Think with me about it in our recent history: Up until the Industrial Revolution, which began just over 200 years ago, poverty was the normal state of most of the world's population, including the nations of the West. Then an incredible economic revolution took place. In the early part of the 19
th century machine tools were developed in Britain which radically increased industrial production and called for skilled labor. Then the British railroads were built as a result of the amazing development of steam power, beginning about 1825--the first railroad transport of goods. This was followed later by the generation of electricity, especially the discovery by Nikola Tesla of alternating electrical current which, in the latter part of the 19
th century, sparked economic growth far beyond the earlier industrial revolution.
Paul Johnson has described that era beautifully in
Modern Times. In the century that followed, economic growth outstripped population growth. For the first time in human history the middle and lower classes of society could aspire to personal independence, a comfortable life, even to wealth.
The incredible economic revolution carried with it the emergence of incredible social problems. Up and down trends in sectors of the economy meant sudden unemployment for people who had moved into urban centers with little financial backup in case of crisis. At the same time, opportunity was unparalleled. There were enormous migrations of people from Scotland, England and Europe to America,Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
In Britain the growth of the Free Churches--Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists--as a result of the Evangelical Awakening led by John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, William Wilberforce, and later Dwight L. Moody, was so strong that for a time there was talk of nonconformists being able to disestablish the Church of England. For example, R. W. Dale at Carr's Lane Chapel in Birmingham (Congregational) preached to over 2000 people each Sunday for over forty years beginning in 1853, first as associate for six years, then as the senior minister. This was but one example of what today we call a mega-church in the evangelical tradition. In principle, Dale opposed the establishment of the Church of England. It was this Congregationalist, Baptist and Methodist evangelical polity that fed into the final separation of church life from the power of the State in America, of which Thomas Jefferson was so proud.
In the latter part of the 19
th century came a turning point: with the undercutting of traditional confessional beliefs among the major churches because of the challenges of Darwinian Evolution and the canons of biblical Higher Criticism, the secularization of Christian altruism led to the emergence of the British Labour Movement and, later, Party. The British Labour Party is the secular offspring of the Evangelical Awakening.
The Canadian parallel to this is the rise of the CLC (Canadian Labour Congress) which, with the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) led by the Baptist preacher Tommy Douglas, morphed (1961) into the present New Democratic Party. While its founding principles focused on the social and economic well-being of the laboring classes in Canada -- it has added gay rights, peace, and the environment to its political agenda -- the movement was never as radical as American Progressivism.
In America the late 19
th and early 20
th century Progressives espoused radical economic and social engineering views, aiming to re-interpret what they regarded as an outdated, un-interpretable Constitution in favor of top-down regulation of American society and its economy. That is still their mantra whenever Constitutionalism is mentioned.
Their thesis: the intellectual elite of the movement are to decide what is in the best interests of society. This is a key feature of American Progressivism: it was begotten not from the lower, laboring classes, but from the American east coast intellectual elites. Hence the adulation of Barack Obama--Columbia, Yale, Harvard -- as a "real brain."
Today, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, along with a host of others in the left half of the Democrat Party, regard themselves as Progressives, not Liberals--but they are Progressives in the community activist tradition of Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven.
Throughout the early and later development of American Progressivism, the Social Gospel message became its spiritual core. Its prophet was the Brooklyn German Baptist preacher Walter Rauschenbusch, who died in 1918. Walter's father August had formed the German Department at Rochester Divinity School in which Walter also taught. Later, the school became the Colgate Rochester Crozer DivinitySchool (Martin Luther King studied at Crozer). In 1949 the German Department became the North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls SD, the Seminary of North American (German) Baptists, where I taught for several years.
Ironically, Richard Rorty, Walter Rauschenbusch's atheist philosopher grandson, who died in 2007, promulgated an American civic religion which purported to embrace all religions provided that they are secularized. In
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he argues that no single cohering vision of the nature of reality and of human life in the universe is possible. Instead, he opts for a practical, romantic polytheism within a liberal democracy (
Achieving Our Country). This is to be a new religion created in America. Secular, social democracy displaces the fellowship of the saints of his local Baptist church ancestors, though the latter remained for him, I think, a haunting ideal. But how can the prevailing secular need-satisfaction behavioral model transcend its fundamental ego-centrism in the romantic polytheism he envisions? What can be built on a non-binding moral footing -- in his language, a non-creedal footing? This, I think, logically marks the end of the Social Gospel movement.
The Social Gospel movement became the political action arm of major Christian denominations, which had been badly hurt by theological liberalism, and the conscience of the Democratic Party. It profoundly influenced social and economic policy during the economic downturns of the 1890s, and the 1930s under Roosevelt.
When, during the 1920s and 1930s, Progressivists could not dominate the government and economic and social policies in America, exponents of the Social Gospel movement turned their attention to Federal social assistance programs; in short, the transfer-payments mentality and top-down economic management were born. Contemporary Liberalism is the morphological offshoot of that era.
Were there problems and much human suffering during the 1930s Depression? Indeed there were, especially for the millions of immigrant families that came to Canada and America during the previous seventy-five years, including my own. They were often housed in slums, segregated in language-barrier communities, with little education, and less access to levers of political influence. The poor and dispossessed became the foundation of the enduring legacy and political power of the Democratic Party in America for several succeeding generations.
As a boy in Hamilton, Ontario, I recall walking from Beach Road to the west-central part of the city to take a bit of lunch -- bread and fat bacon -- to my father who was working on a city welfare-relief construction project. There was no work for "foreigners." And I remember walking with him to the city dump to find food for our family from restaurant castoffs.
This is the historical context for the transfer-payments mentality which dominates public policy in America today:
my Congressman, Congresswoman and Senator are there to get whatever can benefit me and my community ... we've got to make sure we get our piece of the pie. It has created a very large dependency population in America, a segment of society which has become the voting clientele for the political class.
Bear in mind: there is no scripture mandate for government to expropriate honestly earned wealth in the interests of what is deemed to be social justice. I take very seriously the biblical mandate to maximize one's available resources--rather than burying one's talent--as well as the mandate to help the poor. I remind secularists that Christians through their churches and organizations are extraordinarily generous to those in need here at home and abroad.
The genius of the capitalist system is that it furnishes a way for productive people to help those they do not know anything about: they furnish useful products and services that meet the needs of others and helps them further the implementation of their vision. Productivity is far more than a profit-oriented concept. Incentive sharpens one's wits and creates opportunity. What appears to be the pursuit of self-interest tends to benefit others as well; while the expropriator of other people's hard-earned resources tends to destroy the future of all. Innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity are the biblical mandate, accompanied by a heart touched altruistically for those truly in need. The goal? Bring as many as possible to fulfillment of their human potential and to self-reliant, fruitful living.
