I shall insert here what may seem obvious: I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world-situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel is between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. (William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom>/em>,” (with a new introduction by the author), Regnery Gateway (Washington, D.C.; 1992) lx)

This work sparked quite a controversy as he brought into the light of day the worldviews which were being communicated at Yale. He was quite clear that if Yale’s alumni were in favor of knowingly and intentionally financing an institution which had become largely one of atheism and collectivism, that was fine. However, he was convinced that the alumni were unaware of Yale’s educational theory at the time. Buckley was quite correct that the most important “duel is between Christianity and atheism” and this duel extended into educational theory and the university.

Even as the ink was drying on Buckley’s book, Abraham Maslow was recruited in 1951 by the founders of Brandeis University to develop a psychologies study for their new institution. This new position gave him a great deal of credibility and the opportunity to effectively train a large priesthood for his new religion:

The prestige and intellectual cachet of his new position gave Maslow a degree of professional visibility he had never enjoyed during his years at Brooklyn, and the appearance in 1954 of Motivation and Personality, a compilation of his articles on self-actualization, was a career-making event. Maslow’s view of motivation had immense appeal for students of education, social work, management and other branches of applied psychology. It released them from the burden of having to defend traditional moral codes that they personally considered outdated or overly harsh and imbued them with a sense of mission. An army of counselors, therapists, trainers, and enlightened teachers would be needed to satisfy the deficiency of America’s young and not-so-young, lifting them to the level at which they would be able to take charge of their own personal growth. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) 54)

In his book, Motivation and Personality he began introducing his readers to the idea of “peak experiences.” It is very likely that he was influenced in his thinking in this area by the 1901 book by Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness. In that book, Bucke:

…argued that about six hundred thousand years ago the human race made a giant evolutionary leap from simple animal consciousness to self-consciousness. According to Bucke, Homo Sapiens are on the brink of another such transformation, a giant leap forward to the stage of “cosmic consciousness.” Since such important evolutionary changes don’t take place all at once, a few exceptional individuals has already moved to the next level, among them Jesus Christ, Buddha, St. Paul and Mohammed. In all cases, added Bucke, their transformations were associated with a life-changing mystical experience that occurred around the age of thirty. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) 55)

The idea of psychology and psychotherapy as a religion which freed oneself form the moral and social constraints afforded s superior godlike being originated early in the century by Carl Jung . The idea of a form of “self actualization” also began with Jung who called it “self-deification” or “individuation”:

Analysis became an initiatory process, a descent into the unconscious mind in order to spark a process of individual transformation through a direct encounter with the transcendental realm of the gods. Just as the Last Supper became the central event upon which the mystery of Communion in the Roman Catholic Mass was based, Jungian analysis became a ritualized reenactment of Jung’s own inner drama, a story of heroic confrontation with the gods that is enshrined as the sacred myth of analytical psychology. For those who survived an encounter with the god or gods within, Jung promised rebirth as a true “individual,” free from all the repressive mechanisms of conventional beliefs about family, society, and deity. The successful survivors of such pagan regeneration became reborn, spiritually superior “individuated” beings. (Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, (New York, 1997,) 141)

Harold McCormick (the McCormick’s were one of America’s three wealthiest families) and his wife Edith Rockefeller McCormick (the Rockefellers were also one of the three America’s three wealthiest families) were very involved with Jung.

Rather than always have one foot in and one foot out of the magically unreal community of spiritual seekers around Jung, he now felt part of their mission. As others in analysis in Zurich found, the war [1st World War] seemed to heighten the social cohesiveness and group identity of the Jungians. Harold finally saw the need for spiritual rebirth of the world and was certain that Jung was the man to bring it about. His conversion was complete. (Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, (New York, 1997,) 214)

Although this didn’t happen in Jung’s lifetime, now Maslow, his new religion and army of priests which were being trained would have a significant impact not only on the next decade, but through the balance of the 20th Century, both in culture and in the church. Some of his friends and associates, Abbott Hoffman, Timothy Leary and Carl Rogers would serve to advance the cause of psychology, hierarchy of needs and peak experiences very successfully in the years to come. At the same time, some of the concerns fundamentalists had voiced about neo-evangelicals would begin manifesting themselves and seemingly vindicate their whole position, including introducing this new religion into the core of the church. John Dewey’s idea of changing culture through the educational system was in full swing and Marxism/Socialism was gaining momentum through this vehicle. Many of these tributaries will begin converging and restructuring the thinking and behavior of culture and the church in the next decade.

The dawning of 1940 witnessed another arousing from slumber, the Conservative Intellectual. A number of individuals were concerned at what the universities had become and were producing in terms of worldviews and philosophies. Dewey’s plan to use the universities to administer social change was in full swing and working rather well in shifting the students into collectivism and socialism. Like Japan’s attack, the signs of this attack on the mind were there for the previous four decades but were largely ignored or those who could have made a difference retreated into the foxhole of fundamentalism to watch as the non-believers self destructed. Through the 1940s the number of conservative intellectual thinkers was growing but was not well organized nor taken very seriously by those in academic power.

There is no doubt, then, that in the mid-1940s the resources for a nonliberal intellectual revival were present. Yet it would be wrong to claim that in 1945 a coherent, explicitly conservative movement was flourishing in America. So barren did the Right side of the intellectual landscape seem to many in those years that one observer actually contended in 1950 that “the American conservative has yet to discover conservatism.” And in 1950, in a famous comment, Lionel Trilling complained of the absence of conservative ballast in American intellectual life:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole Intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas. (George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) p 51)

While intellectual conservatism was in the beginning throes of awakening, Abraham Maslow was working on his motivational theory of hierarchy of needs which he began publishing in article form in 1943. It is apparent in his theory that he regarded humans as basically good but environmental causes brought them to develop in selfish ways but this could be changed if humans environmental needs were satisfied. He argued that:

An inborn “instinctoid drive” will lead them to grow into loving, unselfish adults provided they are first able to satisfy four basic levels of needs 1) physiological needs, such as food and shelter; 2) security needs; 3) belonging needs, for love and acceptance; and 4) self-esteem, which implies both actual accomplishment and recognition from others. Only after the “defiency needs” have been satisfied are human beings free to begin the potential process of self-actualization and the maximization of creative potential – “to become everything one is capable of becoming.” Of that group, he estimated that perhaps 2 percent of the population achieve the ultimate goal and become fully self-actualized – or, as he sometimes preferred to put it, “fully human.” Though Maslow never expressed it in quite those terms, fully actualized men and women were the living equivalent of religious Scripture. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) p 49)

In a very real sense, Maslow was moving psychology into the arena of being a religion and in his atheism it would become the one and only true religion. It is in fact, a religion which would work very well with the current of Darwinian thought since “self-actualizers” were more advanced than ordinary human beings and thus did not have to be constrained by cultural mores unless they found them useful in a particular circumstance.

Self-actualizers, moreover, “tend to be good animals, “at home with the earthier sides of their natures. They are spontaneous and relatively free from anxiety or guilt. “Very few of them are religious.” They can make an effort to follow conventional rules of behavior when necessary, but when they are absorbed in what they are doing, these rules are likely to be dispensed with. As highly evolved individuals living in an imperfect society, self-actualizers “resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.” Indeed, “the unthinking observer might sometimes believe them to be unethical, since they can break down not only conventions but laws when the situation seems to demand it. But the every opposite is the case. They are the most ethical of people even though their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of the people around them.” (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) p 52)

So, the more evolved “self-actualized” person has high self esteem (#4 on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), has very little problem with guilt, can easily flaunt the rules which society around them holds as important and therefore would appear to the lesser evolved and unactualized to be unethical or perhaps even evil. But in this new religion of self-esteem and self-actualization, these individuals are nearly god-like.

The Neo Harold

By the late 1940s a few Christian fundamentalist came to realize that the previous two decades of an increasingly narrow brand of fundamentalism had produced a very rigid, inflexible and academically poor church. Not only hadn’t they reached the world for Christ, the Church had steadily lost influence. Eventually, as many fundamentalists publicly identified themselves with questionable issues such as opposition to new Bible translations, or became vocal supporters of racial segregation, tensions began to rise within fundamentalism. Many who originally identified with the movement either abandoned it or kept very quiet about their affiliation. The promising start fundamentalism exhibited at the beginning of the 20th century had become intellectually backward and academically ingrown as the movement steadily marginalized itself within society.

Many conservative Christians felt there were only two choices: stay where they were and endure parochialism and even paranoia, or compromise their convictions on Scripture by joining a liberal church.

In 1947 Harold Ockenga, Pastor of Park Street Church in Boston proposed a third alternative and preached a sermon titled A New Evangelicalism. His desire was to bring the Church out of the fortress mentality in which they were now trapped by recovering the spiritual dynamic of the evangelical movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even though these new evangelicals, which included the young evangelist, Billy Graham, still considered themselves fundamentalists along the lines of the original turn of the century founders of the movement. However, fundamentalist hard-liners almost immediately began accusing this group of compromise and disdainfully labeled them “neo-evangelicals.” At the same time there did appear to be an increase of religious fervor:

Of the many aspects of the recovery of tradition in the decade after Hiroshima, one of the most pervasive was the renewal of interest and belief in Christian orthodoxy. On a popular level, signs of this “return to religion” were everywhere. Some might doubt its sincerity or profundity; some might jibe at “foxhole religion”; none could doubt that religiosity, at least, had come back into favor. In 1940 fewer than 50 percent of the American people were church members; by 1955, 60 percent had joined. These years witnessed the spectacular rise of Billy Graham, the addition of “under God” to the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and the printing of “In God We Trust” on certain postage stamps. President Eisenhower unexpectedly opened his inaugural address with a prayer, joined the National Presbyterian Church (and attended it often), gave a nationally broadcast speech on the need for religious faith, and supported the American Legion’s “Back to God” Campaign…. Nor did trends abroad go unnoticed. The brilliant Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis were becoming popular in America. And when, in 1948, C.E.M. Joad, a British philosopher and hitherto agnostic, wrote a defense of Christianity, Time was quick to take note. The horrible evils of World War II, Joad explained, had “hit me in the face…. Human progress is possible but so unlikely.” Time also quoted Joad as saying: “I see now that evil is endemic in man, and that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses a deep and essential insight into human nature.” ( George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 51-52)

Some of the intellectual conservatives saw the reemergence of religion as at least useful and a good antidote to totalitarianism and Marxism.

Writing in Partisan Review in 1950, Ernst van den Haag, a émigré sociologist from Mussolini’s Italy then teaching at the New School for Social Research, conceded that religious faith could not be “logically justified.” Still,

Religious sanction is required – just as the police force is – for any society which wishes to be stable without being totalitarian…

Religion is useful, even a necessary opiate – a sedative protecting us from excessive anxiety and agitation and from those who, like Marx, thrive on agitation and therefore hate the sedative would replace it by the murderer’s hashish. (George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) p 52)

And Then Along Came John

Just as many fundamentalists were climbing down into their cultural manholes and pulling the covers over their heads, seeds of radical social change were being sown. In 1933 John Dewey authored the Humanist Manifesto. In it he argued that there is no creator, no creation and no moral absolutes. This was a sharp departure from the birth certificate of the nation, the Declaration of Independence, which affirmed belief in all three. In 1934 Dewey authored a book titled, A Common Faith, in which he further argued for abortion, euthanasia, and for the aggressive teaching of these views.

Also in1934, the Teachers College of Columbia University took up the same banner as John Dewey in using education to accomplish social engineering,

The first issue of The Social Frontier, produced by Teachers College of Columbia University, urges the remaking of American society through the schools. The journal’s first editorial says that “for the American people the age of individualism in economy is closing and the age of collectivism is beginning.” This journal describes not “teachers” but “educational workers.” It says these must join “into a mighty instrument of group consensus, harmonious expression, and collective action.” Overtly urging teachers (sorry, educational workers) to indoctrinate students, the journal soon calls for a “united front” between progressives and Marxists, as the brief Popular Front Era begins.

Social Darwinism, collectivism, psychology and indoctrination of another kind was flourishing, largely unchecked by the Christian community. Many Social Darwinists believed that the human race could be perfected through genetics and selective breeding. Adolph Hitler was a Social Darwinist who loathed Christianity as a religion of the weak and hoped to help evolution produce the ideal man through “purifying the gene pool,” murdering both physical and racial “inferiors” to allow the superior Aryan “superman” to evolve. Many Americans today do not realize that Eugenics, as this “selective breeding” program is called, was not really a new idea in the 1930’s, nor was it confined to “evil Nazis” in Germany. Their full party name was National Socialist or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They were brought together through community organizers and were the political progressives of their day. The Nazis were duly elected, not only in Germany but as America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don’t Let Freedom Slip Away, in Austria as well:

I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide – 98% of the vote. I’ve never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force. In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.

The citizens effectively gave their leaders the power to implement their worldview and turn these ugly and evil ideas into legally sanctioned murder. However, the German Eugenicists didn’t invent these ideas they borrowed the theory from America and England, where these ideas were born.

American Feminist leader, Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to be nominated for president by a political party, stated,

Thus society, while expending millions in the care of incurables and imbeciles, takes little heed of or utterly ignores those laws by the study and obedience of which such human abortions might have been prevented from cumbering society with their useless and unwelcome presence. Grecian and Roman civilizations were, it is true, deficient in the gentler virtues, the excess of which in our day is hindering the progress of the race rather than helping or ennobling it. They, by crushing out the diseased and imperfect plants in the garden of humanity, attained to a vigor and physical development, which has never been equated since. And in so doing they were entirely in accord with nature, whose mandate is inexorable, that the “fittest” only shall be permitted to live and propagate. She is a very prodigal in her waste of individual life, in order that the species be without spot of blemish.

Not so our modern civilization, which rather pets its abortions and weaklings, and complacently permits them to procreate another race of fools and pigmies as inane and useless as themselves.

Margaret Sanger, greatly honored today as the founder of Planned Parenthood, pushed the Eugenics idea even further than past adherents had. As a devout humanist and evolutionist, she advocated the elimination of “inferior” human beings, such as the poor and minorities. Their problems, in her view, weighed down society and held back the superior human stock – the wealthier and supposedly more highly evolved white race.

She bluntly defined “birth control,” a term she coined, as “the process of weeding out the unfit” aimed at “the creation of superman.” She often opined that “the most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and that “all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.”
Sanger frequently featured racists and eugenicists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger’s board of directors, wrote in “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremecy” that “[w]e, must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally Asiatic regions inhabited by really inferior races.

Why Behave?

Through the early decades of the century psychology continued to grow. After all, if there was no God to whom we are accountable, as is the logical outworking of Darwinian evolution, why do we as humans do the things we do? Why behave “good” vs. “bad”? Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and others had been making their mark. A young Abraham Mazlow had served as the first research assistant to Dr. Harry Harlow beginning in 1932. He nearly gave up on the idea of being an academic psychologist as he neared completion of his doctorate due to his perception of anti-semitism within that discipline. However, largely due to pressure from his wife, he pressed on.

By 1935 when Maslow joined Thorndike’s lab, New York City has become the new capital of psychoanalytic thought, a mecca for refugee analysts in flight from Nazism. Maslow attached himself for a while to Alfred Adler, got to know Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, and audited courses at the New School given by Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, who emphasized the importance of inspiration – the “aha!” moment. It was a heady time, and Maslow began to think that it might indeed be possible for him to synthesize an important new theory of personality. Research-oriented behavioral psychology increasingly struck him as too narrow, focusing on the most routine aspects of human behavior while neglecting the ideas and emotions that made people interesting. Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other had, was preoccupied with the abnormal, the pathological. The question Maslow wanted to pose was: “What is the nature of psychological health?”

Defining health as anything other than the absence of disease is always tricky. Defining psychological health is even more challenging. Before we can say what qualities make up the healthy personality, we must make assumptions about the meaning and purpose of life.

It seems that this burgeoning new pseudo science was having trouble recognizing that Hitler was simply acting on the views (Darwinism, Social Darwinism and Collectivism) which they themselves had accepted as being true and was an underlying theme in psychology. The attempt to be able to “fix” human beings and thus create the “good society” was a driving force. Maslow’s question about the nature of psychological health is a good one but how could that really be defined? After all, if survival and reproduction are all that really matter how could one even determine right from wrong behaviors? Is good psychological health simply a matter of what makes an individual happy or is it following the rules which society (not God) has set up, for the benefit of the whole? What is the purpose of our existence?

Maslow’s theory of personality would be a protest against the idea that there is a necessary conflict between the individual’s pursuit of happiness and the good of society as a whole. If conforming to the rules of civilization made people feel stifled and unhappy, then there was something wrong with the rules. Looking back on his work in 1968, Maslow acknowledged, “My concerns were socialistic, with American socialism… There is the Jewish tradition of the utopian and the ethical and I was pretty definitely looking for the improvement of mankind.”

So Maslow, as with other academics of that time who were the educational elite were in the process of carrying out the social engineering Dewey envisioned which would in turn bring about the “good society” in man’s evolution. Collectivism, Darwinian Evolution and psychology were having a great impact at the university and college level where the future educators, economists, attorneys, doctors, politicians, and even ministers were being trained or “indoctrinated.” Many who were financially supporting these institutions were largely unaware of the changes that were taking place under their noses and with their money in the name of “academic freedom.” Fundamentalists could offer no voice of descent as they had already abandoned this arena which so largely shaped the thinking of the future generation. With the coming of the Second World War many of the fundamentalists as well as some of the end-times cults, were fairly confident that they were in the last days as they understood the book of Revelation and the Lord would be returning any moment. Therefore, to interact with the culture with an attempt to see it turned around was almost regarded by them as fighting God’s plan. Add to that the contempt that the “fighting fundies” had toward intellectualism as it was represented within the institutions of higher learning and it is little wonder that they felt vindicated within their “safe” community. All they had to do was hold on a little longer and God would soon deliver them from this foreign “godless” world.

Now whether one holds to a pretrib, mid-trib, pre-wrath, post-trib (or what some have said a pan-trib, however it pans out is fine) should have very little bearing on how we live out the Christian faith in the day to day. We co-laborers in the ministry of Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc., do not agree on the timing of the Lord’s return. We do understand that the Scriptures teach that we are to live as though He may return today and also as though His return is a long way off (Matthew 24:42-51). But the trend of this period in history within the fundamentalist movement did not appear to be disposed in that direction. Eventually this would lead to dire circumstances within what was fast becoming a foreign culture in which they found themselves living.

I think it’s been established that the Burned-over district was a hotbed of change (and probably some hope as well). “New” was everywhere. New men, new methods, New Thought and new movements dominated the landscape. It is no accident that women’s suffrage (the right to vote), abolition, and the temperance movement spring up in New York at this time. As with any human movement, these were conglomerations of good intentions, justice, and genuine concern. However, they were also the occasions for injustice, manipulation, and the temptations of power. Listen to Lyman Beecher in a letter to his friend Nathaniel Berman (from Whitney Cross’s book):

There is nothing to which the minds of good men, when once passed the bounds of sound discretion, and launched on an ocean of feeling and experiment, may not come . . . nothing so terrible and unmanageable as the fire and whirlwind of human passion, when once kindled by misguided zeal . . . for in every church, there is wood, hay, and stubble which will be sure to take fire on the wrong side.

It should give us all pause how movements built on good intentions can be warped by our own tendencies to “crusade.” As C.S. Lewis warned, what begins as the political aspect of our faith can quickly become the most important aspect of our faith. How many Christians do you know who consider political activism their God-given calling? The danger however is that what becomes our Christian identity can soon overshadow in a way that our Christianity and our Activism trade places so that our Christianity becomes simply an aspect (albeit the most important aspect) of our political activism. Listen to Cross:

Itinerant preachers utilized the various sins of intemperance as excuses for protracted meetings, and lecturers who centered upon social rather than religious reform utilized the same techniques with much the same ideological content. From both camps [i.e. social and religious] came leaders and followers who increasingly focused on the alcoholic question as the greatest, if not the single vital one of the day. Losing sight of others, they magnified this one objective until it assumed in their minds exclusive proportions.

And that was the way of it. As one reads the history of the burned over district, a pattern emerges. In order to hasten the millennial kingdom, sins must be eradicated. Sins become issues and issues become movements. Movements become frustrated with the lack of personal influence that mere advocacy produces and government becomes the chief means of advocating change. Consider this quote again from Cross:

But the evangelicals, who had first seen the cause as one step toward the millennium and had gathered their intensity from revivalism, evolved toward direct action on the one issue alone, by whatever political methods were required to achieve it.

Time and again this is the pattern. John R. McDowall’s Magdalen society sought to rescue “fallen women and restoring them to social usefulness” but when his supporters grew impatient with results, McDowell began to publish tracts and journals calling for public and political solutions. In themselves these are not bad things but one gets the impression that the “fallen women” were abandoned in favor of more sweeping reforms in legislation. By the time the “female moral reform” movement had separated themselves from McDowall, the movement became nothing more than a publishing house for “vapid moral tracts on the preservation of innocence and campaigning for state laws to punish crimes against chastity.”

I mentioned earlier that Finney’s theology was the headwaters, but there was one other tributary that contributed to the flood out of New York–millennialism. William Miller, Adventists, and Ultraists all thought the end was coming soon. Millerites, it is said would sell all they had and climb trees to await the apocalypse. But what isn’t widely considered is what happened when the end didn’t come in 1838 and 1849 and . . . By 1850, many were disillusioned with Miller and the Ultraists. The fire of misguided passion had burned over the district in a conflagration that led to all manner of heresy including sexual cults (Oneida community of John Humphrey Noyes) and manipulation (one Presbyterian district paid its members 25 dollars to take the temperance pledge). In the wake of the endlessly tardy return of Christ, the flood divided. Those with a more spiritual bent went further into mysticism looking for a supernatural solution. A young treasure hunter named Joseph Smith would seek for supernatural vision and guidance in the midst of religious turmoil. Those of the more political and ideological bent veered pell-mell to the left.

Cross again:

“. . . having departed from the literal rendition of their religious tradition, could make a somewhat more realistic approach to the problems of this world. In their view, to , the millennium would come immediately, but it would be a Utopia built by mortal hand and brain, of earthly materials, established in the midst of contemporary society. . . Christ had died to atone for the original sin of all men. Regeneration, then, could be no Heavenly miracle, sorting the saved from the damned, but rather betokened a growth in morality which could as well be gradual as instantaneous. Such a theology might easily accord with the opinion, as orthodox doctrine did not, that evil was the consequence more of social maladjustment than of individual sin.”

What began as a philosophical worldview and reaction to some kinds of Calvinism had become a political and psychological assessment of the cause of human evil. This branch of the Burned-Over river would flow downstream and become in many respects the great influence on the Social Gospel Movement. Walter Rauschenbusch, himself born in upstate New York would pick up the stream of Utopian and Millennial in his book Christianity and the Social Crisis. Note Rauschenbusch’s warped theology of atonement leads directly to the concern for social maladjustment:

“Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”

Rauschenbusch was heavily influenced by Charles Sheldon of In His Steps fame who was a committed Christian socialist . The timing could not have been more perfect for the rise of the Christian left. Communism claimed its first revolution in the October revolt of 1917. Rauschenbusch published Theology for the Social Gospel the same year. Marx called Christian socialist experiments “Utopian socialism” to distinguish them between “Scientific Socialism” of Marxism-Leninism, but the movements had much in common–especially the emphasis on the social evils of society brought about by class warfare and poverty rather than the depraved human heart. Marx was right when he wrote in the Communist Manifesto that there was a specter haunting the landscape not only of Europe but America. It was the specter of an ideology that began with Ultraism and found its flourishing in the Culture-Driven Social Gospel and Communism. Don has already wrote of the 20th century fascination with Communism and now I think we see that the tributaries of that fascination can be followed back to the world-view first cultivated in the Burned-Over district.

I like the analogy of the streams rather than dots. Connecting dots could imply direct connection from one thing to another. As I warned earlier, history just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, connecting dots doesn’t show how strong the influence of one thing is on another. But the stream analogy does. When you look at a river, it is made up of streams of water that flow from many different sources–some creeks and some tributaries. Sure the Mississippi has its headwaters in tiny stream dribbling out of Lake Itasca Minnesota but no one would say that Lake Itasca is the one source of the Mississippi. Likewise, the Romanticism of Emerson or Finney’s perfectionism can’t be definitively the source of the ills of the Burned-Over district. But they are tributaries in what would become a river. And like a river the route is seldom straight and picks up all sorts of debris along the way. When I last posted, I thought Finney’s revivalism was just a stream. Turns out that his perfectionism was tributary all its own.

As I pointed out in Training the Mind of Faith in America, there was a major shift in theological focus from Christocentric (Christ centered) to Anthropocentric (man centered) in the early 19th Century. The church opted for compelling marketing and a feeling driven faith and, with the loss of sound biblical teaching a number of cults and New Religious Movements began. By the time we reach the middle of the 19th Century this seems to go into hyper-drive.

Atheism Goes Mainstream

On the philosophical front, in 1848, the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels was published. These individuals took an essentially materialistic view of life. In their view, man is really in control of his own destiny and had made remarkable progress in controlling the forces of nature and growing toward his creative potential. It was a well-constructed view and Marx, a formidable polemicist, argued his points with vigor.
In 1859, eleven years later, Charles Darwin published his work – On the Origin of Species. The first printing sold out the first day of publication. At this juncture, the religious and scientific communities began to part ways. Naturalistic materialism was displacing the biblical account of origins. Faith and reason were fast becoming mutually exclusive ideas. Darwin applied his view to humans in 1871, and Darwinian evolution rocked the world. It utterly changed for many, the view of our place in the world, and indeed, our place in the universe and the hereafter.

Friedrich Nietzsche, although an Atheist himself, realized the moral implications inherent in a universe without God. In his work The Gay Science (sec. 125), he penned the words:

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe away the blood from us?

Nietzsche realized that if there is no God, to Whom we are accountable and to Whom we owe obedience, then all things are permissible. There really is no right or wrong, good or evil in such a universe—there is just predator and prey.

Dis-harmonic Convergence

In 1893, the first Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in Chicago. It was predominantly a Christian event, but a very articulate individual from India by the name of Swami Vivekananda made quite a favorable impression upon the assembly. East met West as Hinduism had now officially made its way to America. Vivekananda captured the minds and hearts of those attending. Hinduism and Darwinian evolution (which was being more commonly accepted) are very compatible belief systems. Darwinism asserts physical evolution through change and adaptation from lower forms of life to higher forms of life—Hinduism asserts spiritual evolution from lower forms of life to higher forms of life through reincarnation.

As we have already pointed out, this was also a period when theological liberalism and spiritistic occultism were competing with Christianity for the allegiance of mankind. The Scriptures had been under attack by the schools of higher critics for some time, and were being more and more viewed as myth and fable to be believed only by the uneducated and fearful.

Perhaps if it had been Atheism alone, or occultism alone, or liberalism alone, or the explosion of religious cults alone, that the church had to face, it may have put up a better fight. But with the convergence of all of these at the same point in time, vast inroads were made against the truth of the gospel. When the light of the gospel grows dim in any society, darkness takes over. Little could anyone have imagined, however, that these nineteenth century religious and secular philosophies would leave their bloody footprints all over the twentieth century.

Christians occasionally defended their faith against these new religious movements and atheistic philosophical ideas that were proliferating, but the response of the church was largely haphazard and uncoordinated. By the end of the 19th century, Christians had managed to forge many interdenominational alliances in such important areas as evangelism (e.g., D.L. Moody’s ministry) and youth work (e.g., the YMCA). But any major united efforts among Christians to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) was perhaps 50 to 60 years away from being realized at the turn of the century.

I like the analogy of the streams rather than dots. Connecting dots could imply direct connection from one thing to another. As I warned earlier, history just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, connecting dots doesn’t show how strong the influence of one thing is on another. But the stream analogy does. When you look at a river, it is made up of streams of water that flow from many different sources–some creeks and some tributaries. Sure the Mississippi has its headwaters in tiny stream dribbling out of Lake Itasca Minnesota but no one would say that Lake Itasca is the one source of the Mississippi. Likewise, the Romanticism of Emerson or Finney’s perfectionism can’t be definitively the source of the ills of the Burned-Over district. But they are tributaries in what would become a river. And like a river the route is seldom straight and picks up all sorts of debris along the way. When I last posted, I thought Finney’s revivalism was just a stream. Turns out that his perfectionism was tributary all its own.

Here’s a quote from John H. Martin’s Saints, Sinners, and Reformers

By 1851 when he accepted the College Presidency, Finney had changed as American religion had changed. His doctrine of reforming one’s self led to the various reforms movements of the nineteenth century, and American Protestantism was to head in different directions after the 1850s. One portion evolved towards a completely literal approach to the Bible and the coming Millennium, while the other, among the major Protestant denominations, downplayed much of traditional theological concerns in favor of a growing interest in the Social Gospel which would concern itself with the betterment of society.

So Finney was the headwaters. But downstream we have other reform movements. Some good (anti-slavery) and some bad (radical millennialism). Recall that perfectionism was a reaction to some forms of Calvinism. Perfectionists believed that the human soul was perfectible rather than being predestined. As a result, it was possible to live a life virtually sinless and revivals were the key to rededicating one’s self to that task. Recall also that I did not like the term “Perfectionism” because it confused Finney’s theology with Aristotle’s virtue theory. Whitney Cross in his excellent book The Burned Over District (Cornell University Press, 1950) doesn’t use that term but instead speaks of “Ultraism” and that is indeed what many in the burned over district called it. So from now on Aristotle can rest easy. We’ll call it Ultraism. Here’s what you need to know about Ultraism:

1) It was anti-intellectual. By that I don’t mean it just didn’t like academic science. I mean it eschewed all forms of systematic study of the scripture. I mentioned in the last post that Finney didn’t want scholarship to interfere with his understanding of God. Cross actually reports that Ultraists wanted nothing to do with prepared sermons because they lacked fire and power. As one Ultraist put it, “We must have exciting, powerful preaching, or the devil will have the people, except what the Methodists can save.” The key here is that in order to distance themselves from the “dusty” puritans, the Ultraists embraced vices in spiritual development. The idea that a prepared sermon wrought with study and prayer lacks fire is ludicrous.

2) It was anti-doctrine. Because sermons were unprepared they tended to bypass doctrinal issues that would divide revival attendees. Cross says, “The practices of the revivalist dulled nice distinctions between denominations and confused logical lines of thought.” And when you don’t have any doctrine to parse out for the poor, benighted farmers, what do you have to preach about? You sensationalize. “Adapting texts to the need of the hour cultivated a taste for the sensational . . . Invective easily came to predominate in attacks on clergy and laymen alike.” Reminds me of a joke I heard in hermeneutics class. What did the preacher’s notes on his sermon say? “Point weak here. Yell louder.”

3) It was hyper-experiential. The people took their cue from the revivalists. No study but lots of passion and fervor and wild gesticulations. To be sure there was much prayer. But since no one thought to actually study the nature and spirit of prayer. The Burned-over district settled for sensational and authoritarian prayer. People demonstrated their powers of prayer by praying horses from one pasture to the next according to Cross. Private prayer meetings became so boisterous as to disturb tourists to the region. Charles Finney would examine the audible prayers of his congregants and pronounce judgment on them for their “Mockery of God” but sadly as one district resident professed, “very few . . . know much about praying . . . I do not find anybody that knows how to teach me on that subject.”

So there are some streams in the Ultraist movement. Since this is a blog and not a lecture (and I’m no revivalist) let us all discuss this. Post your thoughts and let’s sift the good from the bad and the ugly.

The term “Burned-Over District” seems to have come from a book by Whitney Cross called The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1950). However it was first used, it seems, by Charles Finney as a description of the fires of Revival sweeping over western New York. Another great source for history of this era can be found online in a series of articles by John H. Martin called “Saints, Sinners, and Reformers.”

His chapter on Finney and Revivalism is detailed and to an untrained amateur like myself, it looks thorough. Much of what follows are quotes from Martin’s work interspersed with my commentary.

The first thing to note about revivalism is that philosophy and worldview played a not-insignificant influence:

A new era, known as the Romantic Period, was coming into existence at the turn of the 1800s. It would flourish intellectually in various quarters, such as in the Boston of Emerson and other New Englanders before long. Out on the frontier, however, it would flourish in a variant form of romanticism, in religion in particular, which was often anti-intellectual. The religious faith of the frontier era was motivated by emotion and the warmth of a new spirit in religion, and this was most obviously observed in the manifestation of the new religious revival movement. Puritan theology was seen as bookish, dry, and musty by many frontiersmen, many of whom were illiterate. Thus on the frontier, religion often substituted emotion for intellectual thought. As one scholar of American life, Dr. Sidney Mead has put it, “Around 1800 American religion gained a heart—and lost its head.” This was particularly to be true in western New York.

American Romanticism as a movement was associated with Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson who both extolled the virtues of worshipping God without the trappings of organized religion. I wish I had more time to discuss Romanticism in Emerson, Thoreau, and William James but I don’t. Suffice it to say that philosophically there was a trend away from knowing God to experiencing God especially in nature. The new romanticism was rustic (Thoreau lived in the woods to settle his soul), anti-establishment (Thoreau went to jail for not paying his taxes), and anti-sectarian. I think both Thoreau and Emerson were Unitarians (someone correct me on this).

In the case of Finney, as with many other preachers of the time, he eschewed theological training at Princeton Theological Seminary since he did not want “to have his theology ready-made for him.” “He was not,” he said, “going to have his religious ideas spoiled by education.” This was to be true of many of the revivalists who followed after him.

The anti-intellectualism of the rustic Romanticism coincided (notice I do not claim it was the cause. first rule of history: correlation does not entail causation) with a growing distaste for seminary training which was handy since rural New York was far away from Princeton. I saw this first hand not twenty years ago. When I was 19, I “felt a call to ministry” while acting in a college drama ministry. Where I was from, this call could only mean a call to one of three things: 1) Pastoral ministry 2) Music ministry or 3) Youth Ministry (or there was the ever popular discount option: Music and Youth–two for the price of one.) I had no rhythm and I was barely out of the “youth” group myself. So I determined it must be preaching that was my calling. With no training beyond my lackluster reading of my youth study bible and my knowledge of every single Petra lyric, I was encouraged to “get up there and preach” as soon as possible. Two weeks after my call, I delivered a 45 minute sermon with absolutely no relevant point, structure, or understanding. Thank God only one tape was made. I destroyed it. I also was told I had the hand of God on me and was given about 100 dollars as a gift to my ministry. There was no encouragement to seek higher education, no call to deepen my understanding of the history, geography, culture, or language of the Bible. I preached steadily for three years in pulpits all around Northeast Mississippi. Hopefully I didn’t do too much damage.

Martin does give what he considers a seminal cause of revivalism, dissatisfaction with Calvinism. Calvinism of the Puritans was already denigrated as dusty and tired. Part of this came from dissatisfaction with pre-destination in some forms of Calvinism. Rather than critique and honestly differ from Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan dons, the rural romantics embraced Finney’s new doctrine of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a philosophical term about developing virtue that has been around a lot longer than Finney but theologically perfectionism meant that one wasn’t predestined to either heaven or hell but could improve oneself in order to be a better Christian. Rather than looking at one’s life as an experiment to see if one was one of the elect as some Calvinists advised, one could gain holiness by getting closer to God. That “getting closer” is where the tradition of revival started. Listen to Martin:

Salvation became not a becoming one with one God or Jesus, or the entrance into Heaven at the end of life, but it became the beginning of a new life here on earth. One became emancipated from sin, and this could be done through the means of the revival meeting.

An individual could perfect his nature and his universe—yet there was still the problem of sin. It was here that the American religious mind developed a technique which could bring the two concepts together, and this was through the device of the American religious revival. The religious revivals which were to spread from the frontier to all of American society in the nineteenth century were a peculiarly American approach to Christianity. If it is found in operation hereafter anywhere else in the world than in the United States, one can be certain that an American missionary has been in the vicinity.

Thus the American revival system squared the traditional Christian doctrine of man’s sinfulness with the possibility of improvement and salvation. The revival system institutionalized these two opposing views of sinfulness and salvation with little regard for logic or the traditional theology of Christianity.

What is a uniquely American contribution to Christianity? Revivals. Revivals provided the solution to our strong sin nature and the desire for perfection. Finding your Christian walk hard, Brother? Struggling with the old nature? Well it doesn’t mean you aren’t one of the elect like those stuffy Boston folk say. It just means you need to get the Holy Spirit to give you the power to fight your sin nature. And where does that power come from? Well come down to the revival and rededicate your life to pursuing God!

Of course this method had its problems. Revival services do not renovate the heart. People would dedicate and rededicate their lives without any inkling of the spiritual practices and disciplines and community necessary to change. They only knew that often the congregation would sing 100 verses of “Just as I am” and hundreds of people would come down “just as they are” and by next summer they would be “just as they were.” Which reminds me of my favorite revival joke. Seems a certain man would come down to the altar at every revival and pray long and loud, “O Lord fill me! Fill me!” but after a week or two he would be back to his old sinful ways–lying, cheating, and womanizing. One year, a blue-haired saint on the first row had enough. When he started his prayers of “Fill me” the old woman shouted: “Don’t do it Lord. He leaks.”

But revivalism wouldn’t just affect individual Christian discipleship. It would spill over into political reform as well:

Thus the new revival approach under Finney gave lip service to the doctrine of sin of traditional Christianity. Finney and revivalists who followed in his train preached salvation through individual reform, and in time this would become salvation through the reform of society, as in the growing temperance movement and then in the women’s rights and the anti-slavery movement. There were those who would carry the idea of perfection to its extremes, and the more radical Perfectionists felt that conversion made them totally sinless, and they therefore sometimes engaged in behavior which flaunted scriptural, social, and moral codes, and in some cases, such as in the Oneida community, led to a sexuality which shocked society.

But that will have to wait until next time. What are we to make of all of this? Isn’t it true that any movement will be distorted? Isn’t it the case that Christianity has always had its scripture twisting and doctrinal snake oil salesman? Certainly. And I’m not condemning things like the priesthood of the believer, emotional experiences with God, or even the sincere public commitment to Christ. I am not arrogant enough to say that I can read this history like tea leaves. However, what I see is that philosophical trends precede theological ones and together these precede political trends as well. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of this. Maybe not. What do you think dear reader? What can we glean from this vignette of history?

YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ (Matt. 22:37)

Mark adds “strength” (Mark 12:30) and Luke adds “strength:” and loving your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27). IN spite of this, the mind in the life of faith is an aspect of the faith that has largely been lost over the last 200 years or so within the church on the whole. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the life of the mind was still held to be an important aspect of faith. Harvard University was established in 1636 for the purpose of training Christian ministers. Ten years later they adopted their “Rules and Precepts”:

2. Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

3. Every one shall so exercise himselfe in reading the Scriptures twice a day, that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein, both in Theoreticall observations of Language and Logick, and in practical and spiritual truths, as his Tutor shall require, according to his ability; seeing the entrance of the word giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple (Psalm 119:130).

In 1701 a collegiate college was founded by several ministers in the New England colony of Connecticut “to the end that they might educate ministers in their own way.” It is said that the Mather family “also were among those in Boston who welcomed and labored for the establishment of a seminary of a stricter theology than Harvard” This Collegiate School of Connecticut was named Yale in 1718 after a wealthy benefactor by the name of Elihu Yale made a fairly substantial donation to the institution. Although arts and science were an important aspect of the instruction, they were to be viewed theocentrically (God centered) and grounded in sound theology:

The charter of 1701 stated that the end of the school was the instruction of youth in the arts and sciences, that they might be fitted for public employment, both in church and civil state. To the clergy, however, who controlled the College, theology was the basis, security and test of arts and sciences. In 1722 the rector, Timothy Cutler, was dismissed because of a leaning toward Episcopacy. Various special tests were employed to preserve the doctrinal purity of Calvinism among, the instructors; that of the students was carefully looked after. In 1753 a stringent test was fixed by the Corporation to ensure the orthodoxy of the teachers. This was abolished in 1778.

It is approximately here that a theocentric (God centered) and specifically a Christocentric (Christ centered) view of Scripture and life began to be replaced with an anthropocentric (man centered) view. By the time we get to the nineteenth century, culture and the church both took a fairly radical change from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century for a couple of reasons:

First, Americans simply did not go to church in great numbers in the nineteenth century. Many estimates place church membership at around 7 percent at the dawn of the nineteenth century and only 15 percent by 1850, after the so-called Second Great Awakening. Secondly, a dramatic shift had taken place in American forms of worship following the Revolutionary War. In the early decades of the 1700s churches and preachers were still under the influence of the Puritans. Sermons were highly doctrinal and were often read verbatim from manuscripts. Church services were geared for the mind not the emotions (although many, like Jonathan Edwards, preached to the heart, they did so through the conduit of the mind); sermons were judged by their content not their delivery (Edwards read every word). Music was carefully controlled. Hymns were often “lined out” (a method whereby the song leader read one line at a time, which the congregation would then sing then wait for the next line to be read), and sometimes eliminated altogether for fear that the people might be manipulated.

The Winds of Change Blew Gently

Yale had put in place their test to “ensure the orthodoxy of the teachers” in 1753 and in a little more than 25 years they abandoned the test in 1778. Other events were occurring which likely aided in this shift mid-eighteenth century things began to change in the institutions of higher learning and in culture:

All that began to change in the 1740s at the time of the Great Awakening and the preaching of George Whitefield. When the embers of this time or revival died down, the church went into a drought. Church attendance began to dive, theology lost its appeal, the teachings of the Enlightenment began to catch on, and Deism became popular. By 1800 the American church was in a dismal state and ripe for anything that would offer some kind of spiritual sustenance. The Second Great Awakening, which began in 1801 in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, would fill that void and forever change Christianity in America. Sermons of substance were replaced with emotional appeals. Doctrine was replaced by stories, and the preacher’s performance became more important than what was taught. Music took on a central role as emotionalism became the order of the day. Ministers began to study “what worked” in order to draw a crowd. Charles Finney would perfect all of this, changing the heart and soul of the church. In other words, church services became a form of entertainment.

It may well be that cultivation of the mind in the faith, nearly to the exclusion of the emotions (heart and soul?) was at least in part responsible for the pendulum swing in the opposite direction. In other words, both extremes are out of balance in the life of individual believers and the church as a whole. However, change they did and definitely not for the better. Claims of God appearing, visions given and/or communication with spirits to filled the void of sound biblical teaching. The Scriptures as the authoritative test of truth was replaced with experience and feelings to determine truth. During the nineteenth century a number of cults and false religious movements were born and the church itself moved into a new era of pragmatism based on studying and implementing “‘…what worked’ in order to draw a crowd.” Sound marketing replaced sound teaching. Providing experiences replaced worshipping God with one’s mind.

The nineteenth century was indeed a period marked by the “democratization” of religious belief—a time of folks doing spiritually what was right in their own eyes, and following whatever spiritual fads and gurus that appealed to them. Indisputably, there was much “spiritual” fervor during this period, but “spirituality” does not necessarily have anything to do with the Christian faith. The schools of the higher critics had begun “demythologizing” the Scriptures, separating the faith from “the book” that had acted as its anchor throughout the centuries. Mystical pied pipers were more than willing to fill the void left by a gradual abandonment of the fundamentals of the faith.

It was in this period that one Charles Finney, an attorney from Adams New York, appeared on the scene. He was intrigued by “the new measures,” or the birth of the “altar call” which some Methodists had employed in their churches:

The earliest record of the altar call is found in the late eighteenth century among congregations of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the Anglican architectural tradition, the area before the communion table, at the front of the sanctuary, was called the altar. Occasionally the preacher called awakened sinners to the front of the sanctuary, that is, to the altar. Some years later Methodists organized camp meetings with an “anxious or mourner’s bench” replacing the altar. Awakened sinners were invited to come to the “anxious bench” (the front pew or row of chairs) to receive specific instruction toward repentance and faith, while the remainder of the congregation tarried in prayer specifically for the mourners.

There had been so many revivals going on for about twenty years between Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Mountains that this area became known as the “Burned-Over District.” In to this spirit of revival, stepped Finney:

In 1821 Finney experienced something of a religious epiphany and set out to preach the Gospel in western New York. His revivals were characterized by careful planning, showmanship and advertising. Finney preached in the Burned-Over District throughout the 1820s and the early 1830s, before moving to Ohio in 1835 to take a chair in theology at Oberlin College. He subsequently became president of Oberlin.

Some church leaders were concerned with what was going on and the “new measures” which Finney was fine tuning and marketing so well and attempted to address their concerns with Finney:

The issue began to clarify itself around the question of the relationship of emotion, feeling, and excitement to revival, the point that Sears had raised with Finney in May 1825. It was a question of being for or against, not emotion, but rather the adoption of means, in addition to preaching and prayer, to promote emotion. There was no disagreement over whether or not hearers under the power of truth ought to feel and be disturbed and moved, but should such methods not mentioned in the Scripture be employed to induce a response in those hearing the gospel? Most of the new measures were deliberately calculated to have that effect. They included such things as denunciatory language designed to alarm, pointed remarks to particular individuals delivered in public, naming unconverted people in prayer, using inquiry meetings to make individuals pray or ‘submit’, and other similar practices.

These leaders were not opposed to the aspect of emotions and feelings in the life of faith. It was what they perceived as manipulation of emotions as a means of bringing about actual repentance and saving faith. Finney however was resolute and unflinching. After all, what he was doing was “working.” Proper marketing, well designed programs, lively music, the air of anticipation in the growing crowds further persuaded him that he was doing the right thing. In the process he also decided that man does not have a sin nature but rather that he is a sinner by choice of his will. It is a teaching that Neil Anderson holds on to today:

It was Adam’s will, not his supposed nature, that controlled his actions and, Finney declared, what was true of Adam remained true for all men; a decision of the will, not a change of nature, was all that was needed for anyone to be converted.

In this movement we see the birth of church fads which, as happened in the case of Finney, can and often does cause basic theology to be modified or even abandoned in order to conform the new pragmatic marketing approach. This isn’t really an argument between Calvinism and Arminianism as the whole of Scripture demonstrates that we are sinners by nature. One can hardly read passages such as Ephesian 2:3 and not come to that conclusion. It is a this point the focus of theology clearly changed from being Christocentric (Christ centered) to anthropocentric (man centered). Whatever marketing principles and well choreographed productions worked to draw in the most people became the norm for many more evangelists and pastors. After all the reasoning went, success as measured by nickels and noses proved this was of God and who can argue with God? This approach took root and largely shaped church practice for the next 180 years.

In 1830 in the same area of the country, to be more specific in the county of Wayne, and town of Palmyra, NY, a young occultist, treasure seeker and teller of tall tales by the name of Joseph Smith published a book now known as The Book of Mormon. Spiritism, although biblically condemned, had become popularly accepted, so Smith’s claims of visits by “Heavenly Father” and Jesus were received without difficulty by some.

Also in the “Burned-Over District,” a few years later, in 1843, a Baptist minister by the name of William Miller believed that he had discerned the actual date for the return of Christ. Many of Miller’s followers (known as Adventists) sold their possessions and awaited His arrival at the predicted time. It didn’t happen. Miller then “realized” that his calculations had been “off” by a year, so he and most of his followers geared up for the new date of His arrival, which passed without incident. This false prophecy became known as “The Great Disappointment” for obvious reasons.

Out of ashes of “The Great Disappointment” came yet another new sect. A young Adventist woman by the name of Ellen Harmon, later to become Ellen G. White, claimed that she received a revelation from God to the effect that Miller’s date had been correct after all—only the expected event was wrong. 1844 was the date that Christ entered and cleansed the sanctuary. Though she offered no proof for her assertion, many of the “greatly disappointed” attached themselves to her, and the movement became known as the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The church had its formal beginning in 1863. Ellen White had “received revelation” that Sunday worship was the “mark of the beast,” and that true Christians must keep the Sabbath and worship on Saturday.

Arcadia, NY, also in Wayne County, gave birth to yet another phenomena, the spiritualist movement in 1848. Two sisters, Margaret and Catherine Fox claimed they had made contact with spirits and that the spirits communicated with them through knocking, rapping, table levitation and so forth during séances. Their popularity grew quickly and by 1855 they had a following approaching nearly 1 million.

Also, in 1848, John Humphrey Noyes moved a small following that he had fielded over the previous eight or ten years to Oneida, NY. Noyes had rejected Calvinism while studying at Yale and came to believe that upon conversion one is completely released from sin and therefore not a sinner. He called this “Perfectionism.” For this view, he was denied ordination, for obvious reasons. Of course Noyes believed he was God’s agent on earth to restore true Christianity and had denounced the institution of marriage and over time replaced it with his teaching of “complex marriage,” which was one of the main elements of this new communal religion in New York.

The main teaching which received the most criticism was that of “Complex Marriage.” In Complex Marriage, every man was married to every woman and vice versa. This practice was to stay only within the community and had to stay within two main guidelines. The first was that before the man and woman could cohabit, they had to obtain each other’s consent through a third person or persons. Secondly, no two people could have exclusive attachment with each other because it would be selfish and idolatrous. Any two people found in any such situation would be separated and not allowed to see each other for a certain length of time.

Among the many communal sexual practices was Noyes teaching of “Ascending Fellowship.”

Ascending Fellowship was set up to properly introduce the virgins into Complex Marriage. This practice also worked to prevent the young members from falling in love with each other and from limiting their range of affection to just the younger members. The main people picked to care for the virgins were people who were considered to be closer to God. These people were of course older and had a special title which was that of Central Member. These Central Members were allowed their pick of a partner over which they would have the responsibility of spiritual guidance.

The Adventist movement, which had it’s start through William Miller in the 1840’s continued to split into numerous competing sects. Charles Taze Russell founded one of these Adventist “cousins” in the 1870’s. He broke with his Second Adventist mentor, Nelson Barbour, and began publishing Zion’s Watchtower in 1879. He had already rejected much of the Christian faith and claimed, as Joseph Smith and Ellen G. White had claimed before him, that he was “restoring” the true Christian faith. He was a religious eclectic, borrowing doctrines from various occult thinkers of his day and mixing them all together with run-of-the-mill Adventism to create his new “Bible Student” movement. He adopted such occult/pagan ideas as Pyramidology, Phrenology (purporting to prove a man’s character by the shape of his head) and various other mystical and occult teachings. He also predicted the date of Christ’s return, 1914, which of course failed, proving Russell to be a false prophet. Russell believed and taught that he was God’s channel, and that it was necessary to study his books to gain a true understanding of spiritual things. Today the group Russell founded has been splintered into hundreds of different sects. Of these, the largest is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, popularly known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A New Age of Age-old Mysticism

In 1875, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded a metaphysical movement called the Theosophical Society. This mystic taught that God’s wisdom is found in all religions—with the possible exception of biblical Christianity. Her disdain of Christianity is very apparent in this and other statements:

The name has been used in a manner so intolerant and dogmatic, especially in our day, that Christianity is now the religion of arrogance, par excellence, a stepping-stone for ambition, a sinecure for wealth, sham, and power; a convenient screen for hypocrisy.

Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy, another religious mystic, was also published in 1875. Eight years later, in 1883, the Key to the Scriptures was added. Essentially, Eddy taught Hinduism, using Christian terminology. She taught that life is an illusion, that there is no physical world and therefore no such thing as sickness. Any symptoms of illness that one experienced were merely a problem in thinking. It was claimed of course, that this teaching came from God, that Eddy was merely a channel of the information to mankind. The Church of Christ Scientist (a.k.a. Christian Science) was founded in 1879 in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Another “mind science” group began in 1889. Called simply Modern Thought. Modern Thought was started under Charles and Myrtle Fillmore and borrowed heavily from New Thought and Christian Science. In 1890 the name was changed to Christian Science Thought, then simply to Thought in 1891, and renamed in 1895 as Unity, and is now known as the Unity School of Christianity. Hence, there is good evidence that they gave a lot of thought to their name, if nothing else.
These were just several among scores of strange new religious movements, aberrations and cults that either sprang from America’s own spiritual soil or opportunistically invaded it from overseas during the 19th century. Christians were not the only ones concerned about some of these movements. Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), for example, expressed alarm at the growing financial and political clout of Christian Science. And early Illinois residents rose up against the misdeeds of their Mormon neighbors. Joseph Smith was jailed and eventually killed in an exchange of gunfire with an enraged mob.

Atheism Goes Mainstream

On the philosophical front, in 1848, the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels was published. These individuals took an essentially materialistic view of life. In their view, man is really in control of his own destiny and had made remarkable progress in controlling the forces of nature and growing toward his creative potential. It was a well-constructed view and Marx, a formidable polemicist, argued his points with vigor.

In 1859, eleven years later, Charles Darwin published his work – On the Origin of Species. The first printing sold out the first day of publication. At this juncture, the religious and scientific communities began to part ways. Naturalistic materialism was displacing the biblical account of origins. Faith and reason were fast becoming mutually exclusive ideas. Darwin applied his view to humans in 1871, and Darwinian evolution rocked the world. It utterly changed for many, the view of our place in the world, and indeed, our place in the universe and the hereafter. These views began permeating and percolating in the universities and schools of higher learning.

Friedrich Neitzche, although an Atheist himself, realized the moral and societal implications inherent in a universe without God. In his work The Gay Science (sec. 125), he penned the words:

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe away the blood from us?

Neitzche realized that if there is no God, to Whom we are accountable and to Whom we owe obedience, then all things are permissible. There really is no right or wrong, good or evil in such a universe—there is just predator and prey. Whatever the predator does to the prey just is, there is no right or wrong about it.

Dis-harmonic Convergence

In 1893, the first Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in Chicago. It was predominantly a Christian event, but a very articulate individual from India by the name of Swami Vivikananda made quite a favorable impression upon the assembly. East met West as Hinduism had now officially made its way to America. Vivikananda captured the minds and hearts of those attending. Hinduism and Darwinian evolution (which was being more commonly accepted) are very compatible belief systems. Darwinism asserts physical evolution through change and adaptation from lower forms of life to higher forms of life—Hinduism asserts spiritual evolution from lower forms of life to higher forms of life through reincarnation.

This period of theological liberalism and spiritistic occultism were competing with Christianity for the allegiance of mankind. The Scriptures had been under attack by the schools of higher critics for some time, and were being more and more viewed as myth and fable to be believed only by the uneducated and fearful. The abandonment of training the mind by Christians left them unable to challenge the views of atheists, Darwinists and higher critics.

Perhaps if it had been Atheism alone, or occultism alone, or liberalism alone, or the explosion of religious cults alone, that the church had to face, it may have put up a better fight. But with the convergence of all of these at the same point in time, vast inroads were made against the truth of the gospel. When the light of the gospel grows dim in any society, darkness takes over. Little could anyone have imagined, however, that these nineteenth century religious and secular philosophies would leave their bloody footprints all over the twentieth century.

The biblical voice and Christian worldview were gradually being replaced in culture. Christians occasionally attempted to defend their faith against these new religious movements and atheistic philosophical ideas that were proliferating, but the response of the church was largely haphazard and uncoordinated. By the end of the 19th century, Christians had managed to forge many interdenominational alliances in such important areas as evangelism (e.g., D.L. Moody’s ministry) and youth work (e.g., the YMCA). But any major united efforts among Christians to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) was perhaps 50 to 60 years away from being attempted.

It is important, first off, to note that the The Manhattan Declaration is not a partisan or political statement–I shared the podium last Friday at the National Press Club with Republicans and Democrats alike. Instead, it addresses and elevates four specific areas of universal consensus. Some have referred to these as “threshold issues,” meaning they represent the foundation of our faith and the pivot point from which everything else flows. This is the bedrock. If we can’t agree on these areas of doctrine, everything else will be of reduced value. These four areas are:

The sanctity of human life.
The sanctity of marriage
The protection of religious liberty
The rejection of unjust laws

Notice, he is clear it “is not a partisan or political statement.” It is not political in nature. Instead the signers view it as the “foundation of our faith.” It is “the bedrock” and these 4 agreed positions are the “pivot point from which everything else flows.” At one time the “foundation of our faith” was Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:10-11) but that seems to have been long, long ago in a land far away. Sure, Jesus is important, but in today’s church, theology and teaching is no longer Christocentric (Christ centered) but anthropocentric (man centered). So where do we begin answering our question and proposing solutions?

In attempting to undertake a project like this it is at least tempting to want to go back to Adam and Eve when fifty percent of the population was deceived into rebellion and the other fifty percent chose to rebel and attempted to blame their situation on God and to move forward from that event. As tempting as that might be to us, there already exists a very good record of those events recorded in the Scriptures and we do not believe we can really improve upon that.

What we can say is that the Scriptures show us the inability of man to maintain a balance in his relationship with God, each other and his place in creation. When a lawyer, with a view to create a dilemma for the Lord Jesus Christ asked what the greatest commandment was He replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and will all thy mind.” (Matt. 22:37) As J.P Moreland points out:

In other words, God is worthy of bring loved with every single facet of our human personality, not simply one or two aspects of our nature.

Over the eons the people of God seem to continually get sidetracked and emphasize one or two of these areas and forget about or abandon the others. To a group of detractors who had pretty well abandoned the heart and soul aspect of the life of faith, Jesus met them on what they assuredly believed was their strongest asset, the mind. J.P. Moreland demonstrates the importance of the mind in the life of our Lord:

We get a hint at what might be included in loving God with the mind in the context preceding Jesus’ answer. In Matthew 22:23-33 (NASB) a group of Sadducees (who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead) tried to trap Jesus with an intellectual argument involving the story of a woman who had successively been married to seven brothers. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? They asked. Jesus’ options seemed to be: (1) deny the resurrection, (2) accept polygamy and adultery by affirming her marriage to all seven in heaven, or (3) unfairly and arbitrarily limit her marriage to one brother only.

It is interesting to note that Jesus did something His followers should emulate: He intelligently answered the Sadducee’s question! First, He addressed the surface issue by denying the necessary condition for the Sadducees’ argument to get off the ground; that is, He denied that there is marriage in heaven. He then went for the deeper issue about the resurrection, and His strategy is instructive. He cites what on the surface appears to be a verse inadequately related to the issue of the resurrection: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ [.] He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” As a young Christian, I was puzzled by Jesus’ response because I myself could have cited better verses than this one, for example, Daniel 12:2, which explicitly affirms the resurrection. Or so I thought. Jesus’ genius is revealed when we recognize that He has studied Sadducean theology and knew that they did not accept the full authority if the prophets, including Daniel. He also knew that the very passage He used was one of the very defining arguments for the entire Sadducean party! His argument hinged on the tense of the Hebrew verb. Jesus does not say, “I was the God of Abraham, etc.,” but, “I am (continue to be) the God of Abraham, et cetera,” a claim that could only be true if Abraham and others continue to exist.

For our purposes, two things are important about the narrative. First, Jesus revealed His intellectual skills in debate by: (1) showing his familiarity with His opponents’ point of view; (2) appealing to common ground (a text all disputants accepted) instead of expressing a biblical text He accepted but they rejected (Daniel 12:2); and (3) deftly used the laws of logic to dissect His opponents’ argument and refute it powerfully.

Although we won’t spend a great deal of time there, we should at least begin in the First Century. I approach this with a bit of caution. As Jonathon pointed out in The Culture Driven Church (or We are of Peace, Always):

Because “where did we go wrong” often leads to restoration movements which is just as effective at abandoning the Gospel as running after the culture.

He is correct. Nearly all cults and false religious movements were developed out of the idea that the church apostatized at some earlier time and they are trying to restore the faith of the First Century Church. The first problem with this claim is the underlying assumption that there was a pristine, unadulterated and lived out faith in the First Century Church. Anyone with a moderate understanding of the New Testament would know this is simply false. The First Century Church was riddled with false teaching, false teachers and bad behavior of all kinds.

The reason is two fold. First, the church was born in the midst of a pagan culture. It was a culture in which there was no sanctity of human life. Abortions and infanticide were rampant. Euthanasia of the elderly, infirmed and others was accepted largely because human life was not high value. Sanctity of marriage was not high on the agenda in that pagan culture. Sure, there was marriage, but prostitution was legal, homosexuality was rampant and pedophilia was a common practice among the men of means who had a catamite which was a young boy, for the purposes of sexual gratification. Much of their culture revolved around their sexual pleasures. Marriage was convenient but not sanctified. Religious liberty was allowed as long as it was a state approved religion and the worshippers agreed that the Caesar was the supreme deity.

The First Century church was made up of those who were formerly pagans, who still dwelt in and interacted with a pagan culture. The majority of the New Testament was written to deal with the problems attendant with living in a pagan culture and recognizing and protecting the flock from false teachers who crept into the church. In some ways we are looking at bookends in time. The church was born into this pagan culture and over the first four centuries transformed culture. We can see the way in which they transformed culture by reading a letter from the last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate to a pagan priest in Galatia. Julian was trying to reestablish the pagan religions which once were Rome before it was transformed by Christian thinking and ethos, Julian, in his desire to reestablish the pagan religions instructed his priests to take note of and begin acting like the Christians:

“Why do we not notice that it is their kindness to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [i.e., Christianity]? I believe that we ought really and truly to practice every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practice them, but so must all the priests in Galatia, without exception…In the second place admonish them that no priest may enter a theatre or trade that is base and not respectable…in every city establish hostels in order that strangers may profit by our generosity; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money…for it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg and the impious Galileans [Christians] support both their own poor and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”

Christians transformed culture by how they lived, articulated and demonstrated their faith. Over the last two centuries western culture has reverted back to the paganism of the first century with little or no influence from the church. Many churches today are trying to imitate the pagan culture in order to entice them through the doors of their church. Over the next weeks and months we will be looking at particular turning points, individuals and movements which have influenced the church and culture. Some had little or nothing to do with the church initially but have greatly impacted the church in adverse ways. As Jonathon mentioned they surface in five areas, religion, science, economics, politics and psychiatry. They start in different places but all seem to converge in the 1970s in a sort of Perfect Storm.

Now some of you might accuse us of pummeling a certain kind of deceased equine–namely “Modern church bad–Emergent Church bad” In fact we might be accused of the opposite of the philosophers in Acts 17 who were enamored with all things new. We might be accused of being curmudgeons who are enamored with some nostalgic desire to restore the church to some image we think we have. If that’s true, then I’m glad we get to expose this project to the sunshine of your criticism. Because “where did we go wrong” often leads to restoration movements which is just as effective at abandoning the Gospel as running after the culture. I want to suggest that a healthy skepticism of introspecting about the Church’s true mission is in order.

I was thinking about that healthy skepticism as I was catching the pilot of ABC’s new V series. I’m a child of the 80s and so I remember the first “V” miniseries. But in case you aren’t familiar, the premise of “V” is that an alien race comes to earth and offers us all kinds of help for our earthly ills from disease to economic collapse. They punctuate their pleas for trust with the phrase “We are of Peace Always.” They are hailed as saviours. But in reality they are cold-blooded lizard folk who hide their true intentions behind a human apperance and a stoic fascade. The three main characters in the series are an FBI agent, her teenage son and a priest.

When I watched the pretend world try to decide if they trusted the Visitors and how earthlings should respond to them, I was struck by lack of healthy skepticism from the populace and their eagerness to embrace any Tom, Dick, or E.T. that offered them a way out of their misery. I would have been suspicious the moment they talked about giving everything to us for free. Any economist will tell you that any scarce resource has costs and therefore incentives to keep up supply. The only free sustinence was Manna and it stank after three days. But I digress. The official church position is the Visitors are also God’s creatures and in fact a Godsend. But the priest and the FBI agent aren’t convinced. The teenage boy on the other hand follows his hormones and all of the Visitors are very good looking. He joins the Youth movement of the Visitors. Until the FBI agent and the priest discover the truth they are skeptics but not opponents of the visitors. I half expected the priest to utter the words of Ronald Reagan when dealing with the promises of the Soviet Union, “Trust–but verify.” Of course eventually it is verified that the Visitors are both reptillian and Machievellian.

This brings me to my point. What is a healthy skepticism of culture? What does it look like? What did Jesus mean by telling his disciples to be “as wise as serpents but as innocent as doves”? When is discernment just paranoia and back-biting. I am a philosopher and I start all projects by asking questions. And a big question is whether or not your project is worthwhile? These are my questions and there is a good reason for asking them–the apparent laissez-faire attitude of most Christians to biblical discernment. Don gives a good example of what I mean.

If pollster, George Barna’s research is true, ninety one percent of born-again Christians do not have a biblical worldview:

 A new survey by pollster George Barna finds only 9 percent of born-again Christians hold a biblical worldview.

Barna, who surveyed 2,033 adults in his study, found only 4 percent of the general population have a biblical worldview and suggests many of the nation’s moral and spiritual challenges are directly attributable to this fact.[i]

The criteria he used in the survey, is criteria with which we would whole-heartedly agree: For

the purposes of the research, a biblical worldview was defined as believing that absolute moral truths exist; that such truth is defined by the Bible; and firm belief in six specific religious views. Those views were that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He still rules it today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.[ii]

The percentages we are most concerned with are the groups which fall within the category of born-again churches of which Barna writes: The denominations that produced the highest proportions of adults with a biblical worldview were non-denominational Protestant churches, with 13 percent, Pentecostal churches, with 10 percent, and Baptist churches with 8 percent.[iii]  

In the words of one of my favorite songs: “Something’s wrong here/ something was here but now is gone.” It is is the task of the Culture Driven Church project (again just my label for it) to figure out how we got to this point. Answering why this is the case takes a bit more time. It is entirely too easy to allow ourselves the luxury of believing this is a new problem which has only recently appeared. Often, we as human beings tend to see and try to fix what are really only symptoms and in the process miss the problem entirely. It is our conviction that a historical perspective is often helpful in evaluating and determining what the core problems are and gain an understanding of how they developed which in turn gives us better insights into solutions.

In the coming months that is what we are going to try to do. Lest we simply accept a culture that is in some sense alien to the kingdom–for we are ultimately not of this world–we will dig beneath the surface and ask the hard questions about just how much the culture has influenced the decline of biblical understanding and to what extent the alien culture in our midst are helpful “little green men” to whom we adapt and accomodate to what extent they might be big green lizards who would use us as . . . well whatever lizards use people for (I haven’t seen the second episode of V yet).  And behind all of this is the desire to obey our master and be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Stay tuned in the coming months as we trace several threads of culture and try to answer the question “How did we get here?”

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[i] “Church doesn’t think like Jesus,” WorldNetDaily, December 3, 2003; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35926

[ii] “Church doesn’t think like Jesus,” WorldNetDaily, December 3, 2003; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35926

[iii] “Church doesn’t think like Jesus,” WorldNetDaily, December 3, 2003; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35926