The American Social Gospel and Christian sociology movements essentially sought to bend Christianity to the progressive social agenda. Senator Albert Beveridge, the progressive Republican from Indiana who chaired the 1912 convention, summed up the progressive attitude well when he declared, "God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world."27
Walter Rauschenbusch offers the best short explanation of the Social Gospel for our purposes. A professor at the Rochester Theological Seminary and a onetime preacher on the outskirts of New York's Hell's Kitchen, the slender clergyman with a thin goatee had become the informal leader of the movement when he published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907. "[U]nless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order," he warned, "back we shall go to Capitalism...'The God that answereth by low food prices,'" he boomed, "'let him be God.'" Left-wing clergy like Rauschenbusch were convinced that the state was the instrument of God and that collectivism was the new order sanctioned by Jesus.28
Progressive clergy like Rauschenbusch laid the philosophical and theological foundation for statism in ways that the new crop of social scientists never could. They argued from pulpits and political gatherings and in the intellectual press for a total and complete reconception of scripture in which redemption could only be achieved collectively. Conservative theologians argued that only the individual could be born again. The progressive Christians claimed that individuals no longer mattered and that only the state could serve as divine intercessor. The Baptist Social Gospel preacher argued that the state must become "the medium through which the people shall co-operate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness."29
Inspiration for such ideas came from an improbable source: Bismarck's Prussia. Bismarck inspired American progressives in myriad ways, some of which have been touched on already. First, he was a centralizer, a uniter, a European Lincoln who brought disparate regions and factions under the yoke of the state, heedless of dissent. Second, he was the innovator of top-down socialism, which pioneered many of the welfare state programs the progressives yearned for: pensions, health insurance, worker safety measures, eight-hour workdays, and so on. Bismarck's efficiency at delivering programs without the messiness of "excessive" democracy set the precedent for the idea that "great men," modernizers, and "men of action" could do what the leaders of decadent and decaying democracies could not.
Moreover, Bismarck's socialism from above gelded classical liberalism in Germany and helped to hobble it around the globe. This was precisely his purpose. Bismarck wanted to forestall greater socialist or democratic radicalism by giving the people what they wanted without having them vote for it. To this end he bought off the left-leaning reformers who didn't particularly care about limited government or liberal constitutionalism. At the same time, he methodically marginalized, and in many cases crushed, the classical or limited-state liberals (a similar dynamic transpired in the United States during World War I). Hence, in Germany, both left and right became in effect statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to impose its vision on society. Liberalism, defined as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government, slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR, a liberalism defined by economic entitlements and the alleviation of poverty.
Then there was the Kulturkampf — a subject to be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. The important point about the Kulturkampf, lost on so many contemporary commentators, is that it was a liberal phenomenon. German progressives declared war on backward Catholicism, believing that their blending of science and a form of nationalistic Social Gospel was the ideology of the future. It was a model the progressives adapted to American soil.
The godfathers of the liberal God-state were the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel had argued that history was an unfolding evolutionary process, and the engine driving that process was the state. The "State is the actually existing, realized moral life...The divine idea as it exists on earth," Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. "[A]ll worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."30 The movement of the state through time was the "march of God on earth." Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to confirm that man was part of a larger organism, governed and directed by the state as the mind guides the body. For the "modern" clergy this meant that politics was a religious calling; after all, politics is nothing less than the effort to define the mission of the state, and the state was the hand of God.
Virtually all of the leading progressive intellectuals shared this "organic" and spiritual understanding of politics — perhaps none more than Richard Ely. "God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution," proclaimed the founder of the American Economic Association and the so-called Wisconsin School of progressivism. The state, he insisted, "is religious in its essence," and there is no corner of human existence beyond the scope of its authority. A mentor to Wilson and a great influence on Teddy Roosevelt, Ely was a postmillennialist Christian who defined the state as "a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations."31 Many of Ely's famous colleagues at the University of Wisconsin saw their advocacy for economic reform, eugenics, war, socialism, Prohibition, and the rest of the progressive agenda as part of a united effort to bring about the "New Jerusalem."
It made little sense to talk about progressives as a group distinct from the theocratic zealots trying to create a new God-state. The American Economic Association, its mission statement dedicated to uniting church, state, and science to secure America's redemption, served as both the intellectual engine of progressive social policy and a de facto organ of the Social Gospel movement. More than sixty clergymen — roughly half the group's roster — counted themselves as members. Later, during World War I, Ely was the most rabid of jingoists, organizing loyalty oaths, hurling accusations of treason, and arguing that opponents of the war should be shot.
With Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible to separate the priest from the professor. From early essays with such titles as "Christ's Army" and "Christian Progress" to his later addresses as president, Wilson made it clear that he was a divine instrument, and the state the holy sword of God's crusade, while at the same time insisting that he represented the triumph of science and reason in politics. Speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, he told the audience that public servants should be guided solely by the question: What would Christ do in your situation? He then proceeded to explain, "There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world."32