Christian Heresies: Leftism and Protestantism

While reading The Other War that Never Ends: A Survey of Some Recent Literature on World War I by Ralph Raico I came across this fascinating sounding book he reviews:

Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. (ISI Press)

This important new book was published by the ISI Press, which suggests that there are still some with Old Right tendencies in the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The theme of the book is how the "forward-looking clergy [progressive Protestants] embraced the war as a chance to achieve their broadly defined social gospel objectives." Thus, the situation Gamble describes is, in a sense, the opposite of the one today, when it is the leaders of "fundamentalist" Protestantism that are among the worst warmongers. In both cases, however, the main contribution of the clergy has been to translate a political conflict into apocalyptic spiritual terms.

Gamble traces the susceptibility of Americans to this view back to colonial Puritan New England. During the later eighteenth century and the Revolutionary War the conception was fixed of the United States as the brand-new nation, casting off the burdens of the past, instituting a novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages. The Americans were the new Chosen People, destined to lead the world to an age of reason and universal virtue.

By the end of the nineteenth century, progressive Protestants, often influenced by the theory of evolution, were preaching the successive remaking of the church, of American society, and finally of the whole world. Rejecting old-line Calvinism, they rejected also the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man. The City of Man was to be made into the City of God, here on earth, through a commitment to a redefined, socially-activist Christianity. As Shailer Mathews, dean of the University of Chicago divinity school, said: "As civilization develops, sin grows corporate. We sin socially by violating social rather than individualistic personal relations."

The progressive gospel was spread through the takeover of influential churches, the infiltration of prestigious seminaries and divinity schools (now offering courses in "Social Ethics" and "Christian Sociology"), the control of journals such as Christian Century, and, nationally, the creation of the forerunner of the National Council of Churches. At conferences sponsored by the progressive Christians, speakers included Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and, naturally, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson claimed that the role of Christian youth was to ignore divisive "dogma" and instead to concentrate on the goal of making "the United States a mighty Christian nation, and to christianize the world!"

The vision of the progressive clergy was internationalized, as they looked to America to lead the world in accordance with God's will for human society. "Isolationism" was a selfish doctrine that had to be overcome. Many of them supported the war with Spain from this point of view. Among the supporters was Julia Ward Howe, composer of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," who addressed progressive meetings. She reported on her vision of all mankind "advancing with one in end in view, one foe to trample . . . All of evil was gone from the earth . . . Mankind was emancipated and ready to march forward in a new Era of human understanding . . . the Era of perfect love."

Once the war in Europe began, and after America entered, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was cited and sung incessantly by the Christian progressives. A favorite line, of course, was "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The progressive Protestants saw World War I as a continuation of the great crusade for righteousness that was the American Civil War. As Gamble writes, "the fight for freedom had to be resumed, but this time it was to be carried to ends of the earth." Fittingly, there was a constant invocation of the hovering spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

The progressives quickly realized that President Woodrow Wilson was one of their own, flesh of their flesh. They eagerly took to his cant on the duty of national self-sacrifice and of America as the suffering servant. "A war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die," Wilson declared. The day was coming when the nations would realize that Old Glory was "the flag, not only of America, but of humanity." In 1915, addressing the Federal Council of Churches, Wilson proclaimed that America had been founded and had "its only object for existence" (sic) to lead humanity on the "high road" to universal justice.

Once the war was underway, the rhetoric of the progressives grew increasingly blood-thirsty. One contingent became "militant pacifists," that is, men whose aim was world peace, to be achieved if necessary by waging ongoing murderous war. As the butchery in Europe continued, they attacked the notion of "a premature peace," an end to hostilities that would permit the continued existence of iniquitous regimes. A statement signed by over 60 eminent churchmen, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Billy Sunday, and the president of Princeton, scorned the idea of "a premature peace:" "The just God, who withheld not his own Son from the cross, would not look with favor upon a people who put their fear of pain and death . . . above the holy claims of righteousness and justice . . . "

On the day that national registration for the draft began, Wilson addressed a reunion of Confederate veterans. He told them that God had preserved the American union in the Civil War so that the United States might be "an instrument in [His] hands . . . to see that liberty is made secure for mankind." Sadly, here, as before and ever after, the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Confederate heroes who resisted the northern invasion of their country took the side of their former mortal enemies. In a kind of Stockholm syndrome, of identifying with the aggressor, they identified with the Union and disproportionately supported and fought and died in its wars. That strange anomaly continues to this day.

When the time came for Congress to consider war against Germany, the people's representatives repeated the rhetoric and imagery of the progressive Protestants. One congressman stated that, "Christ gave his life upon the cross that mankind might gain the Kingdom of Heaven, while tonight we shall solemnly decree the sublimest sacrifice ever made by a nation for the salvation of humanity, the institution of world-wide liberty and freedom."

In the Second World War there was a nice sentimental propaganda song, "The White Cliffs of Dover," which went something like this: 

    There'll be blue birds over,
    The white cliffs of Dover
    Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
    There'll be love and laughter,
    And peace ever after,
    Tomorrow, when the world is free.

The poor, deluded people ate that up, as they ate up the fantasies of the progressive Protestants during the Great War, as they swallow all the lies dished out to them to this day.

Of all people, H.G. Wells, the freethinker and prophet of evolution who got religion during the war, became a favorite of the progressive clergy. Wells, who coined the phrase, "the war to end war," wrote that "the kingdom of God on earth is not a metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream . . . it is the close and inevitable destiny of mankind." By the kingdom of God, it turned out, Wells meant his Fabian socialist utopia globalized, through total war against evil.

Incidentally, one of H.G. Wells's last books, published in 1944, is Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. Wells had been in charge of British propaganda during the war. The first chapter is titled, "Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?" Rome, he argued, was not only the center of Fascism, but "the seat of a Pope . . . who has been an open ally of the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis since his enthronement." "Why do we not bomb Rome? . . . A thorough bombing (à la Berlin) of the Italian capital seems not simply desirable but necessary." If the Allies had taken Wells's heartfelt advice, today tourists would be able to take photos of the ruins of St. Peter's just as they do of the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. This is the way this Fabian humanitarian ended up—screaming to have the city of Rome razed to the ground.

The progressive Protestants intertwined their warmongering with their social gospel. William Faunce, president of Brown, gloated that "the old petty individualism and laissez-faire" were dead: "'Me' and ‘mine' will be small words in a new world which has learned to say the great word ‘our.'" The president of Union Theological Seminary warned that the churches had to abandon their "egoistic and other-worldly character," and "must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation"—blah, blah, blah.

I must confess that the one drawback of Gamble's excellent book is having to slog through the endless high-minded drivel of these progressive Christians.