Progressive Academic Scholarship and Liberal Protestant Theology: 1902-1940

0:00Because these have to be done very rapidly, 17 minutes, I don't expect you to frantically write down everything, so I'm passing out a handout. If there's something that I say that looks interesting, you can follow it up, and otherwise you don't have to worry one way or the other. In the writing of history, there are just a few rules that we have to follow. And you can be fairly effective in covering the basic historical materials. Some of them are very, very simple rules. I always like the one, if you find a skeleton in a closet, find out who owns the house. Kind of an obvious starting point.

0:46The two that I do my best to follow in my writing. The first principle is follow the money. And the second principle is follow the confession of faith. And if you want a summary of a phrase that we have come to associate with both positions, follow the money is the question of money talks, or as Marx put it, the cash nexus. And with respect to follow the confession of faith, that's the principle that ideas have consequences. And most historians prefer one or the other, but they very rarely combine the two.

1:38And one of the few exceptions was Murray Rothbard. And Rothbard's work on the progressive movement is an almost flawless example of how somebody have followed the money and followed the confession of faith. And I don't pretend to be able to do as good a job as Rothbard did, but at least that becomes my model. Let's go to a study very briefly of what I see as the battle for the American mind and really the American soul that began in the 1870s is still going on, but certainly was in full force through the first half of the 20th century.

2:26And that is the battle in politics between progressivism and what we might call a kind of traditional American politics, kind of constitutional politics. And on the other hand, the battle between modernism and Christianity. And both of those battles took place at the same time, and both of them were interrelated. In following the confession of faith, as I have put in the handout, I start with what I call the biblical covenant model. And I recommend this to anybody who is studying any aspect of social theory or social organization.

3:14And these are the issues as follows. Sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. Once again, sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. Now let's put it in simple language when you're looking at any organization. Sovereignty question is, who's in charge here? The authority question is, to whom do I report? The law question is, what are the rules? The sanctions question is, what do I get if I obey, and what happens to me if I disobey? And the future question is, does this outfit have a future?

4:01And if you ask those five questions of any organization, you're going to have a pretty good handle on how the particular organization functions. And so I like to use those questions when I'm looking at the history of social thought, and I like to ask those questions when I'm looking at the history of any kind of an organization. Very simple questions, though very difficult, accurately, to assess and evaluate effectively. It's not easy work, but they're fairly straightforward questions. Now with respect to the battle on Christianity versus modernism, let's start with very briefly What was the fundamental, covenantal view of American Protestant Christianity, say, in 1874 or 1875?

4:49God is sovereign. The Bible is the Word of God. God's law is authoritative. There is going to be a final judgment, and the Kingdom of God in history has a consequence. Those five issues. We can date, actually, we really can date in a rare situation, we can date almost exactly when the battle began, between 1875 and 1876, and that was the time that higher criticism of the Bible first began to take root in the United States, and for that matter really in Great Britain. And the modernist position took essentially the same five points and they rewrote them.

5:34And the modernist position is sovereignty is some form of evolution, including social evolution. There is higher criticism of the Bible, so the Bible is not the authoritative Word of God. Law is some form of situation ethics. Sanctions, there is no hell. Now if there's any doctrine of modernism that was the central doctrine, today, as in 1875, that is the central doctrine, there is no hell. And the fifth point was the Kingdom of God is extended through ecumenism in terms of a great joining of all religions into one large religious confessional association.

6:24Now the modernist position is almost kind of a rubber-stamp parallel of the modern, the progressive position is a rubber-stamp of the modernist. That is, it also begins with the principle that man is sovereign, at least at this point of evolutionary history. Man is sovereign right now. The second point in terms of their whole concept of authority in the progressive movement was the state is finally authoritative. The third position on law was legislation slash regulation is the basis of social ordering. Fourth position was, in terms of sanctions, it's a combination of politics and money.

7:10And the fifth position was the American Century. That in some way we were going to find that the 20th century was the American Century This is the basis, then, of what I would call the war between Christian Protestant America that you can date around 1875 and that extends still going on, but certainly escalated visibly in the first half of the 20th century. I believe that the battle began in the religious sphere first. I think the war on modernism versus Christianity really got into action from about, again, as I say, from about 1875 to say 1885, maybe 1890, that period, where you had the real confrontation between the liberal, theological, innovators, revolutionaries, if you call it, and the old traditional Protestantism.

8:24Then in the mid-1880s and certainly in the 1890s, you saw the rise of the progressive movement. Murray was very, very good on this issue. He went to a book, a very important book, Crondon on Ministers of Reform, which is a history of the progressive leaders, and He said, Cronin said, and Murray believed, that these people were mostly sons of old Calvinists who had a post-millennial vision that the Kingdom of God was going to extend across the face of the earth. They secularized it. And in secularizing it, they became progressives. They became, as Cronin calls them, ministers of reform. To use the state as an agency of reform to transform civilization in an ethical way, but not in a biblical way.

9:10And so, in terms of theology, the battle became the social gospel, which was essentially the theological foundation of the progressive movement. They gave that their ethical foundation was in the social gospel, and that gospel was in a head-on collision against traditional conservative Protestantism in this country. Now, with respect to the issue of follow the money, I suppose it starts getting clear in 1891, you begin to see the first source of the funding, and that is when John D. Rockefeller Sr. is convinced by a Baptist minister, by the name of Frederick Gates, that what is necessary is a Baptist university.

10:05And Rockefeller puts up the money and the university is the University of Chicago. And that becomes a spearhead organization for both the progressive movement and for modernism. Now, Chicago has been defined as or described as the university in which agnostic students Study at a Baptist University, reading Thomas Aquinas, to be taught by atheist Jews. And that institution became the spearhead institution, and Gates became, I believe, if I were going to do a book of the ten invisible Americans who changed America, Gates would certainly have a chapter.

10:57because Gates became, he was a genius investor and a systematic theologian of the modernist movement and he got Rockefeller's ear on both issues and he became the guy who wrote the checks for Rockefeller basically from 1900 until 1923, 1924. He was the key check writer. I like to think of him as the bag man and he absolutely transformed the country. in terms of all of the Rockefeller institutions, multiple foundations, Rockefeller medical efforts, the General Education Board which was started in 1902, got rolling in 1903 and whose goal was to bring public education to the American South and to systematically take religion out of the colleges which at that point were totally decentralized and Rockefeller wrote The Quid Pro Quo was, you had to hire PhDs. And all PhD education from 1875 onward was totally secular because of the seminar system.

12:08There were no ministers teaching in graduate schools in the United States. They taught in the lower division, but they did not teach in the graduate schools, and the model was Johns Hopkins. And out of Johns Hopkins, on the East Coast certainly, that became a spearhead organization for both the modernist movement and the progressive movement. And you had, for example, in 1885, you had in one group, you had J. Franklin Jameson in history, studying under Herbert Adams. You had Eli, who became the American Economic Association founder. and you had the ultimate progressivist, the absolute incarnation of both modernism and politics, Woodrow Wilson.

12:56And that was how Wilson got his start. In a, what was called then, believe it or not, not a seminar, an historical seminary. They even had the old language, they only dropped the Y towards the end of the 19th century. In terms of the funding, I have a phrase, all roads lead to Picatico Hills. All go back to the Rockefeller family interests. He puts up the money for the General Education Board. That, again, was Gates's idea. A junior puts up the money for the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which became the central organization of the ecumenical movement in the United States, and it was there that you saw the social gospel really put into action, into some kind of a series of calls for state intervention into the economy, justifying the progressive movements call for centralization, only justifying it in a theological way.

14:01And Rockefeller, junior and senior, but especially junior after about 1910, begins to fund both the progressive movement, but especially theological education, theological standards in the United States. And what they really together, the two of them work together, the old man and the son were in agreement basically, but the son became the real ramrod in the area of American Protestant religion. And he wrote, the estimate is at least $100 million of those kinds of dollars to do this in the period of 50 years when he was writing the checks.

14:48And he came across, under an obscure situation, he came across a man by the name of Raymond Fosdick, around 1912 or 13, he liked Fosdick, he sort of became Fosdick's metter and financer, In about 1923, Fosdick, Raymond Fosdick, replaces Gates and for the next 40 years he writes the checks and Fosdick is the brother of Harry Emerson Fosdick who was the most important theological figure of theological modernism in the first half of the 20th century. I had no idea those two were brothers. The two of them and the religion FASDIC was on the transformation of the Rockefeller Board in 17 when Junior takes over and in 1925 Junior builds the Riverside Church for him and the Federal Council of Churches then moves into 75 Riverside Drive and that becomes the spearhead now for the whole social gospel movement in the United States.

15:57is Rockefeller money from day one, from day one. He was very subtle, he did not seek publicity, he was a wise man, he was Mr. Anonymous. And there's only one man that I know of who's comparable on our side, and they were competitors and they tried to do exactly the same thing, we had one too, J. Howard Pugh of Sun Oil, which is Calvinist who ever lived and he went lockstep with lockstep in terms of finances and in terms of oil development with the Rockefeller interest and he put up the money for many many of the organizations which finally have come down to here at the Mises Institute without Pugh's money things would have been much more difficult for most of us.

16:45But he never had the clout, he never had the following, Rockefeller was really expressive of what sometimes is called the ideas of the age. He was the right man at the right time to do almost all of the wrong things. So in my bibliography I've got some things listed. I cover this in my book called Crossed Fingers, where I trace the money and I trace the ideas with respect to the takeover of the Presbyterian Church, but of course it was all of the seven

17:51The old protestant establishment began to disintegrate when finally the old timers began to retire and die and the congregation members died and they were not replaced by young innovative kids who either went to college and lost their faith or they went back to the older traditional evangelical religions and did not go back into the mainstream mainline denominations in the United States. And all of them have shrunk since about 1960. I want to thank you for the time. I hope it gave you some help.