I regard progressivism as basically a movement on behalf of Big
Government in all walks of the economy and society…
- Murray Rothbard
I have written here about how Christianity can play its
part in moving toward a society better grounded in liberty. To
summarize: civil law should be aimed against violations of person and property
– basically violations of the non-aggression principle (recognizing that’s application
of this principle gets a bit tough at the edges); it is the role of other
institutions – and, I argue, Christianity in the form of churches – to properly
teach moral instruction.
Here, I will examine what I consider as the wrong means for
Christians to achieve these ends – and a means by which much of the destruction
of liberty that we have seen since the turn of the last century gained its
force. Christians offered Sauron the ring and then thought they
could then control him.
World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,
by Murray Rothbard
This essay can also be found as Chapter 13 in The Progressive Era, written by Murray
Rothbard and edited by Patrick Newman. I will focus on one specific
aspect of the essay, and that focus is best described as follows:
Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial
pietist Protestantism that had conquered "Yankee" areas of northern
Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state,
and finally federal governments to stamp out "sin," to make America
and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on
earth.
By “both groups,” Rothbard is writing of “a fusion or coalition
between various groups of big businessmen, led by the House of Morgan, and
rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals.” These
intellectuals include not just academicians, but “also all manner of
opinion-molders in society — writers, journalists, preachers, scientists,
activists of all sort — what Hayek calls ‘secondhand dealers in ideas.’”
For those unfamiliar with postmillennialism:
In Christian end-times theology (eschatology),
postmillennialism…is an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation
which sees Christ's second coming as occurring after the
"Millennium", a Golden Age in which Christian ethics prosper.
So, my focus will be on the role of these “postmillennial
pietist Protestants” in using state power to advance their social
agenda. This would then hasten the Second Coming, as a thousand
years of purity was required before Jesus would return.
It was this desire to harness state power as the means by which
human beings can be made pure for Christ (I am gagging as I write these words)
that made it possible for others to then use the state to usurp the traditional
role of Christianity in society: that of being the moral teacher, that of
helping the poor and disadvantaged, that of holding civil authority
accountable. And guess what? While these others
appreciated using the state as the means, they most certainly didn’t see
Christian morality as the end.
With that, let’s look at Rothbard:
…I am convinced that the war [World War I] came to the United
States as the "fulfillment," the culmination, the veritable
apotheosis of progressivism in American life.
This is a powerful statement: it is in World War I where
progressivism reached its fulfillment. The ultimate ends, or
purpose, of progressivism was to be found in this war – this war that Jacques
Barzun and others describe as the suicide of the West, this war that was the
fruit of killing God, as Nietzsche’s madman predicted and as Solzhenitsyn would
later record.
Progressivism could only lead here, and it was here that it
achieved its ultimate end. And Rothbard dedicates at least this
chapter (maybe many others; I have not read the entire book), to the role that
postmillennial pietist Protestants played in the United States in bringing on
this end (and, of course, all of the “gifts” that have continued in the century
since).
…most [intellectuals] combined in their thought and agitation
messianic moral or religious fervor with an empirical, allegedly
"value-free," and strictly "scientific" devotion to social
science.
Rothbard has written a good amount on the risk of “value-free”
social science when it comes to the possibility of achieving
liberty. And, of course, no scientist approaches his science in a
value-free manner; value-free is just used as code. Often, but not
always, it is meant to imply no revelation – meaning no Christianity.
One of the few important omissions in Professor [Robert] Higgs's
book [Crisis and Leviathan] is the crucial role of
postmillennial pietist Protestantism in the drive toward statism in the United
States. Dominant in the "Yankee" areas of the North from the 1830s…
This politically influential subset of Christians saw the State
as the instrument through which they would stamp out sin and Christianize the
social order – thus speeding Jesus’s return and bringing on their hoped-for
thousand-year reign.
Citing Professor James H. Timberlake:
According to this view, the Christian's duty was to use the
secular power of the state to transform culture so that the community of the
faithful might be kept pure and the work of saving the unregenerate might be
made easier.
They would preach a Social Gospel. An important
leader in this regard was Rev. Josiah Strong, through his monthly journal The
Gospel of the Kingdom.
…in the July 1914 issue, The Gospel of the Kingdom hailed
the progressive spirit that was at last putting an end to "personal
liberty"
World War One would start that same month. Citing
Strong:
We are no longer frightened by that ancient bogy —
"paternalism in government." We affirm boldly, it is the business of
government to be just that — Paternal. Nothing human can be foreign to
a true government.
Amazingly, they thought that they could harness the power of the
one ring that could rule them all. Tolkien would write his book
about sixty years too late. These pietists believed that this power
could be used not just in the United States, but exported throughout the
world. Starting with World War One.
Via entry in the war, the dreams of the progressive
prohibitionists could be fulfilled. Food production, placed under
Hoover, meant that there was now a vehicle through which grain for alcohol use
could be prohibited. Even beer – the favorite of the out-of-favor
German Catholics and Lutherans – would be banned.
Next came women’s suffrage and the vote, greatly increasing the
ranks of pietist voters. Citing Susan B. Anthony:
There is an enemy of the homes of this nation and that enemy is
drunkenness. …I say, if you believe in chastity, if you believe in honesty and
integrity, then take the necessary steps to put the ballot in the hands of
women.
Hoover would enlist the cooperation of the nation’s women in his
quest for food industry cartelization: all for the good of “’conservation’ and
elimination of ‘waste,’” as Rothbard puts it. In addition to food
control, another important and immediate function of the Woman's Committee was
to attempt to register every woman in the country for possible volunteer or
paid work in support of the war effort. Every woman aged sixteen or over was
asked to sign and submit a registration card with all pertinent information,
including training, experience, and the sort of work desired.
In 1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., like his father a pietist
Baptist, was chairman of a special grand jury to investigate and to try to
stamp out prostitution in New York City. For Rockefeller, the elimination of prostitution
was to become an ardent and lifelong crusade. He believed that sin, such as
prostitution, must be criminated, quarantined, and driven underground through
rigorous suppression.
Then there was the New Republic magazine:
…founded in 1914 as the leading intellectual organ of
progressivism, was a living embodiment of the burgeoning alliance between
big-business interests, in particular the House of Morgan, and the growing
legion of collectivist intellectuals.
All of this power granted to the state would soon be turned from
a postmillennial progressive Christian statism to progressive secular statism.
[John Dewey] he was far more interested in the wonderful changes
that the war would surely bring about in the domestic American polity. In
particular, war offered a golden opportunity to bring about collectivist social
control in the interest of social justice.
We are value-free, after all. This desired marriage
of church and state was certain to end in dominance, if not divorce, as power
doesn’t really like to be told what to do.
"Why should not the war serve," the [New Republic]
magazine asked, "as a pretext to be used to foist innovations upon the
country?" In that way, progressive intellectuals could lead the way in
abolishing "the typical evils of the sprawling half-educated competitive
capitalism."
The ends of this progressivist agenda is war, as Rothbard
offered in the title of this chapter. War as fulfillment, beatitudo –
turning the proper ends of man into horror.
Conclusion
These postmillennial pietist Protestants thought that they could
control the one ring that would rule them all. We saw that even
Frodo was not immune to the power of the ring, succumbing at the last moment,
at the edge of the abyss.
Such a ring should be in the hands of no human being; it will
only bring out the worst in people, and it will be the worst of the worst who
will end up with it. As long as the ring existed, it would return to
Sauron.
Christianity does have its proper role to play in securing liberty
against the over-reach of the state. It is far from playing that
role today, still dancing with the state that has happily taken control of the
ring. Yet every day we are left playing a losing battle – both for
Christian ethics and for liberty.
