Sean Rittenauer is going to lead the discussion in detail on Gary Norr's article from the
Journal of Libertarian Studies, Millennialism and the Progressive Movement.
The article under discussion today is Gary Norr's article, Millennialism and the Progressive
Movement, came out on the most recent issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
I think it is, I'll start off by saying it's a very good article and it's an article that
needed to be written as an article that I had put on the back burner of writing, something
like this, after reading Murray Rothbard's article, World One in Fulfillment, Power and
the Intellectuals.
After reading this article, I was frustrated at, reading Rothbard's article, I was frustrated
at what I consider to be some, say, lack of clarity or frustrating lack of proper distinctions
between certain groups that he talks about.
And because of those lack, because of the improper distinctions that are made, it leads
to improper conclusions when we take the general overall use of this, or general overall article
of Rothbard's and then seek to apply it to political economy.
It leads to some, I think, some wrong conclusions simply, I guess, as we try to generalize history.
If we take this article and use it as a, you know, some place to kind of, or a jumping-off point to interpret history and interpret, say, or try to predict the outcomes of certain types of religious groups entering into the political discussion.
If we take Rothbard's article as jumping off point, we could lead to improper, wrong, imprudent conclusions, I guess.
And so, and North addresses the very problem that I, the very frustrating problem that I had.
I'll start with this article at the back of the article where North kind of sums up his position.
Rothbard, in his article, seems to, basically makes the point that the progressive movement was largely, was in large part due to what he calls Protestant-Pietist-Post-Millennialist.
and their influence and their wanting to bring about a kingdom of God here on earth.
Now, I think that that is too broad and sweeping of a statement because Rothbard doesn't quite, I think, get certain definitions correct.
And North, in his corrective, states that for progressivism, secularization was the key.
It was secular post-millennialists of the secular social gospel types that Rothbard does talk about like Richard Ely, James Dewey, John Dewey, and his people, Rockefeller.
Those people, even though using, say, religious terminology, by that point had been completely co-opted by secularist modernism.
So that although they were talking about things like God and the Kingdom of God, those terms were divorced from their historical scriptural meaning.
So for North, secularization is the key.
The secular post-millennialists of the progressive movement joined forces with the theological liberals in Protestant denominations, and they fused the social gospel movement, and it was that social gospel movement that was propelling the secularized social gospel that was propelling progressivism.
Where did Rothbard go wrong? Rothbard emphasized two streams of American church history in the 19th century, liturgical and pietistic, and the pietistic post-millennialists.
For North, he said that that's the wrong distinction. The liturgicals, Lutherans,
Roman Catholics, were not set on changing the world because, as North points out,
that they tend to come from an amillennialist eschatological perspective, okay? And I'll explain
why this is important. But it doesn't hinge on necessarily liturgy, high church versus low
as Rothbard seems to indicate, the crucial distinction is our view on the end times, our eschatology.
And not only that, but on an eschatology that's divorced from any type of biblical restraints in our activity.
So the secularized post-millennialists who believe that there is going to be a literal kingdom of God on earth,
They want to obtain this through the state, through state activity. Whereas, say, a more biblical, say, Northean post-millennialist believes that there are restraints, biblical mandated restraints in the power of the government to do anything.
So you have this right off the bat secularized versus say more biblical, for lack of a better term, post-millennialism distinction that I think Rothbard kind of muddies, not intentionally necessarily, but nonetheless I don't think he makes the right distinction.
All millennialism, well, I guess I won't make that case yet, anyway, Norris' basic point is the key difference is not eschatology, or was eschatology, a particular type of eschatology driving progressive movement, not liturgy, or not a type of church or their particular views on say, booze or what have you, okay, it's not those types of things that was driving the progressive movement.
Now, in order to get to this conclusion, this North begins by asking several questions.
First is, what is millennialism? If we're going to talk about millennialism and its effects on social theory or on political movements,
we have to understand what is millennialism. And two, he says, what are the differences in millennial views?
Three, why does it matter? If there's no differences in millennial views, we can just lump everybody,
We don't have to distinguish between post, pre, and all millennialists. We can just lump everybody into one millennialist camp and then continue with our reasoning.
So it's important for him, for North, to point out why does different millennial views matter.
Then he goes on and asks the question, for what is pietism?
and this again is crucial to see, is Rothbard's conclusions correct from his, reasoning from his ideas of what pietism is or is North more correct or are they, does everybody have the same definition?
And five, the most important question he says, perhaps says North, is who were the post-millennial pietists?
So, North begins by discussing what is millennialism, and I thought it was a pretty good, say, six, seven page description of the four dominant views on millennialism, in terms of laying out what they actually are.
Now, North, of course, has a certain viewpoint, and of course, he's stressing his viewpoint throughout, but he starts out by saying that all Christians agree regarding the end of the world, that it will be produced by the bodily return of Jesus from where he's at right now in heaven.
So all Orthodox Christians believe that. The various denominations are also agreed about the events immediately preceding the bodily return, that there will be some type of rebellion against the Church before His return.
The debate comes regarding the time period preceding this rebellion, and it hinges on the interpretation of something called the Millennial Kingdom.
The Millennial Kingdom is described in the book of Revelation chapter 20 and it talks
about Jesus' reign for a thousand years and it's this notion of the millennium that was
where the differences for our purposes begin.
The question is how will Jesus rule in this millennium in person on earth or from his
throne in heaven?
There are three dominant viewpoints, the amillennial viewpoint, the post-millennial viewpoint, and the premillennial viewpoint.
North then talks about the two categories of premillennialism, which is, say, historic premillennialism and dispensationalist premillennialism.
Okay. Now, Amillennialism simply means that the millennial reign of Christ is described in Revelation 20 as neither geographical nor physical.
It is exclusively spiritual, tracing its beginning to the Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts.
When the New Testament era's institutional church began and when the church first received the Holy Spirit,
most Amillennialists have argued that things will get worse and worse and worse as time goes on.
Amillennialists argue that attempts at social reform are morally valid but not biblically mandatory
and that all of such attempts will inevitably fail to change permanently the secular realm of politics.
Because of this less than optimistic view of the way things will generally go in terms of morality, in terms of ethics, in terms of how people will respond to God,
and respond to God. They tend to see, as time goes by, a kind of a general decline.
And because of that general decline, Northwood argued that people that are all millennial do tend not to be that concerned with trying to change the world,
with trying to get overly involved in political affairs, because try as we want to, with the social means, to change the way, to make the world better,
try as we want to make the world better, prophecy tells us that things aren't going to ultimately get a whole lot better,
that we're going to be on this general decline until Jesus comes back, okay?
And so we're kind of spinning our wheels if we try to make things better through the political process,
either by restricting freedom or restricting liberty or pushing for more liberty.
Ultimately, it's not going to be that consequential.
The premillennialist view believes that the coming of Jesus, after the coming, well, let's see,
that the coming millennial kingdom, the coming reign of Jesus will be literal on earth, okay,
for a particular period of time, and a lot of them believe it's going to be the literal thousand years it's talked about in Revelation 20.
Now, North, again, distinguishes between historic premillennialism and dispensationalist premillennialism.
And I don't think the distinctions are that important for the relevancy of the paper,
other than just to say that dispensationalist premillennialism is the most,
It's certainly the most common, the most popular form of premillennialism in existence today in American Protestantism.
And it can lead to some kind of contradictory, it's what the North calls schizophrenia,
intellectual schizophrenia on the New Christian right.
But they also tend to believe, by the way, that things are going to get worse and worse and worse,
even more so than the amillennialists, some of the amillennialists I've read.
The Church will be taken up out of the grave or out of the earth and will meet Jesus in the clouds and they will kind of sit and observe the Church.
And they believe, however, that before this coming tribulation period, the Church will be raptured, the dispensationalist will believe the Church is all going to be caught up.
So every living, every Christian, dead or alive, will be taken up out of the grave or out of the earth and will meet Jesus in the clouds.
You give away all their worldly belongings and that kind of thing?
It's not necessarily, but just that their outlook is towards different things like evangelism.
There are certain things that last forever. That's the Word of God and the souls of men. Those are the two eternal things.
The Word of God and the souls of men. And if that is the case, and we think things are going to get worse and worse and worse,
so it doesn't pay us to try to make things better on earth through, say, social change, through politics, things like that,
Then we need to get out and start evangelizing because the thing that really matters in the whole scheme of things is a person's relationship with Christ.
And because the return of Christ may be imminent, we may not have, we don't have a whole lot of time right now.
So we have to put our, basically it's an allocation of resources, okay.
We think that evangelism is the most productive thing we can do given what prophecy tells us and gives us the state affairs we're in now.
now. So we spend more and more time doing evangelism and thinking in those rather narrow terms as opposed to thinking more broadly about social theory.
Okay. And as North does point out, though, that there's this intellectual schizophrenia on the new Christian right, like people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell,
tend or claim to be dispensational pre-millennialists, but they're also, since the 1980s in particular, really, late 70s, early 80s,
have become increasingly more politically active. And so in evangelical protestism now, or at least in the Baptist Church where I go to,
But there is this kind of, to me again, kind of rather frustrating discontinuity or dichotomy
between people that know that they think that they should cast an informed vote, they're
not happy with the government, a lot of them want government off their backs, but they
haven't thought it through clearly and they're not willing to put a whole lot of time into
If you're researching philosophy or even spend that much time in academic pursuits at all, anyway, because, again, we don't have a whole lot of time, because the return of Christ is imminent, and so we spend times better spent placing it towards things that are more eternal, like evangelization and making sure that your own house is in order, that kind of thing.
Then, okay, so we've passed over Amillennialism and Premillennialism,
the North then goes to the Post-Millennialism. Post-Millennialists teach that, according to North,
the Kingdom of God began with the manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and that the entire
church era can be regarded as the Millennium. Now that, they are in agreement with the Amillennialists
The point of departure is that at some point in the future, a great period of Gospel success in evangelism will take place, wherein billions of people will come to accept Christ as Savior.
So there will be a large conversion to Christ as a result of the preaching of the Gospel.
This period will result in great external blessings, whether it will last exactly a thousand years or not is not much discussed.
Until the world experiences a long era of Christian culture, Jesus will not come again to end history and judge the world.
Thus, Jesus will return post-millennially.
So there's going to be this extended period of something that they could call perhaps the Kingdom of God on Earth.
As more and more people become Christian, they will begin to affect laws, etc., to make them more, society more Christian.
and then after this long period of large converts, large numbers of people being Christian, then Jesus will come back and provide the new heaven and the new earth for Christians and then cast all the non-Christians into eternal perdition.
okay so there's those that's laid that lays out the gee that lays out the
millennial views and what is pietism North says that pietism is basically an
eye a viewpoint that places a lot of emphasis on your person your own your
own personal salvation your own personal Christian living okay and that things
that aren't connected with that or tend to be tend to be second than that
are not that important. So the pietists will tend to be, say, more concerned
about smoking, more concerned about booze, more concerned about gambling, those
kinds of things. So five topics dominated its list of social concerns in North
States. The use of alcohol, the use of tobacco, attendance at plays or movies,
dancing, except for traditional folk dancing and maybe square dancing, and
and gambling, other social issues such as laws against prostitution and
pornography or the enforcement of laws against commerce on the Sabbath have not
been unique to Protestantism that they've also well actually I don't know
about that I have some comments there's just too much there's a lot of this
article that needs to be discussed and I don't have time to discuss it all but
I have problems with certain North definitions as well, so just to not let North off the hook.
Anyway, the important thing for North when describing the pietists is that pietists tend not to be overly concerned with changing the social political atmosphere.
They tended to be anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual. They didn't put a whole lot of stake in, say, Christian scholarship, for instance, because they thought that the academy, for instance, would become more and more secular.
They thought that they were generally opposed to any form of Darwinism, the pietists were,
and therefore tend to associate scholarship and science and learning with evil, with biblical fallacies or things that were not in accordance with the Bible.
to spend their time in studying scripture and not spend a whole lot, which is fine, good, but not, they didn't, they didn't tend to, they tended not to think too systematically about, about things.
And you can see this, he has got, in a, let's see, I don't want to make sure, you can see this kind of come to fruition in William Jennings, in William Jennings' Brine, where it's, his attack on brine is, is, is, I think, one of the best parts of the paper.
paper. I mean, it's just utterly devastating. It just paints Brian to be... I did not realize
that Brian was such a socialist, such a hardcore socialist. And it was... I mean, the only thing
I knew about Brian was that he was from my home state, which was Nebraska, and he was
the boy orator of the Platt, and that he did some Chautauqua stuff and then kind of embarrassed
himself at the Scopes Monkey Trial. That's pretty much all I knew about him. So I thought,
well, at least he was...
That's definitely not, I know that's more in line with Tucker's theology, but nonetheless
it's definitely not in line with say Calvinist Presbyterianism, which is a tradition out
of which Brian came.
Then North, in illustrating his main point is to point out that not all post-millennials
North tries to divide the post-millennialist, broadly interpreted into two basic, what I
consider two basic groups or historical groups.
One, basically it's the status of post-millennialists versus the non-status post-millennialists.
As I see it, Rothbard tended to just lump all post-millennialists into the status post-millennial group.
And North, I think, makes a more proper distinction in tracing out, say, the old school Presbyterian post-millennialists
and, say, the pietist post-millennialists of, say, the Jonathan Edwards, his era of post-millennialism,
as being non-statist. And then you have the secularized social gospel post-millennialists
who were very statist, who led to, rolled into the pre-millennial, or the, I'm sorry, the progressive
movement. And he points out people like, you know, he cites several times people like J. Gresham,
J. Gressen Machen, for instance, as an old-school Presbyterian Whig post-millennialist who was
probably the closest thing to a libertarian we see in American Protestantism, except with
the exception of perhaps Mark Brantley, but up to this point, he was probably the most
libertarian writing in terms of and again in terms of his writings probably most
libertarian of all say the American Protestantism up to the say the 70s or
80s so so the I guess the point is that the the crucial the crucial distinction
is not just are you post-millennial or not the distinction is what type of
Post-Millennialism, is it a more secularized, social gospel post-millennialism, or is it
a more biblical post-millennial, orthodox Christian biblical post-millennialism? And
also...
So if you're a pietistic post-millennialist, you tend to be less statist.
Yes, exactly right. And then I guess that's where I'll stop and open up to questions. I know it wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be, but yes sir.
I didn't access the World War I article, but I did look back and I found an article that Rothbard wrote for American Family and the State.
It was edited by Pydon. It was in 1986, so it's about three years before the publication of this.
I don't know if this is an earlier article or not, depending on how I'm not sat around.
But I think Rothbard, whether or not he made it in the World War I article or not, I think he knew about this distinction.
She talks about pietists, and he defines them as specific creeds or various churches of
sex do not matter, neither disobedience to their rituals or liturgies of a particular
church.
What counts for salvation is only each individual being born again, a direct kind of confrontation
between individual and God, a mystical and emotional conversion in which the individual
achieves salvation, and then he talks about baptism.
And then he also makes another distinction later on between two different types of pietism,
a northern and a southern basically, and he says that the southerners, at least until
the 1890s, became salvationist pietists, and that is they believed that emotional experience
of individual regeneration or of being born again was enough to ensure salvation, religion
Man was a separate compartment of life, a vertical, individual-God relation, carrying no imperative to transform man-made culture and inter-human relations.
Then, in the next paragraph he talks, in contrast, the northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by Yankees, adopted a far different form of evangelical pilotism.
Basically, they believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will.
They also believe that it was necessary to a person's own salvation and not just a good idea to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society.
What was the last part? The northern evangelical salvation via free will.
And what was their social view that you should, you could or you should?
Yes, it's not just a good idea. It's not just a good idea to try its best to ensure salvation of everyone else on this side.
Yeah, as he says in page 83 of the World War I fulfillment article, he says,
Evangelical pietism held that requisite to any man's salvation is that he do his best to see to it that everyone else is saved and doing one's best inevitably meant that the state must become a crucial instrument in maximizing people's chances for salvation.
and then so that oh go ahead no please I just say so so so in order for me to be
saved I have to be out there working to make sure that everybody else as many
people as possible become saved and and in order to do that I've got to use the
state to remove impediments from people that might lure people away from being
saved like alcohol or what have you I think they also want public schooling
etc right you know so much of this dispute to turn turns on this question
and what constitutes pietism, right?
I mean, they agree on the millennial question.
I mean, it seems like North wants
to make more distinctions among the post-millennials
than Rothbard's willing to.
But I thought it was significant that when North
is discussing eschatology, he's talking in theological terms.
When he turns to the question of pietism,
he talks exclusively in historical terms
and never seeks to give a theological definition
of pietism.
Well, I think he's done this deliberately, which is why I think this article is so wrong-headed.
Really, the difference between... the reason why Rothbard makes a distinction between liturgicals and pietists
is not because some people ring bells at mass and other people don't or something.
It has nothing to do with high church, low church as such.
It's that these are proxies for a particular view of sin.
The Piousistic view of sin is basically a neo-Gnostic view of sin.
It rejects the traditional Christian view of sin, that is that a sin is any thought, word or deed that violates certain scriptural mandates.
The Piousists go on further, and they dispense with the thoughts, they figure you're totally depraved, there's no way you can purify your thoughts.
So, you need to go after your words, which you can purify, your deeds, which you can purify, and most importantly of all, things, that there are certain things that are inherently evil.
Liquor, in and of itself, embodies evil. It's not what you do with it. It's by its very existence is evil.
And this is a pietist doctrine that really is not part of orthodox Christianity, but goes to the heart of the distinction between, you know, the liturgical branches of Christianity associated with Catholicism, Lutheranism and Episcopalianism, and the more radical Anabaptist sects that were later secularized in progressive era that Rothbard identifies as their view of man's nature and their view of sin.
I think that, for example, like nowadays, you can sort of almost define these groups by the institutions which are associated, for example, that the pietists which Jeff was talking about are, you know, Bob Jones University, if you can say Bob Jones, you know, and I guess I had the distinction of being brought up with fundamentalism in both the north and the south, and basically the difference I saw was that you were allowed to smoke in the south and still be a Christian. I'm serious.
When ultimately people came down to distinctions, how was the distinction? You could smoke in the south.
By the way, there's pietism on the left too.
Pietism in politics would constantly seek to stamp out, say, discrimination.
A good example of something that's inherently sinful.
There's no way you could discriminate and be good about it.
There's no way you could have a drink and do it in moderation.
It has to be utterly destroyed.
which is why pietism led to statism. So that's my critique of the North Paper.
Let me say something real quick. I think the word pietism is misapplied. I think you'd be taken out of this whole argument and you'd still end up with a record.
Let me tell you why. It kind of points on page 136, the article. It talks a little bit about, and I'm a Presbyterian, I know a little bit about the history of the Presbyterian Church, so I'm familiar somewhat with the debates and that sort of thing that went on in the late 19th century, that sort of thing.
And in this last paragraph on this page, it talks about what the debate essentially was
in the Presbyterian Church during that time, and what it was, it was between what was a,
what you might call a pietist type viewpoint, which is one, this is how I've learned to
define pietism, it's something, the difference is, pietism defines, as you say, certain deeds
in and of themselves wrong, evil, and basically says that every deed can be put
into some category in some way. While the traditional tradition, the tradition for
Luther for instance, basically said there was a whole host of deeds which are
neither black nor white, good nor bad, anything in and of themselves, they're
just acts which are out of the realm of spirituality. And basically that was the
and the debate between the leftist, let's say, and the conservative element in the Princeton Theological Seminary which was traditionally the conservative bulwark and the most powerful, in that sense, in the Presbyterian Church, and probably still is, even though it's not conservative.
So in that sense, it was very clear. Tiatism lined up with social activism.
Well, those against Tiatism lined up against social activism.
I don't think that that's clear throughout the whole spectrum.
I believe that Tiatism has been the dominant form of Protestant Christianity in America.
In a lot of traditions, to an extent even Lutheran, to an extent, definitely to an extent Baptist, very much so,
and yet they have not necessarily aligned with social activism.
I just think it just happened to be in this case that the debate of the Presbyterian Church came down along those lines,
but I do not believe that that is something that can be generalized to all Protestants.
I don't know if people from other traditions may agree or disagree,
I think the Baptist religion is very pietist in its background and yet not necessarily very social activist in that sense, at least to some extent.
James?
Oh, and then another thing with the criticism of Rothbard's treatment of Rock,
of the Forest Man and the Rockefellers.
I don't know if that's valid.
One of the things Rothbard implies in saying that is that this sort of says that while
these people may go secular, that basically once you're a post-mil piadist, you're always
a post-mil piadist, and that if you're brought up in these ways that you, even though you
You may become an atheist, you may become a secular Unitarian or whatever I think he refers to in here somewhere, that you still bring this baggage with you, this Post Mill book, this baggage with you.
While they may have switched over, Rothbard, by calling them Post Mills is not denying the fact that they switched over to the church, but he's just saying that they've got this baggage with them, they took it with them.
Right, right, yes. I think there's no disagreement there. I would just argue that it was, that the more likely one is to make the switch into secularism, then the more likely one is actually to become an activist status. That would be my, that would be my...
One quick thing on page 140, I think you get a shorthand look at North's actual critique of Rothbard.
Rothbard says the problem in much of Christian history has been the advent of the post-millennial pietists.
But if you look at the first paragraph under the conclusion, he has this sentence,
but they were not pietists in the historical meaning of the word, and then he gives a short definition of it, colon,
Christians who elevated religious experience about social transformation.
So in North's view, by definition, almost, you can't have a post-millennial pietist.
I don't think you're...
But I think you're wrong about that. That's what North's really arguing.
No, that's not true at all, because the post-millennial pietists tend to believe, they tend to...
Post-Millenniopitis would tend to argue that the millennium will come about practically almost as a necessary consequence to more and more Christians becoming receptive to the Gospel and living integrable Christian lives.
So that there's no need to go out and actively even say, you know, even to act actively change laws according to, you know, the Old Testament or anything, anything like that, because people will just, there'll be a kind of a natural progression towards this, whereas the, say, the reconstructionist branch that also argued that, you know, this is all going to, you know, any type of king, any type
of Millennium on Earth is going to be after you know this is going to be in
this golden age after a mass conversion then I mean they still argued that they
would still argue that this this would only happen as this would happen as a
natural consequence but they would be they would tend to have more developed
social social theory but you know the pious post-millennialists would still
The Golden Age is going to come, but we don't have to write a social theory about it.
Well, aren't Quakers, for example, pietistic, post-millennialists?
They're probably pre-millennialists.
I don't know about that.
I would say the modern Quaker has a theology on that.
I don't know what the modern Quaker is.
But I've talked to Murray about the pietistic point in particular and I think he did view the term with a small p as James sort of indicates that the people themselves were pietistic in the basic sense that they didn't smoke, that they didn't drink, they were very frugal and they felt successful, they were pragmatists
and they felt that they could give that to other people. They could give these keys of life and success, which of course most people were in the United States.
They could give them to everybody else. If you didn't drink, you didn't smoke, and you saved, and you invested, and you worked hard, and you did X, Y, and Z, then you too.
There's even more to it than that.
That's where the pietism breaks out into more...
But the reason they're contrasted with the liturgicals is that the liturgicals reaches
back to the whole tradition of iconoclasm and the stripping of the altars after the Reformation.
And the reason they stripped the altars is that the pietists thought there was something
inherently suspect about material decadence.
That's why you see this breakdown between the liturgicals and the pietists.
By definition, there would be something wrong with material decadence.
It's decadent.
Well, they thought a candlestick was decadent, you know what I mean?
Well, it may have been, in that context.
I mean, of course, they're reacting against a thousand years of abuse or corruption.
But what I understand, it seems to me, though, that you talked before about this definition of sin,
where sin doesn't become any more thought, where there are actions inherent in things.
and you say we don't worry about thoughts because people are totally depraved
but if people are totally depraved then how can they...
what sense does it make then to concentrate on actions or things
or people consuming things if people are totally depraved?
It's a mechanistic view of salvation.
Totally depraved has nothing to do with pietism, the definition of pietism.
The idea of the Presbyterian Church debate has everything to do with that
because the conservative branch of the Presbyterian Church,
The anti-pietist group were staunchly Calvinist, staunchly total-of-the-bratical.
My argument doesn't hinge on the total-of-the-piety point. That was just a gratuitous thinking.
I would argue it, but I don't think it's necessary to accept that, to accept the view that Rothbard is identifying
pietism with a particular view of ethics and salvation. And North never quite picks up on that.
But it seems to me, well, I don't know.
He never quite, even on this footnote early in the thing, he says something about the liturgicals and he says,
I mean, it's like he doesn't understand. Yeah, here it is, footnote 10.
He says, this all-millennial's view has been the dominant astrological viewpoint of the Roman catholicism,
the Lutheranism, the Episcopalian, with their high church, quote unquote, liturgies.
liturgies, then it just goes on, as if there's nothing to it, as if liturgy is just an accident.
But it's not. I mean the churches with liturgies tend not to be pietistic.
Well, in the example of Continental, the Reformed Church, the Presbyterian of the Continental Calvinistic Churches, typically which are very, were not high church, also be, and then he also makes a good distinction between post-millennialists that were activists and those that weren't, which I think what the problem is, I still think that you can take hiatus out of the whole thing, just take it out and you can still come up
with a side that is socially activist and post-millennialist and not so and you can
be a pietist that believes that if you enforce laws on other people that that's
gonna bring about some kind of change and you can be a pietist that believes
nothing of the sort. I think Norris probably goes a little too far in the other
direction. He tries to define pietism as someone that's totally concerned almost
with his or herself and not with anything else but you can, to me, you can
be either. I mean you can be a pietist that believes social activism can
in Congress something and you can be a scientist that believes neither and you can be not a
scientist at all and be a social activist. I mean I just don't see where that's adding
a whole lot to the debate.
I mean, one of the things to remember is that the whole progressive era, a lot of the, there
are a whole lot of strains of progressivism. What tended to join the anti-Darwinists, and
this is another thing he really doesn't touch on very much, the huge split between the Darwinists
The fundamentalists and anti-Darwinists, the fundamentalist modernists, but where the anti-Darwinists
tended, the fundamentalists tended to join into this whole progressive movement was on
the issue of prohibition, because they felt that drinking was sinful, and certainly at
the time, at the turn of the century, alcoholism was a problem in America, and these guys,
these preachers would go down to Skid Row, and that's where they started their union
and Gospel Missions, which exist to this day, but they tended to really focus upon Prohibition,
not so much some of the other aspects of progressiveism that we think of in regulation and the like.
Granted, William Jennings Bryan did, but Bryan also strikes me as a person who really had
never worked out much theology or worked out much of anything else.
It's just sort of just this populism, whatever appeals to the people, but Prohibition really
I'm reviewing a paper right now on progressivism and what it is, and that is one of the problems, is progressivism is really the historical manifestation of all of these groups, progressives from religious bent or not, that have come together and still exist to a certain extent, well obviously do, to a large extent.