I have spent much of my professional life grappling with the Progressives. My introduction came while working on my first book, Prohibition is Here to Stay, in which I had to discuss how the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker became Indiana's leading dry. The answer, I found was the intermixing of temperance sentiment within his own Methodist tradition with the emerging Progressive political and Social Gospel theological movements. To me it seemed then, as it still does today, that it was a rather easy leap for him to make from the pulpit to political activist, leading his (largely) evangelical dry crusade, via the Anti-Saloon League (whose slogan was "the Church in action") against the forces of "demon rum."
Of course one of the fun things about studying the Progressives is that scholars (not unlike the Progressives themselves) argue over what is or was a "real" Progressive reform. Our problem is that there was no checklist, no requirements, to being a Progressive. Really (and this no doubt will gall some of my colleagues) the only requirement was that you be a reformer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century advocating that your reform would make American society better. Hence, reforms ran the gambit from Prohibition, to worker's rights, to child labor laws, to eugenics, to food and drug regulation, to many, many more. You did not need to advocate all of these things to be a Progressive, you did not even need to support all of them. Likewise, you did not have to be politically liberal (really by the standards of the time, and most assuredly by today's definition) to be a reformer either. Such ambiguity can be maddening at times when you are trying to write or teach about the Progressives. It can also make it difficult to define or even defend the term within its modern use versus its historical context (note how many twenty-first century political liberals have attempted to adopt the term "Progressive" for themselves).
But, I have been thinking about the Progressives again because I have been reading posts this week about whether or not Christians can hope (or even should hope) to be able to transform their culture or not. Hence, in the past week there have been calls for Christians to re-engage the fine arts (as a means to transform the culture), rather than seek a political solution (see here), calls to be "realistic" at what Christians can actually hope to accomplish (see here), and doubts that Christians can ever hope to actually transform secular culture at all (see here). Perhaps interestingly, these posts come from what might be called the more conservative theological spectrum, and dovetail nicely with this piece from the Wall Street Journal in which Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention asserts that "the Bible Belt is collapsing." Rather than a "moral majority", Moore says American Christians must now be prepared to be a "prophetic minority."
Such a discussion is healthy to have of course. What is the role of God's people on this earth? Is it to save society? Or merely save souls? Can it do both? Can committed Christians actually live their faith and NOT affect wider society? While some of the discussion above is related to notions of such debates over "two kingdoms theology" (see here) and what that means for Christians and culture, there is also a tinge of dejection -- that despite the best efforts of the Religious Right since the late 1970s, America seems to be only getting more secular, that perhaps they have failed to recapture or transform the culture at all, and that the best that can be hoped for is to hold on to what God has given them individually.
The Progressives grappled with this kind of dejection--of falling short of their goals--as well. For religiously inspired reformers, what they were striving for was to establish God's kingdom on this earth. Some believed that by perfecting American society (not unlike their parents or grandparents during the Second Great Awakening) they would literally be preparing the world for Christ's Second Coming. Hence to them, reform work was both their Christian duty to their fellow man and a divine mandate. That their reforms sometimes worked, sometimes failed, and sometimes never got very far was, eventually, a source of confusion and disappointment (coupled with the theological controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that caused many denominations to pull back from the wider world and from each other by the time of the Great Depression.
The pull back by some and the coasting of others led to a lack of cultural engagement and involvement unprecedented in American History. As I argue in The Mainline this contributed to the decline of the Seven Sisters and the rise of what has been called the Religious Right (and to a lesser extent, the Religious Left perhaps). Disengagement from the culture might feel nice in the short term, but holds the potential to do far greater damage to both the Church and the wider culture than staying engaged does. And to hear one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention talk about being a "prophetic minority" is to remind me of some within the Episcopal Church (including some affiliated with retired Bishop John Shelby Spong) who, in the late 1990s claimed that they were a "righteous remnant" in the face of dwindling membership within the denomination and attacks on liberal theology. Considering that I placed the Southern Baptists within the new Mainline, it causes one to wonder if they will not lead, who will? And if Christians will not engage the culture, who will?
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