In part 2, we saw that American education, from the elementary or grammar school level up through the universities that became the Ivy League, was a Protestant Christian project. It was founded on a strong belief in God and in Biblical Christianity. How then has it all gone so wrong? In this part we will discuss two of the precursors of the current mess.
First, rapid technological and scientific progress in the century between 1815 and 1915 led to Western intellectuals becoming less religious and more humanistic. Faith was less and less placed upon God and more and more placed upon man and man’s achievements. Humanism became the dominant ideology in American education.
Second, a parallel transformation took place within American Christianity, when “mainline Protestantism,” abandoned the old-time religion and embraced liberalism. Although called “liberal Christianity,” liberalism is not Christianity. Liberalism rejects the miraculous and supernatural elements of Christianity, and especially rejects the blood atonement, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross for our sins. In place of these elements, liberalism substituted a project of personal moral self-improvement, combined with chamber-of-commerce-style civic boosterism and collective optimism.
The Arrival of Humanism
A century of general peace in Europe, from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the beginning of the Great War in 1914, was accompanied by tremendous innovation and technological progress, especially in the latter part of this period. Trains, steamships, telegraph, telephones, electrical power, the electric light bulb, radio, automobiles, airplanes and skyscrapers were the symbols of this transforming technological revolution.
Medicine saw the triumph of the germ theory of disease, and the pathogens that cause many common diseases were identified by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and others. This allowed Joseph Lister, Pasteur and others to take steps to combat and kill these microbes. The widespread deployment of indoor plumbing, with showers, bathtubs, and flush toilets, and the replacement of horses (which produced 3 million pounds of manure a day in New York City by the late 1800s) with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, fostered a vast improvement in sanitation in the large cities, which had theretofore been the epicenters of disease. New surgical techniques were pioneered, and x-rays invented. It seemed that by 1900, medicine was at last doing more good than harm, and was on the way to accomplishing almost miraculous things.
There were also tremendous disasters during this time—the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which killed over 2,200 people, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed over 6,000, and the fifteen hundred souls lost in the 1912 sinking of Titanic. These disasters should have served as a check on creature hubris and confidence in the arm of flesh. But the only disaster that made much of an impression was the Great War (1914 to 1918) which killed 20 million and wounded a similar number, followed by a global flu pandemic that killed at least 17 million, with some estimates triple that number.
The most destructive war in history (for only a generation, sadly) interrupted this period of astonishing human progress. But the war was caused by the failures of diplomacy and statesmanship of the Christian elites of European Christendom, so, in the minds of many intellectuals, the war was a strike against Christianity, not the stark warning it should have been of the limitations and defects of fallen human nature.
After the war, the progress in science, technology, and medicine continued and accelerated. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, and other anti-biotics were developed; at long last, that elusive “silver bullet” had been found to defeat the bacterial infections that carried off so many people of all ages and stations of life. Viruses, which had been suspected since the late 19th Century (because some pathogens got through filters fine enough to stop even the smallest bacteria) were finally identified under electron microscopy, starting in 1931.
The world was changing at an unprecedented pace, leading many to believe that utopia, a perfect human society, was attainable through human effort alone—apart from God. In his 1927 essay, “Why I am Not a Christian,” Bertrand Russell captured the sentiment of the progressives during this era:
“Science can teach us… no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
Humanism, the idea that man can depend upon his own efforts to improve society, became the de facto “religion” of many intellectuals. This was seen in the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America, in Fabian (non-revolutionary) socialism in Great Britain, and in the worldwide Marxist movement.
In 1917, Marxist ideologues got control of Russia, the first time Leftists had gotten control of a large nation since the French Revolution. Although Russian communism was an immediate, violent failure, it was bolstered by Western intellectuals and journalists, starting with John Reed (not to be confused with my father), who visited communist Russia and returned to the West with tales of how well the communist experiment was going.
Theological Liberalism
During this time, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Christian Church had been put on the back foot by the scientific community’s acceptance of Darwin’s naturalistic theory of origins, which obviated a creator God. Unsure of how to navigate the relationship between science and faith, many Protestant theologians wavered in their commitment to the inspiration and authority of God’s Word.
Theological liberalism seeks to divest Christianity of its miraculous and supernatural elements, deemed retrograde and anti-modern, while retaining the impetus for good works and moral improvement. In essence, liberalism is the religion of Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, stripped of elements like heaven and hell, and the substitutionary atonement, Christ’s death on our behalf, the six-day Creation, the Resurrection of the dead, etc. Christ is demoted from savior to moral example. Liberal “Christianity” is an altogether different religion from Christianity, if it can even be called a religion; it is a system of morality and self-improvement, sometimes aided by Bible stories, the factual truth and accuracy of which no one clings to.
To give an example of liberalism in action, in 1891, Union Theological Seminary in New York City appointed Charles Briggs to chair its Biblical Studies department. In his inaugural address, Briggs claimed that it was both “unwise” and “unchristian” to require seminary students to affirm “the divine authority of the Bible.” When the Presbyterian Church, believing that the chair of their Biblical Studies Department ought to know (and teach) that gospel ministers in training ought to study the Bible precisely because it is the divinely inspired word of God, reversed Brigg’s appointment, Union Theological Seminary severed all ties to the Presbyterian Church.
As theological liberalism spread, the Union Theological Seminary story played out in dozens of institutions. The seminaries were liberalized, the pastors were trained to be liberals, and the denomination-sponsored colleges and universities also began to be liberalized, and often to abandon their historic denominational affiliations.
The Fundamentalists Backlash
In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA adopted a list of “Five Fundamentals” that all of their ordained ministers would be required to affirm:
(1) the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible,
(2) the Virgin Birth,
(3) the substitutionary atonement of Jesus,
(4) the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and
(5) the historical reality of Jesus’ miracles.
Those who affirmed the fundamentals came to be called “fundamentalists,” a pejorative label among liberals, then and today. The opponents of fundamentalism called themselves “modernists,” placing themselves on the side of scientific and technological advances, and portraying the fundamentalists as opponents of progress and modernity.
In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, preached a sermon titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” calling upon Christians to abandon the core supernatural elements of the Bible. Fosdick singled out the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, disparaging those who believe “that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner.” Fosdick bragged that he would have been branded a heretic by past generations (as indeed he would have been), but the liberals rallied behind him. Standard Oil scion John D. Rockefeller, Jr. paid to print and distribute 130,000 copies of Fosdick’s sermon to ordained pastors throughout the nation.
One year later, in 1923, Professor J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Theological Seminary wrote his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism, warning that liberal Christianity is not really Christianity at all:
“Liberalism is totally different from Christianity, for the foundation is different. Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking [its doctrine] and its life [its practice]. Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.”
Not surprisingly, liberalism emptied the seminaries of any real theological thinking. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor martyred for his opposition to Adolf Hitler, attended Union Theological Seminary in 1930 and wrote a friend regarding his experience:
“There is no theology here. . . . They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.
Darwinism Enters the Churches
In 1925, liberalism scored a public relations victory with the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The Tennessee state legislature, in the Butler Act, had outlawed the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee (the act did not prohibit the teaching of evolution per se, just the idea that human beings evolved from apes and were not specially created by God).
The Scopes trial was planned and carried out as a publicity stunt. Outside liberals colluded with local civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, to stage a trial that would be a national event. They recruited John T. Scopes to violate the law; the ACLU hired a famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, to defend Scopes. Three-time (1896, 1900, 1908) Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, a strong voice against the encroachment of liberalism into mainline Protestantism, was brought in to be the special prosecutor.
The circus the Scopes trial turned into must have exceeded the planners’ expectations. Liberal reporters were recruited to pack the court room, including the famous cynic and skeptic, H.L. Mencken, who called the small-town residents, “yokels,” “morons,” and “ignoramuses” plagued by “simian imbecility.” Mencken and the others reported that Darrow had easily outsmarted Bryan, making him look foolish. Many in the English-speaking world,reading their newspapers in distant locales, were convinced that evolution had the better case, and that creationism was for rubes and troglodytes.
It is not often recalled that William Jennings Bryan hurt himself by having already compromised on biblical creation. Bryan had adopted the day-age theory, which held that each day of the Genesis One creation story represented a long geological age. When he took the stand, he testified, under questioning by Clarence Darrow, that he did not believe the days of creation were 24 hour days, but rather indeterminate time periods, signalling distrust in Scripture’s simple narrative.
Historians also typically fail to mention that Scopes’ textbook, A Civic Biology by George Hunter, justified racism. The textbook claimed that five different races of humanity were at varying stages of evolutionary progress. Black people were listed as the lowest race of humanity while “the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” were listed as “the highest type of all.” Such frank racism was orthodox evolutionary doctrine in the early 20th Century.
Darwinism has a complaint against Christianity not often mentioned: Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that the human race, like all other species, is advanced and perfected by the struggle for survival. Only the fittest survive, which purifies and advances the race. Christianity, with its solicitude and comfort for the poor, the sick, the weak, and the old was interfering with nature’s salutary work of weeding out the unfit. Christian charity is, in effect, anti-Darwinian.
Acceptance of evolution tosses out the Fall—there never was one—and hence the need for humanity to be redeemed from the results of the Fall. It does away with Christ as the second Adam, because there never was a first Adam. It does away with Christ as Redeemer, because there is no sin, nor Fall, nor anything to be redeemed from. Theological liberalism is the natural result of acceptance of Darwinism; liberalism jettisons the elements of Christianity that conflict with Darwinism.
Liberalism Takes Down Mainline Protestantism
Sadly, theological liberalism infected and eventually swallowed the mainline Protestant denominations, their seminaries, and their publishing houses. The Presbyterians Church USA was one of the first to go. Less than two years after the Scopes trial, the same Presbyterian denomination that adopted the “Five Fundamentals” voted that they were no longer binding for ordained ministers. In 1929, Princeton Theological Seminary, America’s flagship Presbyterian seminary and historically a resolute defender of Bible Christianity, reorganized its leadership and embraced liberalism—prompting J. Greshem Machen and other faithful professors to leave and establish Westminster Theological Seminary.
The Episcopal Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the United Methodist Church (UMC), the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the northern Baptist were all lost to liberalism. By the middle of the 20th Century, most had begun ordaining women—both a result of liberalism and a cause, because of what women are, of ever deepening liberalism—by the beginning of the 21st Century, some had begun ordaining open homosexuals. By 2025, most of mainline Protestantism is actively celebrating sodomy, and some condone the surgical and chemical sexual mutilation of children, as if that were the end-goal of Christianity. The liberal destruction of Christianity has reached depths that Harry Emerson Fosdick could scarcely have imagined.
As we saw in parts one and two, America’s public schools were always, from the very beginning, Protestant schools. (The Roman Catholic Church recognized this, and built and the largest parochial school system in America to educate its young people. Seventh-day Adventists, writing off all Christians who did not accept our new light on the Sabbath as “Babylon,” also built a large parallel parochial school system, second only to the Catholics.) So when liberalism destroyed mainline Protestantism, the public education system was bound to become secularized and anti-Christian. It was not a question of whether this would happen, but how, exactly, it would play out.
Education is Turned Over to the “Teachers Colleges”
The first “teachers college,” Columbia University’s Teachers College, was founded in 1887. Its founding donor, Grace Hoadley Dodge, a Christian philanthropist who devoted much of her life to promoting sexual purity among women, recognized “that the country needed trained teachers.” She wrote that she “felt the spiritual force of this need…to make teaching a profession like that of law or medicine.”
It is hard to overstate the impact of Columbia University’s Teachers College. For decades, it remained the nation’s only college for teachers, exerting enormous influence over the public school system. By 1950, roughly one-third of all school administrators in America were graduates of Teachers College. Its notable alumni have included twenty-eight different university presidents and countless professors. To this day, Teachers College remains America’s largest college of education. Yale and Harvard would not establish their own departments of education until 1920.
Liberals, progressives, and others on the Left soon began to focus on the teachers’ colleges, realizing that if they could capture the institution that trained America’s teachers, they could control education in America.
In 1905, the Teachers College hired John Dewey, who became known as the Father of Modern American Education. Dewey championed the classroom as “the primary and most effective instrument of social progress.” But, as we will see in the next installment, John Dewey was an atheist, a humanist, and a Marxist. He promoted a godless alternative to Christian education.
Prophetically, J. Gresham Machen warned that the public school system’s monopoly on schooling would eventually lead to very bad things:
“A public school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.”
Conclusion
From the earliest times, Christianity was at the forefront of education in America. But by the 1920s, liberalism had hollowed out mainstream Protestantism, and intellectuals had adopted anti-theistic ideologies: liberalism, humanism, progressivism, socialism, and communism. Education followed these trends, as schooling at all levels separated from the Christian church, then from Christianity, becoming secularized and professionalized. Worse was to follow.
“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Psalm 14:1
This article is condensed and edited for content from a series by Sam Kastensmidt at the Institute for Faith and Culture.