Fundamentalism and American Culture
Page 5
Beecher’s religion frankly interpreted God through human experiences. “The only part of the Divine nature that we can understand,” he told Yale divinity students in 1871, “is that which corresponds to ourselves.” If we are to further God’s moral government, we must “comprehend that on which God’s moral government itself stands, which is human nature.” Beecher advocated a “Life School” of preaching which would “understand men” as opposed to creeds and traditions. Even Scripture should be subordinated to the authority of the modern age. The oaks of civilization, said Beecher, had evolved since Biblical times. Should we then “go back and talk about acorns?”18
It would be some time before the professional theologians caught up with Henry Ward Beecher. A popularizer who gloried in ambiguity and sentiment, he could move much more quickly than professional academics. Ambiguity and sentiment were difficult to try for heresy and, in any case, no ecclesiastical body had greater prestige than Beecher himself had. He could rise above church trials, as he did in the 1880s by simply leaving the Congregational Associations when there were rumors of charges against him. Professional theologians, on the other hand, were bound by their denominations and the theological schools that hired them and these in turn were usually committed to official creeds and vows to combat heresy. A great deal of caution and discretion was therefore necessary in order successfully to introduce the new views.
Thus the intellectual revolution was a relatively quiet one. Nonetheless, Frank Hugh Foster, who lived through and wrote about the era in which theological liberalism emerged in New England, indicated how rapid the transition could be. In his opinion, 1877 was the turning point. In that year there was among Congregationalists a minor flurry over future punishment. This controversy, like many that had preceded it, reflected efforts to tone down some of the harsh conclusions of Calvinism without abandoning its main assumptions. Yet it set off a change in the whole atmosphere within the next ten years. The most dramatic evidence of this change was the bloodless revolution at Andover Theological Seminary. Between 1879 and 1882, Edwards A. Park and two others of the “old faculty” at Andover retired, occasioning an almost immediate shift at the school toward the new liberal trends. By 1886 the new faculty had made enough departures to collect and publish a volume. Progressive Orthodoxy. The title itself reveals much about this early stage of liberalism. Their purpose clearly was to preserve the essentials of evangelicalism, not to destroy them. The “real issue,” they said, “is between Christianity as a supernatural redemption and a mere naturalism.” The actual doctrines they proposed, moreover, were Christocentric and in many respects orthodox. Yet a progressive principle was unmistakably present as well. Theology was no longer viewed as a fixed body of eternally valid truths. It was seen rather as an evolutionary development that should adjust to the standards and needs of modern culture.19
That the “New Theology” should spread so rapidly during the 1880s and 1890s into many strongholds of American Protestantism suggests that the walls of the old-style orthodoxy, so strong in appearance as late as the 1870s, had in fact restrained a flood of new views that had been gathering for some time. Gradual modifications in the content of the prevailing American theology together with inconspicuous shifts from Common Sense to Idealism had been feeding a rising tide of change. But the real waves came from abroad and by the time they hit America their full force had developed. Three strong concussions were felt almost simultaneously—evolutionary naturalism, higher criticism of the Bible, and the newer Idealistic philosophy and theology. The first two did not immediately create a national theological crisis largely because the third seemed to provide a counterforce against the most destructive effects of the others.
The Idealism of the New Theology answered naturalism and higher criticism in two steps. One was by merging the supernatural with the natural, so that the supernatural was seen only through the natural. Simultaneously, however. Idealism posited a strong dualism between the material world, known through science and logic, and the spiritual world, known by intuition and sensitivity. As Newman Smyth, one of the earliest New England spokesmen for the New Theology, put it, there is an essential “dualism which exists in the constitution of nature. There are two kinds of force, two lines of law, two orders of development, two processes of evolution—body and mind, nature and spirit, earth and heaven.” God, although seen everywhere, is spirit and thus beyond the reach of natural science. “The science of the senses may knock in vain for this truth to be opened to it, but the poet finds it revealed wherever he looks.”20
As Henry Ward Beecher was already pointing out, such dualism (in addition to its apologetic value) could be made quite palatable to the Victorian religious disposition. First, while not challenging the sanctity of natural science, it appealed to a strain of moderate anti-intellectualism relying on religious experience, sentiment, and sublimity, as opposed to the seemingly cold rigor of the intellectualism of the old theology. Second, and probably more important, it had a clear moral application. New Testament texts that opposed “flesh” to “spirit” could be interpreted in terms of lower animality versus higher religious qualities. As Paul Carter asserts, Darwinism simply reinforced the idea of sin as connected to animality. Christian belief was the highest stage in human evolution, overcoming the original, lower, animal nature. “Every man falls when, by yielding to the enticements of his lower, animal nature, he descends from his vantage ground of moral consciousness to the earthiness out of which he had begun to emerge,” wrote Beecher’s spiritual successor, Lyman Abbott, in 1892. As Carter observes, this is not far from the popular YMCA hymn of the era, “Yield not to temptation…. Dark passions subdue.”21 The evangelical tradition had long been strong on the condemnation of the appetites of the flesh—with alcohol and sex seen as the chief temptations. In the pulpit, liberals could not easily be distinguished from conservatives on such practical points, and practical morality was often for American Protestants what mattered most. Phillips Brooks, Beecher’s only clerical peer in eloquence and fame, summarized this main emphasis in a sermon which reconciled evolution, competitive individualism, and the ethics of Jesus. In answer to the question “What do you need?” he said simply, “Go and be moral. Go and be good.”22
2. THE BLANCHARDS OF WHEATON:
FROM EVANGELICALISM TO FUNDAMENTALISM
Many years later, in the mid-1920s, Charles Blanchard, the aging president of Wheaton College in Illinois, reflected on his long experience in an era of remarkable change. He expounded some general principles that had guided him. “We are not required to explain the universe,” he remarked near the beginning of the autobiography he would never complete, “but we are required to live in it according to the plan of God.” Our duty, he advised, is “not to waste time in trying to find out how things come to be as they are, but to improve the time by seeking to live under present circumstances as we ought.”23 In pointing to the moral imperative as the first principle in responding to the intellectual challenges of the era, Blanchard drew on an enduring theme in American evangelicalism. Indeed, it was also a major element in his own family history. Nearly a century earlier, in 1839, Blanchard’s father, Jonathan, then a leading young spokesman for abolition, delivered the commencement address at the radical Oberlin College, where Charles G. Finney was president. Finney was noted for attacking academic institutions that “give young men intellectual strength, to the almost entire neglect of cultivating their moral feelings.”24 Jonathan Blanchard, like Finney, had great respect for learning directed toward moral ends. “The perfect state of society,” he said, will approach “as knowledge and piety advance.” Morality was the goal, “exterminating sin in all its burrows.” “Society is perfect,” his address concluded, “where what is right in theory exists in fact; where practice coincides with principle, and the law of God is the law of the land.”25
There had been some shift of emphasis in the rigorous moral stance between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century Blanchard statements. Most
notably, Jonathan Blanchard’s proposals for reforming society were essentially optimistic. They were “postmillennial,” assuming spiritual and cultural progress amounting to a millennium, after which Christ would return. Blanchard’s son Charles had turned to premillennialism, seeing little hope for society before Christ returned to set up his kingdom. The gradual transitions of their respective moral views reflects an important continuity of fundamentalism with its evangelical heritage.
Jonathan Blanchard (1811–1892) was a product of the same tradition of New England evangelicalism that fostered theological liberalism. Born in New England, he attended Andover Seminary. In the mid-1830s, inspired by Theodore Dwight Weld, he became an anti-slavery lecturer—then a dangerous business. Unpopularity and physical threats only increased his conviction that the cause was morally right. In 1837 Blanchard moved to Cincinnati to complete his theological training at Lane Seminary, where Lyman Beecher was president. During the next eight years in Cincinnati, Blanchard became pastor of a sizable New School Presbyterian church (then closely allied with his native Congregationalism), helped found the anti-slavery Liberty Party, and was appointed a representative to the World’s Peace Convention, held in London in 1843. During these years the Blanchards were close friends of the Beechers. Lyman Beecher preached at Jonathan Blanchard’s ordination and a few days later both, together with Calvin Stowe, presided at the ordination of Lyman’s talented son, Henry Ward.26
In 1845 Blanchard became president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He was typical of the old-time college presidents. He built the fledgling college into a flourishing institution. He was, however, notorious for his refusal to compromise on any moral point. His initial move to Galesburg was delayed three weeks when he had his family and all his possessions unloaded on the banks of the Mississippi rather than continue during a Sabbath a journey on a riverboat that was behind schedule because of bad weather. In Galesburg the apocryphal story circulated that he had stood in front of one of the first Sunday trains and told the engineer to go back to the roundhouse, upon which the engineer returned the sentiment, suggesting a warmer destination. Blanchard engaged in serious controversy with local Masons and liquor interests, whom he considered to be allied. His career at Galesburg ended in a conflict with some of the Presbyterian founders of Knox, in which another of Lyman Beecher’s sons, Edward, was one of Blanchard’s chief supporters. After refusing a number of similar positions, in 1860 Blanchard became president of The Illinois Institute in Wheaton, a college of Wesleyan background that turned to Blanchard for more Congregational support.27
Blanchard’s policies at both Knox and Wheaton were based on the prevailing convictions about the necessary interrelationship of reason and morality. Right thinking led to right living. The task of education was therefore a moral one. “In the moral conflict of the world,” he declared in his inaugural address at Knox, “institutions of learning are the forts.”28
Blanchard’s assumptions, grounded in Scottish Common Sense,29 were that God had built into the universe a system of law, essentially moral law, and had created the minds of people so that reason and moral sense could apprehend that law. The millennium would occur when the inhabitants of a society recognized, and freely obeyed, this law. “‘The kingdom of God,’” he said at Knox, “is simply: Christ ruling in and over rational creatures who are obeying him freely and from choice, under no constraint but that of life.”30 Opposing the way of the kingdom were vices, superstitions, and false religions. These morally, intellectually, or spiritually blinded one to true moral duty.31
In 1860 Jonathan Blanchard was still very much in the mainstream of American evangelicalism. With the end of the Civil War, however, that mainstream diverged into two distinct branches. While Henry Ward Beecher represented those who continued to adjust the religion to the tenor of the new age, Blanchard in the last thirty years of his life represented those who attempted to hold firm to standards drawn from the evangelicalism of the ante-bellum era.
Victory in the Civil War had virtually put out of business the old national coalition for reform which had united against slavery. Although the old reformers were feted, there was a sense of weariness with strenuous reform efforts. Jonathan Blanchard, however, was undaunted by the mood of the Gilded Age. With the slavery question settled, he simply turned to old business. The anti-Masonic movement had been a major reform and political movement before anti-slavery overshadowed it in the 1830s. Now it resumed its place at the top of Blanchard’s list of crusades. Enlisting Charles Finney in the cause,32 he followed the pattern that had led to anti-slavery’s success. He founded the National Christian Association in 1868, sent out teams of lecturers, held regular conventions, and wrote constantly against secret societies in the Christian Cynosure. In 1880 Blanchard even ran for President for “The American Party,” following the model of the old Liberty Party. The widespread opposition he encountered Blanchard took to be evidence of the similarities of the two causes.33 At the point of small beginnings, high hopes, and strong opposition, however, the similarities between the two movements ceased.
Fighting Freemasonry was an unpopular business in the era after the Civil War. It meant attacking a powerful institution of strong loyalties, made up of many of the most influential business, political, and professional leaders in American society.34 For Wheaton College it meant much opposition. During the last third of the century most other American colleges shed their controversial prophetic and reforming stances. Knox, for instance, had a Mason as president, had Greek-letter fraternities, and gradually dropped its tight religious restrictions. Wheaton, on the other hand, increasingly found its identity by fighting against the mainstream.35
These fights were simultaneously conservative and radical. Blanchard, who had by now been joined in his campaigns by his son Charles, believed that America was a “Christian nation” and worked for a Christian amendment to the Constitution.36 Their concepts of Christian ideals, however, showed little regard for prevailing middle-class standards. The 1874 platform of the National Christian Association included recognition of Christianity in the United States Constitution, Sabbath and prohibition laws, outlawing secret lodges, preservation of the “civil equality secured to all American citizens by articles 13th, 14th, and 15th of our amended Constitution,” international arbitration for peace, that “land and other monopolies be discountenanced,” “justice to Indians,” abolition of the Electoral Colleges, and election of President and Vice President by direct vote of the people.37 While there was a note of hopefulness in presenting these programs, they were all issues whose time had not yet come, or had already passed.
The resulting perception that society was in rebellion against God involved a sense of theological as well as moral decline. The two always went together. The Christian Cynosure, accordingly, never hesitated to put truth before friendship and was in the forefront of those warning of doctrinal laxity among Congregationalists.38 Henry Ward Beecher was a special target for attack. “I loved him as a brother,” wrote Jonathan Blanchard. Now, however, he viewed Beecher as a full-fledged hypocrite. Ever since the days of anti-slavery and temperance campaigns, said Blanchard, Beecher had been ready to say one thing on one occasion and the opposite on the next. In 1872, two years before the Beecher scandal, Blanchard described the Brooklyn pastor as “a crafty leader of degeneracy and corruption,” and asserted that “the American churches have drunk and are still drinking the poison of his teachings….” “If Mr. Beecher’s teachings are the gospel of Christ, what need had Christ to be crucified.” When an Oberlin, Ohio, newspaper objected to his contentiousness, Blanchard responded by attacking Beecher in even stronger terms (“… dealing out the love of Christ to sinners with the indiscriminate fondness of a successful prostitute who loves everybody who does not condemn her trade….”), and also by attacking Beecher’s illustrious sister, Harriet. Harriet, he said, was “sneering the doctrine of human depravity … out of good society … while she is holding up the worn garments of her Puritan a
ncestors till her readers see nothing but ‘the holes in their coats’….” Henry Beecher did much the same thing. “When he is about to assail some fundamental truth, held and suffered for by the Puritans, he always begins by proclaiming himself their descendant.” Beecher was “preaching Scripture like Satan, and, like Satan, defeating its practical intent.” He and his sister had forgotten the lesson: “‘Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?’”39 Such language left little between the Blanchards and the Beechers of the old New England reforming alliance.40 In fact, Blanchard was finding New England Congregationalists increasingly reluctant to support his efforts.
New patterns of alliance began to emerge, and were apparent by the end of the 1870s. The closest affinities of the Blanchards had always been with the revivalists who preached a fundamental gospel message of sin, conversion, and a holy life. With these tendencies, it was almost inevitable that the Blanchards would come into the orbit of Dwight L. Moody, who was then forging a new revivalism. Moody’s immense success sparked new hopes for revitalizing the heritage. When the evangelist’s first triumphant national tour brought him to Chicago in 1876, Jonathan Blanchard took part in the dedicatory services and continued thereafter to give him enthusiastic support in the Christian Cynosure.
Significantly, Blanchard even reprinted in the Cynosure Moody’s sermons on the premillennial return of Christ and editorially emphasized the points on which postmillennialists and premillennialists could agree. Moody, he was pleased to observe, had “no definite theory drawn out in detail.” Clearly Blanchard was softening his old postmillennial stance. In 1881 he attended Moody’s annual Northfield conference; but when asked to present the postmillennial theory of Christ’s coming to the predominantly premillennial group, the elderly social reformer declined, saying that he believed “both theories and neither.”41