The Liberalization of Denominational Protestantism

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The liberalization and abandonment of Christianity that was evident in the rich and powerful also ran rampant amongst most protestant denominations during this period. In the time following World War I Protestant denominations gradually liberalized to the point where they lost most or all of the fundamental teachings of the historic Christian faith. While secularization had a long history in northern Protestantism and Evangelicalism, with the exception of the Congregationalist and their offshoot groups of Universalists, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists, the major denominations hadn’t fully and formally abandoned fundamental doctrines up until this point.  This process was not smooth and the voices of Christian orthodoxy had some victories along the way but in the end the forces of liberalism were able to gain dominant positions in the liberal arts colleges and seminaries run by the denominations (3 p. 179) that then filled the pulpits. Liberalism and modernism in Protestantism generally made its greatest gains in churches with an Arminian theology and history and those that lacked clear creeds or statements of faith (3 p. 180). In the 1920’s the Princeton Theological Institute, which stood resolute against secularization and “scientism” fell to a liberal takeover and a large minority of the Presbyterian clergy signed a document known as the Auburn Affiliation that accepted alternate positions on the five core points of Christian belief that had been approved by the church council a few years earlier.  In all the major denominations, especially those most associated with the North, the picture was more or less the same.

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The issue at the core of the denial of Christian doctrine on the part of the denominations was denial of scriptural authority which led to denial of doctrinal authority which flowed out in sermons and literature.  To the degree that churches liberalized they also tended to affiliate with socialist and globalist movements and organizations like the League of Nations, World Court, Marxist political parties and organizations, and labor unions (3 p. 187). This was especially true of the Federal Council of Churches and the magazine Christian Century which was a mouthpiece for this form of secularized Christianity. Conservative and Evangelical voices were muted. The liberal church would commonly associate Christianity with democracy which was in keeping with the elevation of democracy in liberal politics by the likes of Dewey and others.  This had really no scriptural or historic doctrinal basis as the Bible doesn’t address governmental organization or structure. This, in turn, associated God with the state.  World peace movements were very popular with the liberal church and church related organizations but this too was deceptive as they rarely were pacifists and justified war to avoid war and distinguished between what they felt to be “good wars” and “bad wars” (3 p. 195).

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As the Russian Bolshevik experiment unfolded, political and theological liberals were very much drawn to and supportive of it. Divisions between conservatives and liberals along these lines became deeper and more obvious throughout the 1930’s. Liberals were not pleased with the direction of American politics and society after World War I when government control had reached its peak of war time power around 1919.  In 1917 the New Republic had written optimistically (from their perspective) about the linkage between democracy and government control saying “Democracy is infectious. It is now as certain as anything human can be that the wall… will dissolve into democratic revolution the world over” (3 p. 215). Marxism, it should be stressed, does not equate to rule of the masses or the working class but of an academic elite which has found it difficult to present in such a way as to get a mass following in western culture but democracy is presented here as potentially providing a path. A. Mitchell Palmer, who was Attorney General under Wilson, wrote in 1919 of the threat posed by liberalism:

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“Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the American working men, it sharp tongues of revolutionary heat  were lickng the alters of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.” (3 p. 215)

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In January 1920 Palmer ordered a series of raids on radical centers all over the country that apprehended app. 6,000 people, in what came to be known as the “Great Red Scare” and led to a retaliation bombing in New York outside JP Morgan killing 33 and wounding 400(10 p. 278). This was indicative of the declining liberal political fortunes during the 1920’s but the assault on academia and the church continued to progress. In America, however, the progressive left has always been patient, playing a “long game” and re-emerged with a vengeance when circumstances were more favorable. 

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America of the 1930’s proved very receptive to economic and social radicalism giving new life to theories and programs that had previously been disregarded. The believers in the social gospel were highly impressed with the Russian Bolsheviks and “economic democracy” because of the similarities and parallels in their philosophies (3 p. 225). Theological liberals had been working towards the same goals and the depression had given them the opportunity to unite with secular forces to bring about their version of the kingdom of God on earth. The Christian Century lamented their inability to form an effective global alliance in 1932 stating there is no way “the liberal social convictions of a great body of our citizenship can register on the conduct of our democracy” (11). Paul Blanchard wrote in the same publication a few months later that liberals saw socialism as the only solution to the nation’s economic problems and that is was an eminently moral solution while acknowledging that it was collectivism because its end “is a society where every normal human being will share in the world’s wealth in proportion to service and ability” (12) (3 p. 228).

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The growing hostility toward capitalism and, in a broader sense perhaps market economics was reflected in pulpits and in church conferences. In January of 1932 a conference of 600 protestant ministers concluded regarding capitalism that, “we are driven by the very logic of the facts to look upon his tragic tide of human misery as directly the result of those principles which we cannot square with the teachings of Jesus” (3 p. 228). At a Methodist Conference representing churches primarily in the Northeast it was unanimously adopted that the government should take control over principal means of production and distribution of goods. They specifically asserted, “In contrast to the acquisitive motive of the present form of capitalism the Gospel of Christ offers the motive of sharing…the profit motive must go…We must bring our economic order, sick and wounded, the Great Physician who can cure our social blindness and move us to love our brethren as we ought” (13). Not to be outdone or left behind, the Quadrennial Statement of the Bishops of the United Brethren Church given at their general conference in 1933 declared that individual capitalism had undermined the structure of American life and the “the whole system of our economic life must be changed” (3 p. 242). The Northern Baptist Convention in San Francisco in 1932 generally echoed these conclusions although not in as strong a terms. The Federal Council of Churches in 1932 didn’t show similar restraint when they issued a revision to the Social Creed of 1908 that called for the “practical application of the Christian principles of social well being to the acquisition and use of wealth” which called for government control of the monetary system.  It should be pointed out that this had effectively already happened with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Note that the references cited here are not isolated or obscure.  They were large-scale endorsements of socialism that were entirely representative of mainstream Protestant Denominational Christianity at the time, especially in the Northern sections of the country.

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During a 1932 Labor Day announcement Franklin Roosevelt referred to the 1931 revision of the 1908 Social Creed stating proudly that the Council was “just as radical as I am” (14).  While liberal theology shouldn’t be seen as being a driving force with the New Dealers, there was substantial two way interaction. Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Francis Perkins, Arthur Morgan (TVA), David Lilienthal and potentially others showed significant influence of liberal protestant thought. Of these Henry Wallace was the most outspoken in linking the Social Gospel and the progressive church to the new deal. He wrote in Christian Century in 1933, “The outstanding uniqueness of Jesus lay in the fact that he enjoyed an unbroken awareness of life in all its vividness.  This was so real and so thrilling a thing in his life that from the very beginning of his ministry he worked eagerly to inspire other men to make this joyful discovery for themselves. To succeed in the search was to enter the Kingdom of heaven. This was the method he proposed for the establishment of a lasting happiness among men” (15). From the perspective of any form of Orthodox Christianity this would be seen as nothing but gibberish but to the followers of the liberal church, it apparently made some degree of sense.

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 Liberal theology increasingly made no distinctions between religions and disregarded the uniqueness of Christianity. Each was an acceptable road to the same end even if they taught irreconcilably different things. The social Gospel had prepared much of the American population for the acceptance of the New Deal and broken down any idea of absolute standards in favor of democratic rule which is exactly the opposite of the founder’s intent.  This sort of relativism was extended to the Constitution which was also constraining.  In this new form of liberty, according to Wallace and others, rights were extended to include purchasing power and economic commodities. The New Dealers and perhaps some of the liberal clergy may have been somewhat unaware of how far they were departing from historic Christian Orthodoxy and have had little contact with anyone who didn’t share their opinions or perspective much as most progressives don’t today(3 pp. 233-6). Other liberal theologians as well as secular liberals claiming the Social Gospel as their own were well aware of how far they were taking the modern Protestant church from historical Christian teaching and traditions.(3 p. 247)

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As the decade of the 30’s passed, the acceptance by the Liberal Church of Marxism or at least neo-Marxism didn’t abate but, if anything, accelerated. Kirby Page of the Disciples of Christ found in his interpretation of the Kingdom of God justification for social revolution. In order to accomplish this vision the economic order must be replaced and “instruments of social compulsion” must be found. His attempt to defend this as a Biblical sanction went as follows: “Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, with discernment, and sincerity, we are praying for revolutionary changes to be made in the present economic order” (16). The Ecclesiastical endorsement of the new deal through the middle of the decade never wavered and, if anything, concluded that the New Deal didn’t go far enough.  The Northern Methodists and Northern Baptist led this continual drift.  Most Lutherans, along with Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists were most resistant to all of this but even there some cracks were starting to appear as there were signs they too were being dragged into liberal social conformity. (3 p. 250)

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Throughout this process, there was resistance. An example of this E.G. Homrighausen, who wrote in 1933 in the Christian Century of Progressive Theology, “Frankly the theology is naïve, it lacks realistic insight into the nature of the world, of the Kingdom of God, and of the ethics of the social order and the Christian ethic. Here the liberals look pretty bad – planless, adolescent, still living in the fool’s world of a sentimental world – very unrealistic and untheological.  They still think of the Kingdom of God as an identified world order which comes within the realm of time and which after all is nothing more than an identified world order”(17). Homrighausen , who was from Iowa of Northern Protestant heritage, taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1934 to 64, after the institution liberalized, and served as Dean from 55 to 64. Increasingly the organized resistance to liberal theology came from outside the denominational schools and seminaries from independent fundamentalist schools that generally had some initial association with Dallas Theological Seminary or the Moody Institute. These schools, however, were also teaching new doctrines of another sort but did defend the authority of scripture. The real critics and jury, however, were the people.  Based on church membership statistics, the liberal churches had not been attracting new members for some time and by the 1920’s were starting to decline. The leadership, which was almost universally from the Northeast or upper Midwest, continued to think and act as if they were highly influential in an academic sense, they would  bring with them masses of followers but their appeal was really only within academia and elite society.  They were becoming increasingly disconnected from the average person’s reality.

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During the war years of the 1940’s, the New Dealers had a vision of a new democratic order that was reflected in the Roosevelt’s administration’s National Resource Planning Board’s report for post war America (3 p. 271). This represented a vision that was generally shared between theological and secular liberals. The Christian Century stood in support of this plan that was essentially a road map for a socialist America (3 pp. 272-75). When this was transferred into legislation the bill died in committee under conservative senator Walter George of Georgia but it does show the country stood on a sort of razor’s edge in this period. After the war, the private economy dramatically outperformed the expectations of the liberals leaving the country without a need for the progressive’s redemptive services. The sort of millennium that the liberals had promised had been far exceeded by private industry driving the reformers back into the schools and away from government while also bringing about a partial return of neo-orthodoxy in some of the denominations. This was reflected more in the pulpits and the rank and file church members than the institutions.

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In understanding the role of the Protestant denominations, institutions, and publications with regard to new deal policies and foreign intervention, they consistently aligned somewhat to the left of the New Dealers and they were very active in their support which is largely different from what would be assumed from the church’s political alignment in the 21st century.  But what of the Catholics, the liturgical Protestants, or the orthodox Evangelicals, did they form a Bull work against this leftward drift? Hardly - they were not discernible from the regional populations where they resided.  If anything the more religiously conservative groups appear to have been the most ardent New Deal supporters. When there was some resistance to the New Dealers in the 1940 and 44 elections, it came principally from states that had a higher Lutheran presence but the “Christian Right” was not a discernible voting bloc until  the Carter and Regan era (18).  While it can’t be said statistically that Christian voters stood out as a more conservative sub grouping, the issue is still a bit cloudy in that there remained very strong regional associations with one party or the other, especially in the South, and because the two parties frequently didn’t represent distinctly contrasting philosophies.  

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Following the war and extending through the 50’s there was an unprecedented expansion in evangelism, both in person and using the television and radio. This involved both individual evangelists, of which Billy Graham was and remains the most famous, and denominations and was not limited to Evangelicals.  The Missouri Synod Lutherans, who were conservative orthodox but liturgical in style of worship, made very effective use of both TV and radio with weekly shows like the “Old Time Revival Hour” (3 p. 278). Revivalism during this period blended patriotism with Christianity to a greater degree than had been seen previously. While attracting a large but not fully defined number of new adherents to the faith, it didn’t have any large effect on the country in terms of culture or general religious character. This was in part due to the political or ruling class being largely distinct from the population as a whole but was also related to the emphasis on evangelical conversion only or principally which Gregg Singer described as follows: “In the first place there evangelistic efforts and revivalism tended to be somewhat superficial in their theological outlook. The preaching all too often was concentrated in its effort to produce conversion to the neglect of the other aspects of the conversion experience and the whole counsel of God. Too little emphasis was placed on what conversion should mean in the hearts and lives of the converts; it was too often assumed that if people were only converted, growth in understanding and practice of the Christian life would come as a matter of course” (3 p. 278). Faith may have grown broader but not deeper. Meanwhile, the forces of political and theological liberalism and the Social Gospel remained active, continuing to control institutional Protestantism and leveraging an expanded acceptance of the government’s role in society and the economy that had become the new normal through the New Deal.  Instances of perceived injustice were increasingly identified and expanded to require their redemptive intervention to correct which transitioned nicely into the coming postmodernist philosophy arriving at the nation’s colleges from Europe.

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