Liberalism’s Rise and Fall

Why is the one-time winner now a loser?

Traditionally, the church in America has been overwhelmingly evangelical. As the dominant religion, evangelicalism gave structure to this nation’s world view and to its ethics (honored in theory if not in practice).

But beginning about 1880, liberalism began to move into the American church in serious fashion. By the end of the First World War, religious liberalism had become dominant in many of the older, so-called mainline denominations, and it continued to reign supreme over the leadership of the churches between the two world wars. From Riverside Drive in New York, the old Federal (now National) Council of Churches was its official voice and spoke for American Christendom in the halls of Congress and to the public media. The liberal Christian Century became its literary flagship. Liberalism controlled the resources, agencies, religious colleges and universities, the most influential seminaries, prestigious foundations, and the religious book publishers. But how and why did this all come about?

The Wave Of Scientific Secularism

In some ways, liberalism was merely an eddy of a far broader stream sweeping through history. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, in his classic work The Crisis of Our Age, traces the movement from a society whose values are based on God and religion to one whose values are drawn from the world of the five senses. While one need not buy every aspect of Sorokin’s rather too-neat evolution of Western thought, still all must agree that Western civilization has gone through a massive change in the last 300 years. For most Western Europeans as well as for most Americans, God and the church are no longer dominant factors. Western Christendom has become secularized. Its center of interest is man and this world. It settles for a sort of practical materialism.

This context explains the essential nature of liberalism, which evangelicalism has generally misunderstood. It has considered liberalism as an attack focused against orthodox Christianity out of hatred for biblical revelation and supernatural Christianity. Not so. It is safe to say that no liberal ever reckons himself as an enemy of traditional Christianity, but as a preserver. Harvard dean Willard Sperry characterized it as the “Yes, But” religion in a volume by that title: Yes, I believe in the deity of Christ, but the language of Chalcedon has become meaningless. We must redefine the doctrine so as to make it intelligible to us who live in the twentieth century. Yes, I believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ, but the important thing is not any biological fact but the value of Jesus for us. Liberalism always wanted to be Christian, but it always wanted to be “with it,” too. For three centuries the world has moved at an accelerated pace away from traditional religious and Christian values. In its essence, religious liberalism was an attempt to meet this challenge by updating an old and beloved religion so it could survive in the modern world. Liberalism succeeded so well because it rode the crest of what during the first third of the century seemed to be the wave of the future.

A Weakened Evangelicalism

But another factor helps explain the swift triumph of religious liberalism. Evangelicalism never was so widespread in America as many thought.

But this earlier evangelical influence on America gradually waned as, oddly enough, church membership skyrocketed. During the last century the American nation began more and more to identify with the church. To be a good American, one must belong to a church. As a result, the churches of America experienced a “Constantinian” effect like the Roman church at the beginning of the fourth century. Everyone moved into the church, and the church became filled with half-converted and unconverted members. Their meager Christian knowledge made them easy prey for a liberal gospel that would allow them to secure the comforting assurances of traditional religion while yet holding on to all the new values of a modern secular and scientific world view.

Ignorance Of The Bible

Finally, among other factors, the increasing pluralism of American society helped render the church susceptible to a liberal takeover. Beginning early in the nineteenth century, Roman Catholic infiltration into the port city of New York posed a problem for the public schools, then dominated by evangelical Protestantism and supported by the state. Roman Catholics demanded tax money for their schools also, so that they could rear their children in the Catholic faith. They appealed to the antiestablishment clause in the Constitution. But Protestants were unwilling to pay Roman Catholics to educate Catholic children. They preferred to exclude all sectarian religions from the public schools.

This fatal decision set American Protestantism on a course of religious illiteracy. It is no wonder that Protestant churches offered little effective opposition to liberal leadership. During the last two decades, Catholics have reluctantly abandoned their parochial schools and the opportunity to give their children solid instruction in their faith. Thus, the Roman Catholic church, like the Protestant church before it, is rapidly becoming an illiterate body. Protestant illiteracy was a major contributing cause to the breakdown of Protestant orthodoxy and the sweep of religious liberalism through the church leadership. It is no accident that the breakdown of the Catholic school system accompanied this disintegration of the traditional American Catholic church in the middle of the twentieth century.

A House Of Cards

Liberalism swept over the American churches, but if its rise was amazingly swift, its fall was even more so. Like a house of cards, it fell with unbelievable rapidity—first in Europe after World War I, and then in the United States after the Great Depression of the thirties and World War II.

I wish I could say that the decline and fall of religious liberalism was due to the overwhelming challenge offered it by a vigorous evangelical apologetic. The fact is, evangelicalism was never weaker than in the thirties. Liberalism was not challenged from without, but decayed from within:

1. Liberalism lost its faith in the liberal gods. It could no longer believe in the goodness of man or in the sweet reasonableness of the world, or in automatic progress, or in science’s ability to solve all the problems of humanity. Evolution had not really placed humans on an escalator that inevitably took them up and out of all the ills of the world.

2. Liberalism lacked a doctrine of salvation. It sought to build the superstructure of a beautiful Christian ethic without providing an adequate foundation in redemptive supernatural Christianity. It could tell man how to live, but when tragedy struck and sin corrupted, it faltered, for it had no solution to the problem of sin. It was a case of seeking beautiful fruit from a tree with no roots to nourish it.

3. Liberals could not defend the basis of their beliefs. Liberal apologetics scintillated with devastating attacks upon outworn dogmas. But when it came to a positive construction of new faith, it fragmented into personal feuds. Liberalism had a method, but no theology that could win any consensus.

In a way, Karl Barth illustrates all three of these liberal tensions. As a minister of a small church on the Swiss border during the First World War, he found his liberal optimism destroyed by the distant booming of the guns of Verdun. His confidence in his liberal teachers faded as he saw them lining up in solid support of a war that seemed to deny all of the fundamental tenets of their own liberal faith. Then, on Sunday when he mounted the sacred pulpit to deliver his morning message, the table of the law would slip from his fingers, He found himself offering worthless advice (that even he only half believed) to a people waiting in deepest personal need. Karl Barth, the liberal, found that his liberalism simply did not fit the real world he saw opening up before him.

Beyond the three liberal flaws mentioned so far, there were two others that Barth did not recognize until later.

4. At its center, liberalism harbored a contradictory Christology. The liberal Christ was a good man who taught his fellow humans a simple gospel of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the ministry of the kingdom; and he set before them a good example to follow. But more and more it became apparent that the real Jesus was not at all what liberals conceived him to be. Surely, at the end of his life he claimed to be Messiah and identified himself in a unique way with God. He provided no example for sinners who stood in dire need of forgiveness from a holy God. Worst of all, he was through and through a supernaturalist who accepted the complete divine authority of holy Scripture, believed in demons and exorcism, held to a God who numbered the very hairs of our head; his intimate piety and blatant supernaturalism were the antithesis of liberal faith. Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus summarized the unsolvable contradiction in the liberal understanding of Christ.

5. Finally, liberalism never penetrated to the masses. It always remained a theology of the university professor of philosophy or the seminary professor of theology. It lacked religious power at the grassroots level, and this was its fatal flaw.

Be that as it may, in Europe by the 1930s the old liberalism had been destroyed. And American liberalism followed suit almost immediately after World War II.

New Liberalisms

Occasionally, we hear rumors of liberalism’s revival in our day. Now and then, liberal ideas float momentarily across the theological scene. But the older liberalism is dead. Its new forms present a radically different structure of Christian faith and usually are unwilling even to claim the name. The old religious liberalism that dominated our churches through the first third of this century will not soon rise again.

But if religious liberalism is understood in terms of a restructured Christianity, we shall probably always have it with us. In this sense, religious liberalism is a by-product of evangelical Christianity. In a free society, there will always be a pluralism of faith. Revisionist Christianities, and there are many of them, represent halfway houses from faith to unfaith, from Christianity to secularism. The old liberalism we have known is dead, but new liberalisms—new compromises with secularism—have risen and will continue to rise so long as man is free.

KENNETH S. KANTZER

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.