of the Union and the Constitution. Few outside Dixie questioned that. Moreover, the Republican Party, which in its reforming origins stood against Rum and Romanism as well as Rebellion, was in the ascendant. Yet there was a sense of excess in reform and a desire for stability. The slavery issue had been resolved only at immense cost and no other reform captured the popular imagination. A few, including the aged Finney, attempted to revive anti-Masonry. Others founded the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. Some spoke out for women’s rights or for care of the freed slaves. Some worked for a Christian amendment to the Constitution. Others proposed campaigns against “worldly amusements.” Most of the causes were old ones; almost all were motivated by the desire to ensure the stability of evangelical civilization.7
Perhaps the continuing interest in Sabbatarianism best illustrates this concern. The Puritan Sabbath was probably the most distinctive symbol of evangelical civilization in the English-speaking world, and remained a major reform issue where religious and social interests coincided. In view of the increasing complexity of modern life, affirmed the Congregational National Council in 1871, “the rest of the Sabbath is indispensable to the continuance of health, virtue and Christian principle in this nation.”8 Mark Hopkins, famed model of college teachers and presidents, held that God’s law agreed with the interests of working people. Using the familiar terminology of the prevailing moral philosophy, Hopkins argued that people had a “right” to one day’s rest because their God-endowed “moral constitution” was “preconformed” to the Sabbath rhythm.9 While evangelicals agreed that “Sabbath desecration” had “reached alarming proportions,” they remained convinced that “a proper recognition of the sanctity of the holy Sabbath is one of the chief cornerstones in the foundation of the Church and of our Christian civilization.”10
The evangelical interest in Sabbatarianism and other causes involved genuine concern for the welfare of the laboring classes and the poor,11 but their outlook was middle-class Victorian and their program to meet the challenges of the 1870s was essentially conservative. This was evident in the day devoted to “Christianity and Social Reform” at the 1873 Evangelical Alliance. “Christian Philanthropy,” “the Care of the Sick,” “Intemperance and its Suppression,” “Crime and Criminals,” “Industrial Schools … in the Prevention of Crime,” and “the Labor Question” were on the agenda. Only the last of these dealt with a new American social problem and the advice given was that, although laborers had some legitimate complaints, the causes might be removed “gradually and safely, by wise and conservative legislation.” Strikes “lead to ruin.”12
American evangelicals enjoyed a remarkable consensus about the economic and moral laws that supported a sound economic system—that is, the prevailing free enterprise capitalism. College courses in “political economy,” usually taught by college presidents, almost invariably inculcated the same principles. President M. B. Anderson of the University of Rochester told the Evangelical Alliance that the Bible and reason agreed “that the pursuit of wealth by legitimate processes is in entire harmony with morality and depends on it.” The right to property and inheritance were sacred, but must be balanced by the law of benevolence, “the truest charity … which educates and trains the poor into the capacity to supply their own wants by their own labor and skill.” Socialism stood in antithesis to these laws. “Socialism, that spectre which so haunts the European mind,” said Anderson, is the creation of those “to whose minds the intelligent self-restraint born of an educated conscience is a stranger.”13
Education, then, broadly conceived as education in Christian morality, stood next to preaching the Gospel itself as an answer to new industrial and urban problems.14 At the time, it appeared that evangelicalism was still dominant in the American schools. Public schools used texts like Mc-Guffey’s Readers, which warned against hard drink, lauded the values of the Bible, the rewards of Sabbath keeping, and hard work, and above all stressed that virtue would be rewarded. The same lessons were taught in colleges; indeed, it was still true that the presidents of most colleges were ordained clergymen.15 In the 1870s the revolutionary trend toward universities, elective courses, separation of the disciplines, and academic freedom (on the premise that there might be more than one variety of truth) was just beginning.16 For Victorian evangelicals, orthodox piety and theological dogmatism,17 combined with a classical curriculum, still provided the basis for an education that would sustain a stable civilization.
This old order correlated faith, learning, and morality with the welfare of civilization. Two premises were absolutely fundamental—that God’s truth was a single unified order and that all persons of common sense were capable of knowing that truth. The implications of these assumptions were carefully worked out by the philosophical school known as Scottish Common Sense Realism. In 1870 Common Sense philosophy had been influential in America for a century, and for the past half-century it had been the dominant philosophy taught in American colleges. In spite of competition from various forms of Romantic Idealism, Common Sense Realism remained unquestionably the American philosophy.18
Common Sense philosophy was marvellously well suited to the prevailing ideals of American culture. This was not entirely accidental since the American nation and Scottish Realism both took shape in the mid-1700s. This philosophy was above all democratic or anti-elitist. Common Sense said that the human mind was so constructed that we can know the real world directly. Some philosophers, particularly those following John Locke, had made our knowledge seem more complicated by interposing “ideas” between us and the real world. These ideas, they said, were the immed
iate objects of our thought; hence we do not apprehend external things directly, but only through ideas of them in our minds. David Hume raised the question of how we can know that these ideas correspond to what is actually there. The answer of Thomas Reid, the principal formulator of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, was akin to Samuel Johnson’s kicking a rock to refute a similar theory proposed by Bishop Berkeley. Reid said that only philosophers would take this skeptical doctrine seriously with its absurd implications. Everyone in his senses believes such truths as the existence of the real world, cause and effect, and the continuity of the self. The ability to know such things was as natural as the ability to breathe air. If philosophers questioned such truths, so much the worse for philosophers. The common sense of mankind, whether of the man behind the plow or the man behind the desk, was the surest guide to truth. The democratic implications are obvious. In anti-elitist eighteenth-century America “common sense” became a revolutionary watchword. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, it provided one basis for a new democratic and republican order for the ages.19
Common Sense philosophy continued to appeal to Americans into the nineteenth century also because it provided a firm foundation for a scientific approach to reality. In a nation born during the Enlightenment, the reverence for science as the way to understand all aspects of reality was nearly unbounded. Evangelical Christians and liberal Enlightment figures alike assumed that the universe was governed by a rational system of laws guaranteed by an all-wise and benevolent creator. The function of science was to discover such laws, something like Newton’s laws of physics, which were assumed to exist in all areas. By asserting that the external world was in fact just as it appeared to be, Common Sense provided a rock upon which to build this empirical structure.
At the same time, a great number of American thinkers, following the suggestion of Thomas Reid, believed that the inductive scientific method of seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon was the one sure way to build on this common sense foundation. Bacon’s name inspired in Americans an almost reverential respect for the certainty of the knowledge achieved by careful and objective observation of the facts known to common sense. Whether the subject was theology or geology, the scientist need only classify these certainties, avoiding speculative hypotheses.20
Common Sense and empiricism provided the new nation with a basis for establishing a national moral order. The evangelical educators had taken the lead in shaping the opinions of the nation. The Bible, of course, revealed the moral law; but the faculty of common sense, which agreed with Scripture, was a universal standard. According to Common Sense philosophy, one can intuitively know the first principles of morality as certainly as one can apprehend other essential aspects of reality. “God has created everything double: a world without us, and a correspondent world within us,” said the eminent textbook author Francis Wayland in a representative Common Sense formulation. “He has made light without, and the eye within; moral qualities in actions, and conscience to judge of them; and so in every other case.” On the foundation of certain knowledge of first moral principles, one could through Baconian induction arrive at authoritative conclusions concerning moral, political, and economic laws. “An order of sequence once discovered in morals,” Wayland affirmed, “is just as invariable as an order of sequence in physics.”21 On this basis, college presidents such as Hopkins, Anderson, or Wayland himself could with assurance point the way for Christian civilization.
The essentially optimistic view of human nature implicit in Common Sense philosophy appealed to the American temper.22 Although there was still room for the Calvinist and evangelical dogma that all people were born sinners, the belief that all were endowed with the potential to know God’s truth was more conspicuous. Strict Calvinists had maintained that the human mind was blinded in mankind’s Fall from innocence; in the Common Sense version, the intellect seemed to suffer from a slight astigmatism only. Moreover, one of the first dictates of Common Sense philosophy was that individuals were moral agents capable of free choice. These premises—which were essential to the economic, political, and religious individualism so widespread in America—were at odds with traditional views of determinism and depravity. The strict Calvinists, however, had long been able to effect some sort of reconciliation between determinism and the experience of freedom and were not to be deterred from employing a philosophy that offered so much support in other areas.23
Most importantly, this Common Sense account of reality was considered to provide a sure base for the rational and scientific confirmation of the truths of the Bible and the Christian faith. The Bible, it was constantly asserted, was the highest and all-sufficient source of authority. Indeed in America the Bible was the primary source for many of the ideals that shaped the culture. The Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture provided a further basis for the belief that the common person could readily understand Biblical teaching. Common Sense paralleled this doctrine with its insistence on the perspicuity of nature.24 In an age that reverenced science, it was essential that this confidence in Scripture not be based on blind faith alone. God’s truth was unified, so it was inevitable that science would confirm Scripture. Evangelical colleges still used the texts and arguments of Bishop Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), and William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. No honest inquirer, the evangelical apologists asserted, if true to his own experience, could finally doubt the arguments when they were properly understood. Over and above the evidence of design in nature, there were simply too many parallels between the laws of civilization as discovered by impartial science and the teaching of the Bible to leave room for reasonable doubt. “Faith,” said Mark Hopkins, “—that is, the faith of the New Testament—is not simple belief. It is confidence in a person, and that confidence is never given except on rational grounds.”25
The old order of American Protestantism was based on the interrelationship of faith, science, the Bible, morality, and civilization. It was about to crumble. In 1869 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (who moved in sophisticated Unitarim circles in Boston) predicted the impending catastrophe. The collapse would not be as dramatic, however, as that of Holmes’s famous “one hoss shay.” Too many vested interests of the churches and indeed of civilization itself, he observed privately, rested on evangelical “idolatry and bibliolatry” for these to be removed “all at once as the magnetic mountain drew the nails and bolts of Sinbad’s ship….” Churchmen could hardly be expected to admit the implications of the new views frankly. Yet Holmes was convinced that a vital part of the whole structure was about to be removed. The Bible could no longer stand up to scientific standards. Without that, little would remain that was distinctly evangelical. “The turth is staring the Christian world in the face, that the stories of the old Hebrew books cannot be taken as literal statements of fact.”26
In the 1870s evangelicals frequently commented to each other on the seriousness of the new threats, though they did not share Holmes’s conclusions. “Infidel bugles are sounding in front of us, Papal bugles are sounding behind us,” declared Professor Roswell Hitchcock at the Evangelical Alliance in 1873. “It would be idle to say,” he confessed, “that we are not alarmed.”27 “At no time,” wrote W. A. Stearns, President of Amherst College, in a similar context, has Christianity “been assaulted with such variety and persistency of argument for its overthrow as during the hundred years just passed.” Yet it seemed that whenever evangelical leaders voiced such concern they followed with declarations of confidence that those who had nearly driven out the skepticism, atheism, and even the Deism of the Enlightenment from American public life could still look to new victories. “Never since the crucifixion,” Stearns continued, “has the religion of Christ, in its purest forms had a stronger hold on the popular heart than at this day.”28 This kind of assurance was unmistakably the prevailing note at the Evangelical Alliance. Unity, of course, said Alliance
speakers, was necessary for continued advance, but by working together they could surely expect to “lift up among all people a victorious standard in the face of modern skepticism, rationalism, the claims of the Papacy, and every other false system.”29
The seriousness of the danger of skepticism and rationalism was portrayed vividly to Americans by the delegates from continental Europe, where higher critical views of Scripture were already far advanced. The European evangelicals most frequently attacked the Biblical criticism of F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school in Germany and the radical questioning of the historicity of the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss in Germany and J. E. Renan in France. A Dutch report on “The Religious Condition of Holland” referred to the exponents of higher criticism in his country as “our enemies” and a report on “Christian Life in Germany” deplored “the critical and speculative rationalism,” but assured the Americans that “wherever it pronounces its doctrines, opposition is not wanting.” Theodor Christlieb, also a German representative, spoke of concentrating on the defense of “the fundamentals of the faith,” likening the doctrine of the supernatural redemption and atonement by Christ to a “fortress” or “citadel” surrounded by “its moat … the doctrine of the Holy Scripture.”30
The American spokesmen, who at this time knew higher criticism chiefly as news from abroad, had not yet developed this fortress mentality. Rather they assessed their strength in remarkably chauvinistic and self-confident terms. Referring to the Great Awakening, which he viewed as the unifying spiritual force leading to the American Revolution, President William F. Warren of Boston University told the Evangelical Alliance that “toward the middle of the last century came the fullness of God’s time for generating a new Christian nationality.” America had seen various forms of infidelity, such as that of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Cooper, and Thomas Paine, known as the “three doubting Thomases,” and then more recently Transcendentalism, Owenist socialism. Spiritualism, and phrenology, but “none of them were of American origin.” The old idea of American innocence versus European corruption still seemed plausible. “Thus all these threatening surges of Antichristian thought,” Warren told the international audience, “have come to us from European seas; not one arose in our own hemisphere.” Infidelity had never taken root in America, and Warren could confidently claim that “in all the ranks of American unbelievers the Christian apologist of learning and ability can nowhere find a foeman worthy of his steel.”31
Fundamentalism and American Culture Page 3
