By the end of the nineteenth century, William Gladstone was arguably the most popular statesman in America since Lincoln. How did a British prime minister achieve such fame in an era of troubled Anglo-American relations? And what do press reactions to Gladstone’s policies and published writings reveal about American society? Tracing Gladstone’s growing fame in the United States, beginning with his first term as prime minister in 1868 until his death in 1898, this volume focuses on periodicals of the era to illuminate how Americans responded to modern influences in religion and politics. His forays into religious controversy highlight the extent to which faith influenced the American cult of Gladstone. Coverage of Gladstone’s involvement in issues such as church disestablishment, papal infallibility, Christian orthodoxy, atheism and agnosticism, faith and science, and liberal theology reveal deepening religious and cultural rifts in American society. Gladstone’s Influence in America offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the statesman’s reputation in the United States.
This essay is drawn from research into my book Gladstone’s Influence in America. For more about this topic and many others related to the British prime minister and America you can purchase it now at Palgrave Macmillan.
A poster from the United States and Great Britain Industrial Exposition (1899-1900)
When the British Prime Minister William Gladstone died, Americans mourned as if he had been their own beloved president. Upon news of his death in 1898, Vice President Garret Hobart sent a cable to London declaring: ‘Not even in his own land was Mr. Gladstone more highly esteemed and venerated than in the United States.’[1] ‘Oh, Eternal God’, the the U.S. Senate Chaplain prayed, ‘with the whole English-speaking race we stand as mourners beside the bier of the most eminent statesman of our generation.’[2] As heralds of Gladstone’s apotheosis, American newspapers filled their pages with tributes, biographies, memorial sermons, and poems of adoration penned by American admirers. Mourners across the country crowded churches to hear him eulogized as the greatest Christian statesman of the century.
The four-time British prime minister had indeed enjoyed international fame. As early as the mid-1870s, a cult of personality had formed around him throughout the English-speaking world.[13] In Great Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand, countless towns, parks and streets were eventually named in honour of the eminent Victorian. In the United States, no fewer than seven cities were named ‘Gladstone’ despite the fact that he had never set foot upon its shores.
Among the dominant themes in the American press at his passing was his commitment to liberal internationalism. His highly acclaimed 1876 pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East was frequently cited as an example. His deeply held religious devotion, along with his influence as an essayist in defence of orthodox Christianity against both agnosticism and the doctrine of papal infallibility, were also featured prominently, especially by evangelical authors. As one might imagine, the most recurrent tribute centred on his reforms aimed at greater political and religious liberty. It is worth noting, however, that most writers overlooked his steadfast devotion to institutions considered undemocratic by most Americans, namely the Church of England, the monarchy, and the British aristocracy.
Another recurring theme, and the primary focus of this essay, revolved around Gladstone as the emblem of improved Anglo-American relations. The statesman’s 1878 essay titled ‘Kin Beyond Sea’, which appeared in the North American Review, became the most celebrated milestone of his personal rapprochement with the United States following a period of sullied relations during the Civil War. [18] In it Gladstone had offered praise for the American constitutional system, but, even more memorably, he had predicted the ascent of the United States to global economic dominance beyond the British Empire: ‘But there can hardly be a doubt, as between the America and England of the future, that the daughter, at some no very distant time, will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother.’ [19] Gladstone later echoed the same theme in an 1888 article for Youth’s Companion magazine titled ‘The Future of the English-Speaking Races’. The future role of the United States was to be nothing short of ‘colossal’, with the British Isles also sharing a smaller portion of the ‘vast common inheritance’ to be realised in this ‘new chapter of human destiny’.[20] ‘For it is pre-eminently the Anglo-Saxon race’, he declared, ‘for which the future promises in many things to rival or outstrip the past.’[21] Gladstone foresaw America’s rise to a world power and thus actively encouraged measures aimed at rapprochement.
William Gladstone (1809-1898)
At the time of Gladstone’s death, themes of Anglo-American unity and alliance abounded in the American press, hastened largely by British expressions of solidarity for the United States in its war with Spain.[22] The reports often intersected with remembrances of Gladstone as the seminal figure for transatlantic détente. With minor setbacks, Anglo-American relations had improved steadily since the 1860s. Nevertheless, conditions had taken a sharp turn for the worse in 1895 when President Cleveland, to the astonishment of Britons, had invoked the Monroe Doctrine and made statements interpreted as hostile towards the British government. The occasion had been a longstanding boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana.[23] Rumblings of war came from Washington, D.C. but the dispute was resolved by skilled diplomacy.[24]
In the immediate aftermath of the 1895 controversy, calls for a more formalised Anglo-American unity intensified, especially in Great Britain. The framework for such a pact generally revolved around issues related to free trade, international courts of arbitration, and a cooperative military alliance. Writing in the North American Review in 1896, James Bryce, the Liberal MP and future ambassador to the United States, stated that the 1895 crisis had ‘awakened [both nations] to a warmer love of peace and a keener sense of kinship’.[25] He affirmed the hope of many in Britain for a permanent alliance ‘under which citizens of each country should have the rights of citizenship in the other and be aided by the consuls and protected by the fleets of the other all over the world’.[26] There had been earlier calls for an alliance such as the arbitration movement that picked up steam in the late 1880s and early 90s.[27]
The Scottish-born American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, a close acquaintance of Gladstone, was among the leading advocates of the alliance during the period, having published a June 1893 essay in the North American Review titled ‘A Look Ahead’.[28] In it he stopped only just short of calling for the formal re-unification of Great Britain and the United States. Another leading promoter throughout the 1890s was the British journalist W. T. Stead. His notion of ‘Americanisation’ culminated in the book TheAmericanization of the World or the Trend of the Twentieth Century (1902).[29] Stead drew upon Gladstone’s ‘Kin Beyond Sea’ to predict that the United States would dominate the global economy of the twentieth century. However, he went a step further than Gladstone by insisting the American constitutional model would triumph worldwide. In an extraordinary statement, Stead offered the following plan: ‘Instead of counting Britain and the United States as two separate and rival States, let us pool the resources of the Empire and the Republic and regard them with all their fleets, armies, and industrial resources as a political, or, if you like, an Imperial unit.’[30] Hopes for greater transatlantic unity were clearly prevalent among British Liberals of the period.
Lyman Abbott, liberal Congregationalist theologian and editor.
Similar sentiments could be found in the United States. A proposal for alliance came from Outlook editor Lyman Abbott. In an 1898 North American Review article he suggested the United States should end its tradition of foreign isolation, and, in partnership with Great Britain, seek to ‘promote that world civilization which is founded on political liberty, Christian ethics, and Anglo-Saxon energy’.[31] The American educator John C. Ridpath (publisher of an 1898 Gladstone biography) expressed, with some frustration, the ubiquitous calls for alliance: ‘From oversea, in the midday of our national turmoil, comes a wave of sentiment breaking on our shores and pervading the atmosphere. It is a call to our people to enter into alliance with the Mother Country.’ If such calls came primarily from liberals, it is also noteworthy that amidst that set were anti-imperialists such as E. L. Godkin and Charles Eliot Norton. Alarmed by the jingoistic tone that accompanied much of the alliance propaganda, they envisioned a partnership based primarily on global peacekeeping.[32] Nevertheless, alliance fever was spreading on both sides of the Atlantic.
Buttressing the movement was the notion of an Anglosphere—the awareness of a common race, religion and language between nations of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ and the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’.[33] In the racist mentality of the period, Anglo-Saxons were thought to possess unique political values and institutions related to freedom and democracy.[34] The spurious racial designation was used quite casually as witnessed by the British journalist Arnold White, who in 1898 wrote: ‘It is probable that Mr. Gladstone was the finest specimen of an Anglo-Saxon that ever lived. His soul was pure; his intellect unequalled; his bodily powers phenomenal.’[35] When combined with a common aspiration for Christian missions, references to the Anglo-Saxon race provided a justification and a potent stimulus for imperialist adventures such as the American annexation of the Philippines in 1898.[36] (Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’.) In his North American essay, Abbott laid out the rationale for kinship: ‘The two [nations] represent the same political ideal: they are both democratic; they both represent the same ethical ideals; they are Christian; and they both represent the same race leadership; they are Anglo-Saxon.’[37] Both sides saw mutual benefits. Americans were also being encouraged to claim their imperial Anglo-Saxon ‘destiny’ by British Liberal Edward Dicey in a Nineteenth Century article of 1898 titled ‘The New American Imperialism’.[38] Lurking underneath the language of race and kinship was the reality that the United States was becoming an imperial power with which Britain must co-exist.
Several examples of Gladstone being linked with talk of a transatlantic alliance appeared in the press at the time of his death. The New York Times published two accounts of such meetings in London between Americans and Britons. The first was an annual meeting of the British Schools and University Club. It featured several prominent figures including journalist and diplomat Whitelaw Reid and Princeton University President Francis Patton. The principal speakers were the Americans who spoke in favour of stronger bonds of sympathy between Britain and America. ‘The greatest enthusiasm was manifested’, the correspondent wrote, ‘whenever even a reference was made to an Anglo-Saxon alliance.’[39] In his remarks, Episcopal Bishop C. Henry Potter of New York referred to Gladstone as the statesman ‘who loved the country of which I am a son and who did so much to bind it and yours together’.[40]
The second meeting was an 1898 Anglo-American banquet attended by numerous prominent individuals, among them the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle. On the wall was a prophetic representation of a future flag described as ‘Stars and Stripes on the union jack, with the eagle and the lion at the corners, and clasped hands between.’[41] Clearly these were anti-imperialists, as the correspondent observed the striking enthusiasm displayed for ‘defense and progress, rather than for land-grabbing and wars’.[42] The Bishop of Ripon spoke with emphasis on the theme ‘Kin Beyond Sea’: ‘It was the ardent and lifelong wish of Mr. Gladstone that these two great nations, forgetting and forgiving all bygone differences, should dwell forever in harmony in “the temple of peace.”’ [43] The deceased statesman was being invoked among transatlantic enthusiasts.
Similar accounts appeared in other mainstream publications. The Chicago Tribune reported that the ‘British-Americans of Chicago’ had been celebrating the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. In a toast, the association’s Chairman, George Gooch, delivered a remarkable proclamation of Anglo-American imperialism followed by a tribute to Gladstone:
We celebrate this day at the present time, seeing all around us and from unmistakable signs that the old prejudice between the mother and her greatest daughter is being rapidly removed, and the day is not far distant when the American flag will be floating over colonial possessions with no jealousy on the part of Britain’s Queen.[46]
Gooch then suggested that the celebration had been marred by the recent death of Gladstone. ‘Of all the British Prime Ministers,’ he intoned, ‘he was the nearest to the hearts of Americans.’[47]
Another article appeared in the Chicago Tribune titled ‘Kin Beyond Sea’ authored by Levi Wells Hart, rector of the College Grammar School in Brooklyn, New York.[48] Following a lengthy excerpt from Gladstone’s classic essay of the same title, Hart declared it to be valuable for the current time and for the near future. He asserted his firm belief that the United States and Great Britain were practically one ‘in the paramount essentials of race, language, literature, liberties, laws, and religion’; and he expressed his hope that they provided the foundation for ‘the inseparable and fraternal relations between two of the great “living nations” of the world’.[49] Nearly alone in offering critical commentary of Gladstone at his passing was the long-time New York Tribune London correspondent George Washburn Smalley. However, he commended the statesman’s leadership in warming relations between the two nations. ‘That clear vision’, Smalley wrote, ‘of the identity of interests between the two branches of one great race is the best legacy he has left.’[50] From New York to Chicago, Gladstone was hailed for promoting Anglo-American unity.
In the evangelical press there were similar references. Zion’s Herald published an address delivered 13 June 1898 before the Boston Methodist Preachers’ Meeting by Thomas Reuen in which he declared: ‘A great idea has been for long time past before the Christ-inspired men of the Anglo-Saxon world—the idea of a union for the highest ends known to man of English-speaking peoples.’[51] Reuen believed such an alliance should not merely be for war and conquest, but to oppose savagery and inhumanity in the interests of peace and progress. Echoing the Liberal panacea of free trade, he declared it would ‘lift off the cruel and unjust taxations on all industries’.[52] It would require men committed to Christ, Reuen insisted, with Gladstone being the prime example.[53]
The Congregationalist devoted a portion of its ‘Current News’ column to ‘The Anglo-American Fellowship’, where it was stated that the ‘best men of both countries are falling into line as advocates of an understanding, which, while not formal, shall be quite as effective as if it were.’[54] The author also invoked the memory of Gladstone. In another article, the Congregationalist reported on the annual meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. The assembly took on the double cause of expressing sympathy for Gladstone who lay dying, and to declare solidarity with the United States in its war with Spain. The correspondent proclaimed that the feeling of Anglo-American unity had ‘grown in volume and intensity that we feel the impulse is of God rather than of man’.[55] And he believed it was ‘hastening the coming of the day when all English-speaking peoples shall be united together for the furtherance of peace and righteousness’.[56] Evangelicals appeared no less enthusiastic about the link between Gladstone and rapprochement.
In sum, at his death Gladstone was celebrated as the embodiment of the racially-charged notion of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ supremacy and as a symbol of the hopes for a formal Anglo-American treaty of alliance that would unify the English-speaking world. It is difficult not to interpret much of this as propaganda given the political climate of the time. Obviously a deceased Gladstone could not respond to the more radical proposals for Anglo-American alliance that he would surely have rejected. As Colin Matthew has well noted, his over-riding interest in any alliance was for the expansion of free trade.[58] Although he would certainly have balked at acts of overt imperialism, Gladstone became inextricably linked with the move towards closer transatlantic relations and calls for a formal alliance. The British statesman had become an American icon, not only for his promotion of religious and political liberty, but also as an emblem of their hopes for continued Anglo-Saxon supremacy and their dreams of United States economic dominance in world.
[3] Levi Wells Hart, ‘Kin Beyond Sea’, CT, 29 May 1898, p. 27.
[4] ‘William Ewart Gladstone’, NYT, 19 May 1898, p. 8.
[5] ‘Mr. Gladstone’, Outlook, 28 May 1898, p. 208.
[6] For a detailed study of British reactions to Gladstone’s death see John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 169-191.
[13] See pp. 48, 49 in D.A. Hamer, ‘Gladstone: The Making of a Political Myth’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978), pp. 29-50. Hamer suggests that cult Gladstone began to emerge around 1875.
[14] Peter J. Parish in Peter John Jagger, ed, Gladstone (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), p. 96.
[15] ‘Seven Days Later from Europe’, NYT, 2 November 1862, p.1.
[16] See Charles S. Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain,1783-1900 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), pp. 111-135.
[17] Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp. 145-150.
[18] Roland Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), pp. 363-383; Parish in Jagger, ed, Gladstone, pp. 90-93, 102.
[19] WEG, ‘Kin Beyond Sea’, NAR, 127 (1878), pp. 179-213.
[20] WEG, ‘The Future of the English-Speaking Races’, Youth’s Companion, 1 November 1888, p. 557.
[22] See Campbell, Unlikely Allies, pp. 191-194, 237-239.
[23] See James Bryce, ‘British Feelings on the Venezuelan Question’, NAR, 162 (1896), pp. 145-154.
[24] For discussion of the Venezuelan crisis see Gerlach, British Liberalism and the United States, pp. 219-235; see also Campbell, Unlikely Allies, pp. 188-192 and Butler, Critical Americans, pp. 221-223.
[30] W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the world: or, The trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: Horace Markley, 1902)
[31] Lyman Abbott, ‘The Basis for an Anglo-American Understanding’, NAR, 166 (1898), p. 520.
[32] Butler, Critical Americans, pp. 249-61; and Campbell, pp. 237-38.
[33] See Paul A. Kramer,’ Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empire, 1880-1910’, Journal of American History, 88 (2002), pp. 1315-1353; Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); and R. Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), pp. 387-410.
Eduardo Paolozzi’s Newton, after William Blake (1995), outside the British Library
Given the acrimony between creationism and science in our time, one might be excused for assuming that relations between science and religion have ever been thus. That dynamic has certainly been at work since the dawn of the modern scientific age, but in fact the great debates over ‘Genesis and geology’ in the nineteenth century occurred largely between men of the Christian faith, or at the very least men who were required to operate within the parameters of organised religion and a biblical worldview. As Bernard Lightman has observed, prior to Darwin even the most radical Enlightenment thinkers were restrained by the theistic structure established under Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century.[1]
The Newtonian system survived as such into the first half of the nineteenth century, melding the study of natural philosophy (science) quite comfortably with the knowledge of God. Certainly William Paley’s Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802) was the most significant and influential expression of the practice. Yet, as will become clearer in this essay, the marriage between religion and science was torn asunder as the century wore on. How did it happen? And who was responsible for the transformation? The answers might be surprising. In this essay I trace the distinguishing characteristics of nineteenth-century relations between religion and science and examine the rise of methodological naturalism. The focus will be primarily on Great Britain, the period’s most fertile ground for science.
The Union of Religion and Science
From the time of Newton through the early decades of the nineteenth century, organised religion and natural philosophy in Britain were like conjoined twins. Indeed, most natural philosophers—as they were known before William Whewell in 1833 coined the word ‘scientist’—could also be considered theistic naturalists. That is to say, in various ways they conceived natural history in terms of a gradual progression that occurred under the reign of divine immutable laws.[2] Research was dominated by the parson-naturalist and the academic clergyman-scientist. Often he was a member of the Anglican establishment and the Royal Society of London.[3] The British aristocratic system of primogeniture sent many younger sons into the clergy where they found sufficient leisure time for other interests such as natural philosophy. Until the latter half of the century, amateurism was the status quo for natural philosophers and there were few opportunities for professional employment beyond academic posts at Oxford and Cambridge. Moreover, the roles of theologian and naturalist were somewhat interchangeable, so where clergymen took the lead in the study of natural history, biblical exegesis was also an acceptable avocation for a non-clerical naturalist like Isaac Newton. [4]
Memorial to Francis Bacon, in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge
The relationship between biblical exegetes and natural philosophers of the period was guided by something of an unwritten code, which James R. Moore has called the ‘Baconian compromise’. The Newtonian system was based in part on an earlier compromise premised on Francis Bacon’s doctrine of the two books: that of God’s word and God’s works –or scripture and nature. For Bacon, the two were equally the revelations of divine truth. Thus, nature became a reliable guide for interpreting the Bible. Under this arrangement, naturalists were allowed a measure of intellectual freedom provided they validated their biblical orthodoxy by demonstrating evidence of the operation of God’s wisdom and power in nature.[5]
The one non-negotiable of the Baconian compromise was strict adherence to divine teleology or natural theology, the view that natural history was providentially designed and purposive, especially for mankind. (It is noteworthy that the contemporary ‘intelligent design’ movement continues to rely heavily on teleology.) In his 1836 contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises, William Buckland, the prominent Oxford University geologist, reflected the guidelines of the compromise for harmonizing nature and scripture:
I trust it may be shown not only that there is no inconsistency between our interpretation of the phenomena of nature and of the Mosaic narrative, but that the results of geological inquiry throw important light on parts of this history, which are otherwise involved in much obscurity. . . . If in this respect geology should seem to require some little concession from the literal interpreter of Scripture, it may fairly be held to afford ample compensation for this demand, by the large additions it has made to the evidences of natural religion, in a department where revelation was not designed to give us information.[6]
Religion and science could maintain cozy relations under such an arrangement, unless one insisted upon literal interpretations of the Bible. That, however, became a distinct problem given the rapid pace of scientific discovery.
Scientific Naturalism
The roots of scientific naturalism—it may also be seen as a process of ‘de-supernaturalisation’—stretch back to the seventeenth-century mechanistic ideas of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Scientific, or ‘methodological’ naturalism may be distinguished from metaphysical naturalism. The former is an empirical methodology that avoids the use of God talk in its scientific description of the secondary causes of natural history, but is not inherently hostile towards religious belief or teleology. The latter epistemology, which is sometimes called scientism or scientific naturalism, rejects natural theology, is agnostic or atheistic and uses empirical science the sole basis for all knowledge.[7]
Methodological naturalism became a distinct trend in the eighteenth century. As early as the 1720s, diseases other than epidemics and those transmitted sexually were no longer seen exclusively as acts of divine judgment, due in part to the success of inoculations. In 1755 Professor John Winthrop IV of Harvard effectively turned opinion against God’s active role in a recent New England earthquake by pointing to secondary causation; and later in the century Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod led to widespread acceptance of the natural causes of lightning strikes.[8]
The ‘heavenly bodies’ of the night sky were naturalised by the French naturalist Pierre-Simon de Laplace. In his ‘nebular hypothesis’ (1796), Laplace theorised that the planets had formed as a result of a cooling and contracting proto-solar nebula which had shed Saturn-like rings that eventually collapsed to form the planets. The theory was remarkable for its time in that it rested on an entirely naturalistic cosmogony without reference to a creator. And as Ronald Numbers has demonstrated, the reception of Laplace in the United States helped pave the way for acceptance of Darwin.[9] Eighteenth-century developments in naturalism did little to upset the Baconian compromise, but they did make it increasingly possible to discuss natural philosophy without reference to God or the Bible.
Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Painting by Alexander Craig, 1840.
In Great Britain, the relationship between geologists and interpreters of Genesis had grown uneasy from the 1830s onwards due in large part to Charles Lyell’s landmark Principles of Geology (1830-33). Lyell, who was himself an orthodox Christian, revolutionized the field of geology with his theory of uniformitarianism. The seminal figure of the school was the Scottish geologist James Hutton who in 1785 proposed that past geological changes had been brought about by the slow agency of forces still in operation.[10] Lyell, however, had presented a more convincing and systematic explication of uniformity. This was in direct contradiction to the commonly held belief of catastrophism, the orthodox view of the period championed by Lyell’s Oxford mentor William Buckland. Catastrophism maintained that any appearance of a much older earth could be accounted for by the biblical story of Noah’s flood and by other acts of periodic divine intervention throughout the course of natural history. Yet if Lyell was correct the earth was at least millions of years older than Bishop Ussher’s bible-based 6,000-year-old model.
Additionally, archaeologists of the period were unearthing proof in the fossil record for the later appearance of certain species. To account for it, Buckland and his fellow contributors to the Bridgewater Treatises speculated about periodic acts of divine creation. All the same, Buckland himself had later taken a significant step toward naturalism with the innovation that all such divine intrusions were performed according to the laws of nature.
The most significant development in methodological naturalism was without question Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection– a topic that deserves its own essay. It allowed for the first time in history an entirely naturalistic explanation for all stages of organic development. Yet it was not so much that natural selection proved impossible for Christians to reconcile with the design arguments of natural theology, many did and still do, but rather that it emboldened the causes of agnosticism and metaphysical naturalism.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century nearly all scientists, and growing numbers of theologians, were theistic naturalists for whom the scope and definition of science had narrowed so as to expunge miracles, and literal interpretations of the Bible, from the domain of proper scientific inquiry. Yet, perhaps surprisingly so for many today, the transformation had been brought about largely by confessing Christians who embraced the scientific tools of scientific naturalism.
Notes
[1] See Bernard Lightman, ‘Unbelief’ in John Hedley Brook and Ronald Numbers, eds, Science and Religion Around the World (Oxford University Press, 2011)
[2] James C., Livingston, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (Continuum, 2007), p. 36.
[3] See Frank Turner, ‘The Victorian Conflict Between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension’, Isis (69), pp. 356-376.
[4] Turner, ‘Victorian Conflict Between Science and Religion’, p. 360.
[5] James R. Moore, ‘Geologists and Interpreters of Genesis in the Nineteenth Century’ in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds,, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 322-350.
[6] Cited by Mott T. Greene, ‘Genesis and Geology Revisted’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, When Science and Christianity Meet (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 157.
[7] David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, When Science and Christianity Meet (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 266.
[8] David C. Lindberg, ‘Science without God’ in When Science and Christianity Meet, pp. 266-272.
[9] See Ronald L. Numbers, Creation by Natural Law: Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought (University of Washington Press, 1977)
[10] David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought ( Regent College Publishing, 1984), p. 42.
As the year 2000 CE approached, many fundamentalist-evangelicals were confident that the second coming of Christ was near based on Bible prophecy. Thirteen years on from the annus memorabiliasthe world keeps spinning along, and Jesus Christ has neither split the sky nor raptured the faithful. In light of the troubling intrusion of end-times theology into American politics, some might have hoped such enthusiasm would have waned as the new century wore on. Yet a 2013 poll suggests otherwise. Conducted by Barna Group-OmniPoll, the survey revealed that a startling 41% of all U.S. adults believe we are now living in the biblical end times. 77% of evangelicals Christians,54% of all Protestants, and a surprising 45% of practicing Catholics hold to the view according to the poll. As we shall see presently, the idea that the Bible contains a kind of blueprint for predicting the end of the world based on political developments appeared first in the nineteenth century, but in the United States remained largely confined to the ranks of Christian fundamentalists until the latter half of the twentieth century. From roughly that period onward prophetic teaching based on ‘dispensational premillennialism’ spread within the wider evangelical community and eventually became its dominant eschatology.
The penetration of end-times theology into the American mainstream is often traced to Hal Lindsey’s 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth. In it Lindsey cleverly (and quite pretentiously) located the fulfillment of Bible prophecies in the geopolitics of history–and in the events his own time–in order to predict that the end was near. The success of his work spawned a thousand imitators, creating an end-times cottage industry replete with books, films, and weekend seminars. More recently, dispensationalism made its greatest inroad into mainstream culture through the popularity of the Left Behind series. For many Americans it is quite possibly the only interpretation of biblical millennialism they have encountered. Yet, as this study seeks to demonstrate, from the long view of history Christians have been all over the biblical map with respect to interpreting the holy book’s allusions to the end of the world. Moreover, those interpretations have often been influenced more by cultural and political factors than by any principles of biblical hermeneutics. Thus, we should approach this study with our minds open to possibilities other than the one that is currently fashionable. We may also rightly ask if any consensus for the doctrine of last things can be found or if it is even reasonable to seek one?
Introduction to Millennial Terminology
Before embarking on our survey it will be useful to clarify some terminology. Since the first century CE there have been three dominant strains of millennialism within Christian thought: 1) premillennialism, 2) amillennialism, and 3) postmillennialism. The English word ‘millennium’ is derived from the Latin word for ‘one thousand’ and in biblical context refers specifically to the 1,000 years during which a group of believers will reign with Christ on earth as foretold in Revelation 20: 1-7. The word is also employed more broadly to describe any transformational period of peace or progress in human society. Within Christianity this applies to certain adherents of postmillennialism (discussed more fully below) or the belief that Christ will return only after the millennium of Revelation.
In contrast to postmillennialists, premillennialists believe Christ’s literal second coming will precede the millennium, while amillennialists generally regard the millennium as a figurative idea and tend to associate it with the present age of the church. In the Bible the word ‘apocalypse’ is taken from the Greek word for ‘revelation’ or ‘unveiling’ and generally refers to a catastrophic consummation of the ages brought about by God. It is usually characterised by a sense of impending crisis and belief in two distinct ages. ‘Apocalyptic’ describes a genre of literature, both canonical and noncanonical, found in Judaism and early Christianity, and includes the Book of Revelation. In most apocalyptic literature a cataclysm of some sort foreshadows the coming of a golden age or millennium. Taken together, the two events highlight the pessimistic and optimistic strands in Christian expectations of last things.
Premillennial Continuity
If the doctrine of end-times is a difficult one to nail down, it is possible to argue for the credibility of certain positions based on their continuity in history. Premillennialism, for example, has appeared with some frequency in Christian history. It was popular during the patristic era from the first through the fifth centuries. The development of the doctrine during this period is also known as historic premillennialism to distinguish it from dispensational premillennialism, which we will come to presently. Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor (d.130 CE), is thought to be the first post-New Testament writer to address millennialism. By using Old Testament texts like Isaiah 65 in conjunction with Revelation 20 he taught that ‘there will be a certain period of a thousand years after the resurrection from the dead when the kingdom of Christ must be set up in a material order on this earth’.[1] From the noncanonical Epistle of Barnabas (early second century) came the ‘year-day tradition’, a conflation of the six-day creation in Genesis and 2 Peter 3:8, ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’. Thus in six thousand years all of history would be completed, followed by the millennium. Other patristic-era leaders such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Commodianus and Lactantius advocated a similar form of premillennialism. Patristic premillennialism reached its apex under Irenaeus (d. 200), Bishop of Lyons. His Against Heresies described a three-and-a-half year rule of Antichrist interrupted by the second coming followed by the millennium. Premillennialism thus maintained a fairly consistent hold on western theology during the patristic era until being displaced by Augustinian amillennialism in the fifth century.
Premillennialism resurfaced during the seventeenth century when the German Calvinist scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted (d.1638) defended the doctrine in The Beloved City (1627). Joseph Mede (d. 1638) popularised Alsted’s ideas in England and placed a future millennium squarely within his own prophetic scheme. Mede inspired Isaac Newton and Cotton Mather along with radical groups of the English Revolution like the Fifth Monarchy Men. Premillennialism was challenged by postmillennialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but reemerged in Great Britain as a vibrant movement in the 1820s and grew steadily in popularity. For example, by 1855 more than half of all evangelical clergy in Britain were thought to be premillennialists and by 1901 it was assumed that nearly all adhered to the belief.[2] The British renewal in prophecy was initially sparked by anxiety over the French Revolution, but was also symptomatic of the influence of romanticism on evangelicalism. Instrumental in the early spread of premillennialism were Edward Irving, Henry Drummond and his Albury prophetic conferences (1826-1830) and the teaching of James Hatley Frere.
Millennialists of this period unified around interest in prophetic scriptures, the salvation of the Jews and the physical return of Christ prior to the millennium. The dominant figure to emerge out of the period was John Nelson Darby, whose ‘futurist’ or dispensational premillennialism made headway in Britain, but became the dominant position among American evangelicals, primarily through the influence of C.I. Schofield’s 1909 Schofield Reference Bible. Since the time of Darby, dispensationalists have rallied around a basic set of beliefs: The second coming prior to a literal millennium; a continued prophetic role for the Jews and, since the 1940s, the modern state of Israel; a literal antichrist, pre-tribulation rapture and seven-year tribulation period; the Battle of Armageddon, final judgment and a new heaven and earth. Also instrumental in the early rise of dispensationalism in America were D. L. Moody, A. T. Pierson, William Blackstone and James Brookes, leader of the Niagara Bible Conferences. Dispensationalism was far more dominant in America than in Great Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century. The most influential advocates of that period were Billy Graham and prophecy authors Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye, whose hugely popular Left Behind series advocates the essentials of dispensationalism and has further cemented its place as the doctrine of choice for many contemporary evangelicals. Other notable modern exponents of dispensationalism include Charles Ryrie, Lewis Sperry Chafer, John F. Walvoord, Arno C. Gaebelein, J. Dwight Pentecost and Norman L. Geisler. Consistent adherence to dispensational premillennialism among evangelicals led to its dominance by the end of the twentieth century.
Along with dispensationalism, ‘historic’ premillennialism has also been popular among evangelicals since the nineteenth century and has maintained a fairly consistent visibility. While differing from dispensationalism on the rapture of the church, the tribulation, and the prophetic role of Israel, modern-day historicists fall within the premillennial tradition of a literal millennium thought to commence with the second coming of Christ. Notable modern exponents of the historic position have included W. J. Eerdman, J. Barton Payne, R. A. Torrey, Millard Erickson, Clarence Bass and George Eldon Ladd. Thus, premillennialism has been a popular position for Anglo-American evangelicals since the early nineteenth century, although there has not been uniformity among scholars.
Amillennial Continuity
Amillennialism presents another example of continuity in Christian millennial expectations. Adherents to this position have argued for a figurative interpretation of Revelation 20. This approach first appeared with Origen (d. 254), leader of the Alexandrian School, which was dominated by the Neo-Platonist tradition and was thus inherently anti-materialistic. Origen therefore rejected the notion of a future, earthly millennium. Revelation 20 was instead describing a spiritual reality in the soul, while the antichrist symbolised evil in the present world. An allegorical approach was also taught by the North African Donatist thinker Tyconius (d. 390). In his Book of Rules, the earliest manual for biblical hermeneutics, he interpreted Revelation as a picture of church history rather than future prophecy; the millennium represented the period between Christ’s first and second advents.
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (d. 431) adopted the view of Tyconius and incorporated his eschatology into Book 20 of his masterpiece TheCity of God (c. 426). In it he interpreted the first resurrection of Revelation 20 to mean a personal spiritual experience of passing from death to life. The thousand-year period is figurative of the period ‘from the first coming of Christ to the end of the world, when he shall come the second time’.[3] Two other events are conspicuous in the establishment of amillennialism. First was the Roman emperor Constantine’s official endorsement of Christianity in the fourth century, which brought respectability to the church and quelled the apocalyptic fervour of the previous generation. Amillennialism was more suited to the church’s new-found status of acceptance within the empire. Secondly, when the Council of Ephesus (431) condemned millennialism as a superstition, amillennialism became the official position of the church for the next twelve centuries. These developments, along with the long shadow cast by Augustinian theology (and reinforced by Thomas Aquinas), made amillennialism the consistently held position of Roman Catholicism throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.
Despite their break with Rome, most Reformation leaders continued the amillennial tradition. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin each rejected millennialism and Protestant orthodoxy continued the aversion. All the confessional statements of the major Reformed traditions rejected an intervening millennial period before the second coming, including the Augsburg Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles. In modern times notable exponents of amillennialism have included G. C. Berkouwer, Stanley Grenz, Anthony Hoekema, Louis Berkoff, Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth. Thus a figurative interpretation of Revelation 20 has been consistently visible in Christianity since the Patristic era and continues to the present in the major Protestant traditions.
Postmillennial Continuity
Christian history offers another example of continuity in millennial expectation known as postmillennialism. For postmillennialists, the second coming of Christ follows a literal millennium, with expectations of a realised kingdom of God within the present age. A cataclysmic end to history is therefore postponed until after the millennium, which may or may not be a literal thousand-year period. This view enjoyed widespread acceptance within Anglo-American Protestantism from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It marks the adaptation of end-time beliefs to the wider cultural influence of the Enlightenment, especially its themes of progress and perfectibility. Traces of postmillennialism appeared earlier, however, with the English Puritan Thomas Brightman (d. 1607), who introduced the idea of a ‘latter-day glory’ which, he believed, was prophesied in Revelation chapters 20 to 22. Brightman heralded a progressive growth of the ‘true gospel’, which he believed had commenced with the fourteenth-century reformer John Wycliffe and would consummate in the latter glory.
The conversion of the Jews (a staple of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century millennialism) would occur followed by the latter-day glory and finally the second coming. Postmillennialism’s official founding, however, is often credited to the English divine Daniel Whitby (d. 1725). In his 1703 work, Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament, he posited the world’s conversion to Christ, the restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, and the defeat of the antichrist figure of the pope followed by a thousand-year golden age of righteousness and peace, all prior to the second coming. This view became popular among eighteenth-century New England Puritans, largely through the influence of Jonathan Edwards. His postmillennialism paralleled Whitby’s, but in the context of the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s took on uniquely American dimensions.
For Edwards, the Great Awakening revival became evidence that the latter-day glory could be attained on earth through the proclamation of the gospel. Drawing on Cotton Mather’s American exceptionalism, Edwards speculated in 1742 that the millennium would likely begin in America, albeit well into the future. The sentiment was widely shared. In 1743 almost seventy New England ministers signed The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors which supported the revivals, declaring that the effusions of the Spirit confirmed the expectations ‘of such as are waiting for the Kingdom of God, and the coming on of the . . . latter Days’.[4] Protestants thus came to view the nearness of the millennium as motivation for revivals, missions and voluntary societies. William Cogswell of the American Education Society echoed this sentiment in 1833:
Soon the whole earth will chant the praises of the Redeemer, and the song of salvation will echoe from shore to shore. But in order to [do] this, there must be more fervent prayer, more abundant labors, more enlarged charities. In this conquest of the world to Christ, the church must become a well-disciplined army.[5]
This optimistic outlook became the hallmark of postmillennialism and mirrored Enlightenment ideas of secular progress. Postmillennialism reached its heyday in the middle to late nineteenth century. Notable Americans exponents of that period included Lyman Beecher, A. H. Strong, Charles Hodge, W. G. T. Shedd, Jonathan Blanchard, Samuel Harris, Charles Finney, Washington Gladden and Josiah Strong. Notable British advocates included Patrick Fairbairn, Thomas Chalmers, Andrew Fuller, Joseph Sturge and Robert Rainy. Postmillennialism was thus a widely held view in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
By the early twentieth century, postmillennialism had become a minority view but resurfaced and maintained a presence throughout the latter half of the century and into the twenty-first century. One popular strand was restorationism, visible in America, but most prominent in Britain through the House Church movement of the 1970s. A second strand was found in reconstructionism or dominionism, a convenant-based Reformed theology that hearkened back to the Puritan age. More popular in the U.S., it has come to be associated with the Christian Right movement, which began in the 1970s under the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Its seminal thinkers include Rousas Rushdoony and Gary North. Reconstructionism mandates strict application of moral biblical law including the death penalty for offences cited under Mosaic Law. This model also drew upon the old Puritan ideal of the holy commonwealth. In the twenty-first century it has seen a resurgence through the New Covenant Movement. A third strand of modern postmillennialism was found in the ‘Kingdom Theology’ movement and was epitomised by the late John Wimber in the U.S. His evangelical approach harkened back to Jonathan Edwards, but placed greater emphasis on healing miracles and other ‘signs and wonders’. Postmillennialism has retained a presence within evangelicalism.
Popular Millennial Continuity
A final area to explore for continuity in millennial expectations found in a fourth version that may be described as ‘popular millennialism’. Since the theological categories of premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism were popularised in the nineteenth century, it can be difficult to impose these terms rigidly on all expressions of millennialism at all times. Another approach, however, enlists the aid of sociology and addresses the topic of Christian millennialism as only one part of a much broader social phenomenon. From this perspective it is possible to discern a form of millennialism that had populist appeal, especially among persecuted sects and other groups on the fringes of church and society Popular millennialism was often countercultural and heavily influenced by apocalyptic writings. This was certainly true in biblical writings such as the books of Ezekiel and Daniel, which many scholars date from periods when the Jews faced extinction. The book of Revelation also sprang from a period of persecution of Christians by the Romans.
The following is a sample, by no means comprehensive, of popular, revolutionary and fringe millennialists: the immediate, first-century Christian readers of John’s Apocalypse; the Montanists of the second century; Joachimists like the Spiritual Franciscans in the Middle Ages; Hussites and Taborites in the pre-Reformation era; Anabaptists like Melchoir Hoffman and Thomas Muntzer in the Reformation period; Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Muggletonians and Fifth-Monarchy Men during the English Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century; eighteenth-century communal groups like French Saint-Simonians; nineteenth-century American utopian sects like the Oneida commune, Shakers, Mormons and the new Adventist denominations, Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses; nineteenth-century British sects like the French Prophets and followers of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott; twentieth-century apocalyptic cult leaders Jim Jones and David Koresh along with the Christian Identity movement.
Norman Cohn’s classic ThePursuit of the Millennium (1957) established that millennialism remained constant throughout the Middle Ages in the obscure underworld of popular religion. Sects of this type, Cohn asserted, came in a wide variety ranging from violent aggressiveness to mild pacifism and from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earthbound materialism. They further varied in social composition and function. For Cohn, the groups within this more liberal definition of the term coalesce around a type of ‘salvationism’ characterised by five essential qualities: collective, terrestrial as opposed to other-worldly, imminent, totally transformative to life on earth and miraculous. Cohn employs these categories but focuses his study mainly on revolutionary movements among the poor during the Middle Ages which, he asserts, occurred in Europe with increasing frequency from the eleventh century onwards. According to Cohn, these sects were generally led by a messiah figure and drew inspiration from an amalgam of prophetic passages from Christian Sybilline eschatology (like the popular fourth-century Tiburtina), the book of Revelation and, beginning in the thirteenth century, pseudo-Joachimite eschatology based on the writings of Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202).
Joachim’s ‘third age of the Spirit’ was reinterpreted by various sects beginning with the Spiritual Franciscans who viewed their order in prophetic context. The pseudo-Joachimite Commentary on Jeremiah (c.1240s) had profound influence in the Holy Roman Empire where a belief arose that Frederick II was fulfilling prophecy as the Emperor of the Last Days and would liberate the Holy Land to prepare the way for the second coming and the millennium. These sects flourished under urban conditions of increased population, weakened social bonds and widening gaps between rich and poor. Cohn finds examples throughout the Crusades (Peter the Hermit and the ‘People’s Crusade’ of the First Crusade) and the Flagellant movement inspired by the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century. Popular millennialism retained a presence throughout the Middle Ages, albeit an inconsistent one.
J. F. C. Harrisontook a similar sociological approach in The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780 – 1850. In a somewhat confusing use of terminology, his study focuses on popular (or folk) ‘millenarianism’ not, he stressed, on sophisticated (or scholarly) ‘millennialism’. Harrison’s distinctive approach lies in examining worldviews rather than doctrine alone. The ‘black and white’ simplistic worldview of Harrison’s popular millenarians is an ideology of social change that became popular during the French Revolution in the 1790s. He likens this to the millennial movements of the English Revolution such as the Muggletonians. Popular British millenarians highlighted by Harrison includes prophetic figures like Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, John Wroe, Zion Ward and Anglo-American utopian groups like the Shakers and Mormons. Harrison places these within the populist, anti-intellectual stream of millennialism, demonstrating evidence for a continuous presence of popular millennialism.
Premillennial Inconsistencies
If examples of continuity in millennial expectations are visible in Christian history, they must be balanced against numerous inconsistencies. Despite the dominant place of premillennialism among modern-day evangelicals, there has not been consistent agreement about its proper interpretation. In the 1950s challenges to dispensationalism began to emerge from within evangelicalism by scholars who believed it was contrary to correct biblical teaching and the historic premillennial position of the church. The central point of contention revolved around the radical dichotomy dispensationalism had created between Israel and the church regarding prophecy. Leaders of this historic school, such as Clarence Bass, insisted that the church is the spiritual Israel and all covenant promises made to Abraham are fulfilled in it. Consequently, God does not have a separate prophetic track for Israel, and the millennium is therefore a golden age intended for the church, not primarily Israel as dispensationalists hold.
The role of the Jews also led to conflicting views of the rapture and great tribulation. For dispensationalists the rapture must be pretribulational since the seven-year period is fulfilment of God’s prophetic time clock for the Jews. Historic premillennialists reject the idea of unfulfilled Jewish prophecy and adhere to a posttribulation rapture and the church’s full participation in the tribulation. Additionally, dispensationalists themselves splintered with the arrival of ‘progressive dispensationalism’ in the 1980s which challenged classical dispensationalism. Progressives modified the classical view of dispensations, reducing them from seven to four and eliminated the sharp distinction between Israel and the church. They further modified the classic view by affirming that some promises previously relegated to the millennium are currently fulfilled in the church age. The influence of progressives placed dispensationalism in a much more fluid state. These developments demonstrate the conflicting views of modern premillennialism.
Amillennial Inconsistencies
Despite the endorsement of amillennialism in both Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy, the doctrine has not always followed a consistent pattern. Christian history has witnessed two primary models of amillennialism: the ‘ecclesial’ and the ‘heavenly’. While all amillennialists agree that Revelation 20 is a symbol of the current age and not a prophecy about a literal future age, they do not agree on the exact nature of the symbolism. The older ecclesial view of Augustine understands it in terms of the spiritual reign of the victorious believer on earth. A reference to time is included since this takes place during the church age and ends with Christ’s second coming. The heavenly model is a more recent view offered by nineteenth-century German scholar Theodor Kliefoth. This more widely held view interprets the millennium in terms of the spiritual reign of the saints already in heaven.
Yet another form of amillennialism is found with the Dutch theologian G. C. Berkouwer who employs the phrase ‘apocalyptic comfort’ to explain the intention of the book of Revelation. For Berkouwer the millennium is a metaphor of the triumph experienced by believers in the midst of tribulation. With their diverse range of opinions amillennialists have clearly not followed a consistent millennial view.
Postmillennial Inconsistencies
Although postmillennialism maintained adherents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inconsistencies existed in the manner in which they defined it. In eighteenth-century America, for example, the postmillennialism that sprang from awakened piety in the 1740s had morphed, for many, into a form of civil millennialism by the 1750s. When the revival fires of the Great Awakening went out postmillennial expectations cooled, but, as Nathan Hatch has skillfully demonstrated, the successes of the French and Indian War reignited expectations that the millennium was about to dawn. The conflict easily took on apocalyptic dimensions since the French represented the antichrist of Catholic popery in the minds of American clergymen.
The Virginian Samuel Davies was representative of this view and framed the battle as ‘the commencement of this grand and decisive conflict between the Lamb and the beast’ the victorious outcome of which would usher in ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.[6] The New England clergyman Jonathan Mayhew believed a victory would trigger a larger civil and religious revolution worldwide, noting ‘all kingdoms thereof are to become the kingdoms of our Lord’.[7] When conflict with the British arose in the mid-1760s, Americans quickly (and remarkably considering their previous idealization of British liberty) transferred antichrist’s seat of power to the British Crown and Parliament. Hatch sees these developments as a grafting of Whig political values into New England’s traditional collective identity, which created a religious patriotism merged with millennial expectations. Of course postmillennialists had not abandoned the need for conversion, but the addition of civil millennialism was a long way from the apolitical millennialism of Jonathan Edwards and reveals an inconsistency in American colonial postmillennialism.
Another inconsistency is visible when comparing the postmillennialism of the eighteenth century to that of the later nineteenth. It is an oversimplification to attribute the optimism of postmillennialism solely to the influence of Enlightenment notions of progress. However true this became by the nineteenth century, it was not the primary philosophy behind the postmillennialism of New Lights in the Great Awakening generation. Here it is useful to examine the New Light Puritan ‘afflictive model of progress’ as presented by James West Davidson. The model employs an Old Testament belief that God redeems history in the same way he redeems individuals: that is, great humiliation must precede conversion. Within this framework there exist awakenings of individual salvation, greater awakenings like revivals, and the greatest of awakenings, the millennium. The ‘morphology of conversion’, as Davidson calls it, provides the model of progress followed by postmillennialists of the Great Awakening generation. Showers of grace, they believed, only come after a time of spiritual declension and deadness, just as the cross preceded the resurrection. Chastisement of the faithful is necessary therefore for history’s consummation, and tension always exists between hope and despair.
The afflictive model remained central to Jonathan Edwards’ understanding and explains why he and other New Lights expected evil and rebellion against God to continue even as the preaching of the gospel was destined to triumph throughout the world, leading ultimately to the millennium of peace. In America and Great Britain, the idea that the millennium would come through conversion, aided by scores of voluntary associations and agencies, existed as a consensus until approximately the mid-nineteenth century. This consensus began to unravel, however, in the wake of Enlightenment notions of progress and the newer anti-supernatural theory of ‘process’ or natural continuity. By the 1870s, many societies and agencies were becoming less subservient to evangelicalism and increasingly prototypical of secular social work. A similar process was at work in denominational colleges in the U.S., a process which ultimately led to postmillennialism’s embrace of the ‘cult of efficiency’, social engineering and its eventual demise. By 1914 a writer in the Methodist Review remarked: ‘Ah! the city which John saw! . . . It will take considerable engineering as well as preaching to get the world there. Hail, Engineer, co-agent of the millennium!’[8] The kingdom of God was now to be advanced by the meeting of eschatological hope with the celebration of modern technology and civil institutions. Although similar, this too was some distance from the postmillennialism of Jonathan Edwards. Thus even during its span of dominance, postmillennialist did not steadfastly adhere to a consistent eschatology.
Popular Millennial Inconsistencies
The social-scientific dimensions of Christian millennialism as outlined above are also open to charges of inconsistency. Bernard McGinn has demonstrated that apocalyptic speculation penetrated all levels of medieval society. Monastic scholars and theologians, for example, contributed to or frequently referenced the Sibylline oracles. In her landmark study of prophecy in the later Middle Ages, Marjorie Reeves notes that the dream of millennial glory under a Last World Emperor ‘was cherished not only by the crazy and fanatical, but by sober historians and politicians’.[9] In addition, the twelfth-century German abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, found wide mainstream acceptance as a writer and illustrator of apocalyptic visions. Moreover, guilds of urban elites supported miracle plays and other religious dramas that frequently featured themes of antichrist, the last judgment and other apocalyptic images. Additionally, the Crusades, hardly on the fringe of society, were fuelled by intense millennial expectation.
McGinn believes millennialism (or the often synonymous ‘millenarianism’) is inadequate as a blanket term when applied to medieval materials. He takes issue with Cohn’s use of the word when applied to medieval revolutionary groups, preferring to call them ‘apocalyptic’. Many medieval beliefs about end times do not fit Cohn’s salvationism model, according to McGinn. Moreover, the general tendency toward sociological stereotypes of millennial movements as subterranean and amorphous popular revolts fails to fit a number of patristic and medieval apocalyptic movements. Beliefs about the coming age played just as vital a role for social continuity as they did for social change. He also takes issue with sociological preoccupation with crisis situations as a catalyst for millennialism. McGinn notes, for example, that the immense crisis of the bubonic plague in the 1340s had only a minor effect on the history of apocalypticism, while, by way of contrast, the conversion of the Roman Empire, a positive event, led to a new stage in the apocalyptic traditions, that of the ‘Last World Emperor’ of the Sibyllines. As Cohn himself recounts, Christian Sibyllines of the period viewed Constantine as a messianic king, and following his death Sibyllines continued to make emperors and kings the subjects of prophecy.
While in sympathy with the understanding of apocalyptic as the literature of consolation, McGinn asserts that it is not merely stimulated by a crisis situation, but may be the result of any challenge to the established understanding of history that ‘creates the situation in which apocalyptic forms and symbols, either inherited or newly minted, may be invoked’.[10] This is because the anthropological roots of apocalypticism are rooted in the human desire for a sense of belonging in time (a grasp of history) combined with a longing to attach a special significance to the present. Thus, in McGinn’s phrase, it is the ‘meeting of this age and eternity’.[11] For his part, J. F. C. Harrison’s sociological analysis may be faulted for including the followers of Richard Brothers in the folk or populist stream of millennialism. Despite his populist appeal, Brothers also had among his ardent supporters the MP Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and he attracted several Anglican clergy and prominent businessmen. These do not fit well into Harrison’s category of unsophisticated ‘millenarians’. Moreover, the British millennialists who followed Edward Irving were also drawn from the well-to-do and the better educated. Popular millennialism, therefore, has not always followed a consistent path.
Conclusion
It is possible to conclude from this brief outline that locating consistent millennial expectations in Christian history is a daunting enterprise wherein consistency is elusive at best. Premillennialism had a consistent hold on the Patristic era, but also witnessed popular millennialism such as Montanism, the allegorical model of Origen and the sea change to amillennialism under Augustine. Its resurgence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries maintained a consistent following, but one that was generally superseded by the more widely held postmillennial position. Its return to dominance among evangelicals since the twentieth century has revealed a consistent preference for dispensationalism. This, however, has been the case more so in America than in Britain. Amillennialism held nearly uniform domination of Catholic and Protestant Orthodoxy from Augustine to Alsted, yet the Middle Ages and the Reformation era gave rise to numerous millennial groups that ranged from militant to pacifist, from spiritualistic to materialistic, from reactionary to world-affirming and from populist to elitist. Postmillennialism held sway for nearly two centuries but began with visions of a fully evangelised world and ended in a more secularised version of eschatological hope. Finally, although sociological models provide a helpful tool for analysing popular millennialism, they do little to explain why such manifestations have sometimes maintained social continuity as well as respectability and are not always stimulated by crises.
In sum, history provides no consensus with respect to who is right about millennial expectations. Christian history from the first century to the present has revealed patterns of consistency, but they have often been periodic, sporadic and highly diverse in nature. Given the subjective nature of the doctrine, if one chooses to embrace any form of millennialism it should certainly be grounded in an understanding of its complexities. Interpreting apocalyptic literature as a poetic and figurative expression of the human condition has long been a reasonable alternative for many scholars. Perhaps most importantly, we have seen that there are certainly other plausible options available than those offered by dispensational premillennialism.
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_____, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
Tyrrell, Alexander, ‘Making the Millennium: The Mid-Nineteenth Century Peace Movement’, The Historical Journal, 20:1 (1978)
Weber, Timothy P., ‘The Dispensationalist Era’, Christian History, 18:1 (1999)
_____, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875 – 1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
Williams, Ann, ed., Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (Burnt Hill, Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman, 1980)
Wise, Robert L., Munster’s Monster, Christian History, 18:1 (1999)
[1] As cited by Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.39, quoted in The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evangelical Options (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), p. 39.
[2] David Bebbington, ‘The Advent Hope in British Evangelicalism’, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, 9, (1988), p. 105.
[3] Augustine, The City of God, trans., Marcus Dodds, (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 20.7.
[4] Thomas Prince, Jr., ed., The Christian History Boston, 1743 – 1745), pp. 11, 95. Quoted in Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 29.
[5] William Cogswell, The Harbinger of the Millennium (Boston: Peirce and Parker, 1833), 299 – 300. Quoted in World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880 – 1925 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana university Press, 1999), p. 6.
[6] Samuel Davies, ‘The Crisis: or, the Uncertain Doom of Kingdoms at Particular Times’, in his Sermons on Important Subjects (Philadelphia, 1818), 5: 239-266. Quoted in Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, p. 41.
[7] Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses Delivered October 25th, 1759 . . . (Boston, 1759), p. 61. Quoted in Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, p. 42.
[8] R. O. Everhart, ‘Engineering and the Millennium’, Methodist Review 96 (1914), p. 44. Quoted in ‘The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865 – 1925’, Church History, 53:1 (1984), pp. 75, 76.
[9]Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 302
[10] Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 31.
Since the 1970s, it has been fashionable for postmodernists to locate the failings of modernity within the eighteenth-century intellectual movement known as the ‘Enlightenment’. The postmodern narrative contends that outmoded Enlightenment ideas such as progress, liberalism and empiricism were simply worldviews that have now been eclipsed. Recognizing the benefits of such an approach for the cause of faith against reason, some Christian apologist have also taken up the postmodern habit of demonising the period. Unfortunately, such denunciations often smack of caricature, with the Enlightenment cast as the monolithic straw man. Now my purpose here is not to act as defence attorney for the Enlightenment. In all landmark developments of human evolution ‘advances’ often produce unintended consequences. When we consider developments in atomic science, for example, the notion of progress becomes mercurial. Postmodernism has rightly cautioned historians about the inherent dangers of employing meta-narratives such as progress and the march of liberty to describe the past. But rather than argue for the merits or deficiencies of the Enlightenment, the present essay will explore its complexities, probing the extent to which we can speak of the Enlightenment as, in any sense, a singular historical event.
‘There were many philosophes in the eighteenth century, but there was only one Enlightenment’.[1]So argued Peter Gay in the opening line of his landmark 1960s study entitled The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. It remains the starting point for any scholarly debate about the scope and uniformity of the Enlightenment. Gay’s historiography was based on the metaphor of a ‘little flock’: an informal philosophic family who shared the same affinity for the paganism of the classical world and the same basic loyalties.[2] Gay’s philosophe was an international type who prided himself (nearly all were male) on his cosmopolitanism and who turned a critical eye on nearly all received traditions in Europe. Though international in type, this elite corps of cultural critics, religious sceptics, and political reformers had Paris as their epicentre. Gay’s Enlightenment was thus a mostly French enterprise (although he was careful to acknowledge the ‘Anglomania’ of the philosophes and the debt they felt toward Bacon, Newton, and Locke).
In his 1932 classic, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl Becker made much the same point, conceding the international reach of the Enlightenment but insisting that France was ‘the mother country and Paris the capital’.[3]Under this model, the drama is acted out on a French stage with an epic plot: the philosophes are cast in the role of emancipators, liberating humanity from the chains of superstition and tyranny forged by unenlightened monarchs and churchmen. Emblematic of this revolutionary-era disdain for kings and priests was Voltaire’s rallying cry, ‘destroy the infamous!’ Paired with Diderot’s promise to ‘strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest’ a radical and uniform interpretation of the Enlightenment emerges. However, this tidy historiography neglects the finer distinctions of the movement which found their expression in Great Britain, Germany and the United States. In fact the British Enlightenment was more far reaching, as will be demonstrated below.
One lasting effect of Gay’s monolithic interpretation is that historical survey textbooks continue to give primacy to the French philosophes in their treatment of the Enlightenment. This caricature largely prevails among postmodernists and Christian apologists who seek to discredit the Enlightenment project as a whole. Yet this broad sweeping generalization is based in large part on sceptics like David Hume and the philosophes, those intellectual elites who gathered in the salons of Paris to scoff at tradition and religion. But the monolithic view derived from Gay was challenged as far back as the 1970s by Henry F. May who located four distinct thematic phases of the Enlightenment. Within May’s framework the sceptical Enlightenment is but one dimension of a much larger enterprise. More recent historiography from scholars like Roy Porter and Gertrude Himmelfarb has focused on diversity by emphasising national and religious contexts, and it is now fashionable to speak of ‘Enlightenments’. The question, therefore, must be asked: is it possible any longer to find uniformity beyond describing the period’s leaders as a group of eighteenth-century intellectuals who wrote passionately about reason, liberty, equality and religion? It would seem not. Nevertheless, it may prove useful to dig down into the weeds and explore the possibilities for uniformity, and in so doing perhaps gain a deeper appreciation for ‘who’ gave expression to the Enlightenment and ‘where’ it took place.
The French Enlightenment has received preferential treatment for several compelling reasons. First, French was the intellectual lingua franca of the period, having dispatched Latin to its place in history. Enlightenment writers across Europe employed the language frequently. Second, the philosophes effectively exploited the clandestine publishing world of the period and were brilliant self-promoters and propagandists; their writing was passionate and colourful. Third, the success of the French Encyclopedie, which expanded to thirty-five volumes by 1780 also enhanced the fame, but less often the fortunes, of the philosophes. Fourth, in the past, historians neglected the more moderate Enlightenment, which included some Frenchmen like Montesquieu, but was largely a British enterprise. So deeply embedded was this bias that even the renowned American historian Henry Steel Commager once rated England ‘a bit outside the Enlightenment’.[4] In his 1951 classic, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,Ernst Cassirer could find ‘no thinker of real depth and of a truly original stamp’ among the English Deists.[5] His Enlightenment pantheon, moreover, included no mention of Priestley, Price, Paine, and Adam Smith. Fifth, political realities were far more oppressive in France; therefore, the tone of the philosophes was more strident and their writings hold greater appeal for those who identify with the desire to end injustice. The weakness of the monolithic French model, however, lies not in what it includes, but in what it leaves out. Uniformity is possible with this approach but it is clearly deficient in its geographical and historical scope.
A more compelling argument for uniformity lies in a thematic approach. From among the many themes of the period ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ rise as twin peaks on the intellectual landscape. The two are paired regularly in enlightened thought. Reason provided the tool for acquiring knowledge of the natural world. Nature provided the metaphor of the age. Its orderly, discoverable laws translated well into human society, or so it was assumed. Reason’s primacy in the Enlightenment is apparent, and for the French in particular it was the supreme attribute. Hence the Encyclopedie article ‘Philosophe’ declared ‘Reason is to the philosophe what Grace is to the Christian’.[6] Nature was the Enlightenment key that unlocked all doors. ‘Nature’, Carl Becker urged, ‘was the philosophes’ guest of honor’.[7] Most often imagined as the ‘Age of Reason’, the Enlightenment might just as well be the called the ‘Age of Nature’.
Nature was the pivotal hermeneutic for the eighteenth-century thinker. With it, he interpreted nearly all aspects of his place in the universe. Moreover, Enlightenment-era reason was itself derived largely from the scientific study of nature, especially after Newton and Locke arrived on the scene. Alexander Pope gave poetic voice to nature’s role: ‘Take Nature’s path, and mad Opinions leave; All States can reach it, and all Heads conceive’.[8] Francis Bacon, the great forerunner to the Enlightenment, had provided a more scientific description in his classic Novum Organum (1620): ‘That reason which is elicited from facts by a just and methodical process, I call Interpretation of Nature’.[9] This ‘natural philosophy’ (or science as it would come to be known) was a new and controlling paradigm. Enlightened Europeans sought to bring all aspects of their society—their education, politics, economics, ethics, the arts, and even their religion—into conformity with nature. Nature was thus its own Bible: a book that if properly read could reveal truth about mankind and the created order.
The implication for more radical thinkers was that creation could now be understood apart from the Christian church or biblical revelation. The effects were nothing short of revolutionary. For not only could humanity’s understanding of creation be understood afresh, the march of human history itself could be reinterpreted apart from the confines of the church. For a sceptical historian like Edward Gibbon, the narrative of early Christian history was now open to critical reexamination. History, which had traditionally sought to discern the works of divine providence and evil in human history, was for the sceptical empiricist David Hume, a tool whose ‘chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature’.[10]
Reasoning from that which is observable in nature was institutionalised in Enlightenment thought by John Locke. His monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) applied empirical methodology to the study of human psychology and produced the period’s prevailing epistemology. According to Locke, the human mind was like a blank sheet of paper at birth and acquired its knowledge through the experiences of the five senses in combination with mental reflection. In effect, all learning began with the ‘experience’ of nature, not from rational, speculative metaphysics (late-medieval Scholasticism) or God-given innate ideas (Cartesian rationalism) or divine revelation (the Bible). However unwittingly, Locke’s anthropology had opened the door for a natural philosophy of humanity and gave birth to the modern social sciences. This was a marked departure from the classic Christian worldview where humanity stood above and apart from the rest of God’s creation. New possibilities were realised for the study of man in his ‘state of nature’. Pope again found the words to match the moment: ‘The proper study of mankind is man’.[11]
Locke also made a foray into the study and use of natural religion. Although not a Deist, his TheReasonableness of Christianity (1695) argued for orthodox Christian truths using the tools of natural theology. Going well beyond Locke, however, the Deist John Toland, in his ChristianityNot Mysterious (1696), employed natural theology to undermine the miracles of the Bible and the divinity of Christ. The development of natural religion would give rise to the science of higher critical methodology. Thus, although nature and reason were major components of religious thought, uniformity is lost in a wide range of expressions, including orthodoxy, deism, pantheism and atheism.
Locke’s use of reason and nature may have had its greatest influence in his political philosophy. Here his Two Treatises of Government (1690) had monumental ramifications for political theory throughout Europe and America. His vision of political society based on nature takes on an idyllic tone in the Second Treatise:
To understand political power right and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in . . . within the bounds of nature . . . The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions;[12]
For Locke, the laws of nature were ultimately derived from nature’s God for in the next line he adds: ‘for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker’.[13] Uniformity in Enlightenment political theory proved elusive, however, and although reason and nature were frequent tools of its philosophers, their results varied. Others, like Thomas Hobbes had earlier employed natural law theories to justify state absolutism, while Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) rejected the political visions of both Hobbes and Locke. Natural law was employed to justify constitutional monarchy in England, enlightened despotism in Austria and Russia, and republicanism in America and France. Additionally, by reasoning from nature Hobbes concluded that men were inherently bad, while Rousseau accounted them inherently good. Despite the frequent references to nature and reason during the period its uniform application to political philosophy cannot be found.
The theory of human progress, a recurrent theme of the Enlightenment, was also a product of reasoning from nature. The notion of progress had its roots in Christian eschatology, but Enlightenment thinkers located its source in nature and secularised it while retaining the Christian teleological theme of an upward, purposeful path to perfection. The idea of perfectibility was central to the concept. Since the world operated according to universal laws, reason could discover them and give people more control over their social and physical environment. Thus nature could be exploited freely in the cause of progress. Here uniformity breaks down rapidly, however, for Rousseau reasoned from nature to scorn the Enlightenment view of progress as ‘unnatural’. Rousseau believed that primitive culture, symbolised by the ‘noble savage’, provided the ideal state for humanity. In his ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750) he insisted that man was good by nature, but city life and civilised society had corrupted him. The progress and perfectibility motif also took on a literalist Christian millennialism in a true man of the Enlightenment like Joseph Priestley, adding still more to the concept’s diversity. Enlightenment thinkers clearly arrived at different conclusions about progress when reasoning from the laws of nature. Hence, uniformity has eluded us once again.
With the problematic nature of Enlightenment uniformity behind us, locating its diversity will prove to be a much easier task. The period produced a wide variety of men (and a few women). We find intellectuals, journalists, writers, revolutionaries and government officials who had access to equally diverse media that included professional journals, newspapers and periodicals, and book publishing. Additionally, the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of local scientific societies, political clubs, reading clubs, salons, coffeehouses, and lending libraries that featured a recent innovation, sentimental fiction.
Henry F. May’s four phases of the Enlightenment provides us the starting point for more diverse conceptions of the Enlightenment. May’s framework is as follows: 1) the Moderate Enlightenment associated with Locke and Newton; 2) the sceptical Enlightenment represented by David Hume; 3) the Revolutionary Enlightenment of Rousseau and Paine; and 4) the Didactic Enlightenment of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers like Hutchinson and Reid. This thematic approach is a useful tool, but uniform historiography meets its greatest opponent when we examine the international scope of the Enlightenment.
Although England and France served as epicentres, varied expressions of the movement were also found in central and eastern Europe, as well as the American colonies. The eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, for example, was acclaimed as a model for religious toleration. Diderot and Voltaire hail it as a cradle of toleration and liberty, though later soured on its commercialism. Varying types of governments, economies, and relevant social issues resulted in unique experiences from nation to nation, producing a variety of ‘Enlightenments’ that in nearly all cases differed from the French experience. In the Germanic lands of Austria and Prussia, political life centred on the so-called ‘enlightened despots’ Joseph II and Frederick II (The Great). There the Aufklarung (German Enlightenment) tended to thrive within existing institutions and was particularly strong in the universities. The enlightened despots (Catherine II of Russia is usually included here) generally allowed enough reforms to stave off radicalism. The late Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant best embodies the spirit of the Aufklarung. Having synthesised the philosophies of the French and British Enlightenments, his ideas informed much of the thinking of the nineteenth century, particularly that of the Romantic Movement.
The Enlightenment proceeded along a broad front in Britain, but generally lacked the radical and utopian flavour of the French Enlightenment. In Britain there was no Kulturkampf. There was little need to strangle kings with priest entrails because the ancien regime had been overturned in the previous century. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had produced a stable parliamentary system along with a measure of individual liberty and religious toleration. Seventeenth-century Britain had experienced a religious reformation and a political revolution, France had not. Gertrude Himmelfarb has astutely distilled the themes of the British, French, and American Enlightenments in their national contexts, summarising them as follows: In Britain, the sociology of virtue; in France, the ideology of reason; in America, the politics of liberty.[14] Along these same lines, it may be said that the philosophes were guided primarily by natural philosophy (ideology of reason) while the British and Americans followed closely on a path of moral philosophy (sociological virtue). Great Britain, then, did not have philosophes, but moral philosophers. This is not to say that complete harmony existed among the British intelligentsia. Indeed Price, Priestley, Paine, and Godwin were, in varying ways, philosophes at heart. However, the tendency of the British Enlightenment was to prize virtue and benevolence above reason.
Lord Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson serve to illustrate the British distinctive. They believed in an innate ‘moral sense’ that was a God-given, universal attribute—a sort of sixth sense for understanding right and wrong. For these moral philosophers it became the basis for the ‘sociology of virtue’. It was, however, a decided epistemological departure both from Locke’s blank sheet and from orthodox Calvinist views of depravity. For Hutcheson, it was a sense that could be refined, like one’s taste in music and art for example. In his System of Moral Philosophy (1755) he states ‘As some others of our powers are capable of culture and improvements, so is this moral sense’; and he contends that just as a low taste for beauty is improved by presentation of finer art, ‘so we improve our moral taste by presenting larger systems to our mind’.[15] By use of the term virtue, however, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were thinking of social ethics, not simply individual morality. Shaftesbury made the case that social ethics were the ‘common nature’ of mankind.[16]
Hutcheson likewise defined virtue in terms of social ethics. His moral philosophy laid the foundation for the Scottish Enlightenment, and while serving as professor of moral philosophy at GlasgowUniversity, Adam Smith was numbered among his students. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) brought him fame as a moral philosopher well before his most remembered work, Wealth of Nations (1776). Though diverging from Hutcheson at points, Smith’s moral philosophy also stressed virtue and social ethics. Even the sceptic David Hume believed in a moral sense common to all men, as did another Scot, Thomas Reid, who would build on these ideas to construct his philosophy of ‘common sense’. Further expansion on the theme of national context demonstrates that the Scottish Enlightenment, although not in tension with England, took on a unique quality and was a paramount influence on the American Founders. However, in fairness, the American Enlightenment is best viewed as a conflation of Scottish and Lockean philosophy. American revolutionaries drew heavily on both Locke and Hutcheson to justify their break with the mother country.
Religion strikes at the source of the dissonance between the French and British Enlightenments. With virtue and benevolence as its dominant themes, the British version lacked the French hostility toward religion. On the contrary, it accommodated religion and passed those sentiments on to the American Enlightenment as well. Even a thoroughgoing sceptic like Edward Gibbon took offence at the philosophes’ hostility toward religion, protesting that they ‘preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists’.[17] Recent studies of a uniquely British Enlightenment have opened the way for an expanded definition of the movement. Some, such as David Bebbington, even speak of an ‘Evangelical Enlightenment’. Jonathan Edwards, for example, was well tuned to enlightened themes and drew upon Locke and Hutcheson to formulate a sophisticated Calvinistic epistemology. John Wesley also read Locke and Hutcheson and, like Edwards, found answers for his preoccupation with the Christian doctrine of assurance.
In sum, Enlightenment uniformity built largely around the radical enterprise of the French philosophes is deficient in its treatment of the movement. However pervasive the ideas of men like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were, to neglect the more influential British Enlightenment (which had the Scottish Enlightenment, and its key progeny, the American Enlightenment, in its orbit) is an unfortunate misreading of history. The Enlightenment does reveal a good measure of uniformity with the ubiquitous themes of reason and nature. With reason as their tool and nature as their guiding hermeneutical principle, philosophers were empowered to address (dare we say create in the case of Locke) the major philosophical issues of the era. Among them we may relate a less than exhaustive list that includes anthropology, epistemology, psychology, historiography, natural theology, political science, and moral philosophy. Nevertheless, we have seen how problematic the nature/reason paradigm is to uniformity in the widely divergent conclusions reached on nearly every issue of the period.
The Enlightenment tree has many conflicting branches and attempts at uniformity quickly fade in the light of historical analysis. Consideration of the major themes of the British Enlightenment expands our understanding of the period. With its emphasis on moral philosophy and its tolerance for religion, a very different picture of the Enlightenment emerges from that which occurred in France. We have also seen that it is proper to speak of ‘Enlightenments’ which occurred in diverse national contexts across Europe and America. Unique social and political environments fostered different ideas and methods for expressing them. It must be concluded, therefore, that no uniform historiography can be imposed upon the age of Enlightenment. Finally, postmodernists risk being hoist by their own petard when setting up the Enlightenment as the straw man of history.
Bibliography
Bebbington, David, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,1989)
Becker, Carl L., The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1932)
Berlin, Isaiah, The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th Century Philosophers (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1956)
Broadie, Alexander ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Campbell, R.H. and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1982)
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951)
Davie, George, The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
Ferguson, Robert A., The American Enlightenment, 1750 – 1820 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Gay, Peter, TheEnlightenment: An Interpretation, vol 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York and London: W.W. Horton & Company, 1966)
_____, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol 2: The Science of Freedom (New York and London: W.W. Horton & Company, 1969)
Gilpin, W. Clark, ‘Enlightened Genealogies of Religion: Edward Gibbon and His Contemporaries’ Journal of Religion, 84:2, (2004), 256
Gordon, Daniel, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (Routledge, 2000)
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, And American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Jacob,Margaret C. The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York, 2001)
Kramnick, Isaac, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)
Locke, John, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. by Thomas P. Peardon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1952)
Manuel, Frank E., ed., The Enlightenment (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965)
Noll, Mark A., America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Porter, Roy, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York and London: W.W. Horton & Company, 2000)
_____, The Enlightenment, 2nd edn, (New York: Palgrave, 2001)
_____ and Mikulas Teich, eds, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Sampson, R.V., Progress in the Age of Reason: The Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)
Smith, John E., and others eds, A Jonathan Edwards Reader (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995)
Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Millenium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964)
Williamson, Arthur, ‘Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and John Pocock: The Appeal of Whigs Old and New’, Canadian Journal of History, 36:3 (2001), 517
[1] Peter Gay, TheEnlightenment: An Interpretation, vol 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York and London: W.W. Horton & Company, 1966) p. 3. Gay employs the unitalicised ‘philosophe’ throughout his two-volume work. The italicised ‘philosophe’ is used herein unless Gay is being directly quoted.
[3] Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1932), p.4.
[4] Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (1977), p.4. Quoted in Roy Porter The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York and London: W.W. Horton & Company, 2000), p 4.
[5] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 174.
[6]‘Philosophe’, in Encycopedie XII, 509. Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, And American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p.18.
[8] Alexander Pope, An Essay on man (1733-4), epistle IV, II. 29-30, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p.537. Quoted in Roy Porter, p. 295.
[9] Francis Bacon, ‘The New Science’ in The Portable EnlightenmentReader, ed. by Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 40.
[10]David Hume, quoted in R.V. Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason: The Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 75.
[11]Alexander Pope, quoted in Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), p. 53.
[12] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. by Thomas P. Peardon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1952), pp. 4-5.
[14] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, And American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p.19.
[15] Francis Hutcheson, ‘Concerning the Moral Sense’, in The Portable EnlightenmentReader, ed. by Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p.276.
[16]Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characterisitics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb. P. 28.
[17] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, p. 49.
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887)
The Psychology of Conspiracy
From 9/11 Truthers to Obama Birthers, it is a source of wonderment that so many people choose to believe conspiracy theories that have little basis in fact. An insightful New York Times article of 21 May 2013 by Maggie Koerth-Baker delves into the question. Psychologists, she notes, trace a believer’s acceptance of a conspiracy theory to an overarching worldview. A 2010 study published in the journal Psychologist discovered the following characteristics among believers:
[They] are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
Research seems to suggest that people are drawn to conspiracy theories in order to make sense of life’s complexities and to alleviate feelings of helplessness to control events around them. And certainly the internet is now the primary vehicle for the rapid and easy proliferation of conspiracies.
It is also plausible that some people are drawn to conspiracy theories in order to invest great tragedies with higher meaning. JFK’s death, the rationale might go, seems all the more senseless when brought about by a troubled loner’s delusions of grandeur. Such an ignominious end for an inspiring young leader strikes many with a sense of cognitive dissonance. Surely the fates could not be so arbitrary and cruel. Maybe a grand conspiracy will somehow help it all make sense? Submitted for your approval (a la Rod Serling): see the mafia dons, rogue CIA agents, shadowy figures on the grassy knoll, perhaps even Vice-President Johnson, all conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. With the added element of these diabolical machinations, JFK’s death takes on a greater sense of martyrdom.
Consider also that conspiracy theories exist for the assassination of other popular leaders including Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. Of course it does not help to quell the imagination of conspiracy buffs when members of our government actually have participated in nefarious plots: the CIA-backed coups in Iran (1953) and South Vietnam (1963) along with the Watergate conspiracy (1972) and the Iraq WMD conspiracy (2003) spring to mind.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Catholicism
Religion has often provided fertile ground for the growth of conspiracy theories, especially where it intersects with politics. The long history of anti-Semitism may be attributed in part to a belief that stretches back to the early Middle Ages (some scholars argue to the New Testament itself) in which the crucifixion of Jesus was thought to be a Jewish-led conspiracy. From this arose the vile epithet directed towards Jews: “Christ killer!” In a second example, many Protestants going back to Martin Luther, who was also an ardent anti-Semite, have been convinced that the pope was the Antichrist. In American history the founding of the nativist American Party or “Know Nothings” in 1850 was fueled by hatred of Roman Catholic immigrants and paranoid fears of interference by the Vatican in the U.S. government. Its members swore an oath not to vote for any Roman Catholic. By 1854 the party had grown to over one million members. The bigotry was based in large part on fears that the Catholic faith would spread throughout the nation.
The Know Nothings collapsed during the Civil War but anti-Catholic paranoia continued with the formation of the American Protective Association in 1887. By 1896 it claimed 2.5 million members with chapters in every state. New members swore an oath that included a denunciation of the pope and a vow not to employ a Catholic if a Protestant was available. In 1893 APA leadership propagated a conspiracy theory by forging a papal encyclical entitled “Instructions to Catholics.” It called for them to stage an armed takeover of the U.S. government, and to exterminate all heretics, meaning non-Catholics. The APA disappeared by 1911, but paranoia about Roman Catholics persisted in the WASPish corridors of American power right up to the presidential campaign of JFK in 1960.
Premillennial Dispensationalism
John Nelson Darby
Perhaps there are no better examples of conspiracy theories than those spawned by literal interpretations of religious apocalyptic literature such as the Book of Revelation. The cottage industry of Christian books on biblical prophecy certainly dwarfs that of JFK conspiracies. In the modern era, the dominant figure to emerge in the field of eschatology or biblical prophecy was the British theologian John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). His peculiar brand of systematic theology is known as premillennial dispensationalism and dates from the mid-19th century. In the 20th century it became the dominant position among American evangelicals, primarily through the influence of C.I. Schofield’s 1909 Schofield Reference Bible. Other popularizers of dispensationalism in America include Billy Graham, Hal Lindsay, and Tim LaHaye, primarily through his hugely popular Left Behind series co-authored by Jerry B. Jenkins. Dispensationalists rally around a core set of beliefs: The second coming prior to a literal millennium; a continued prophetic role for the Jews and, since the 1940s, the modern state of Israel; a literal Antichrist, pre-tribulation rapture and seven-year tribulation period; the Battle of Armageddon, final judgment, and a new heaven and earth.
Dispensationalists are driven by an essential paranoia that Satan and his minions are conspiring through secular forces to establish a one-world government. Since the demise of communism, dispensationalists have targeted secular education and media, the United Nations, and the U.S. government—when under a Democratic president—as Satan’s primary instruments for bringing the Antichrist to power. It is a conspiracy theory of cosmic and biblical proportions. Within this worldview, complex geopolitical events, especially those surrounding the state of Israel, are made more comprehensible, if no less frightening, in the context of an end-times plot leading up to the second coming of Christ.
An extreme pessimism pervades dispensational eschatology, with events on earth predicted to grow increasingly dire as the end draws near. Thus, otherwise senseless acts of war and terror—or violations of Palestinian human rights—may be interpreted as part of a divine plan. While this may provide some consolation for true believers, the inherent danger in this view is that American foreign policy may be, indeed has been, influenced by leaders who make decisions based on a dubious interpretation of the Bible rather than through rational thought. Additionally, in its more extreme manifestations, apocalyptic theology easily degenerates into cultish behavior such as that practiced by 20th century autocratic ministers Jim Jones and David Koresh.
The Influence of Apocalyptic Literature
The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Francesco Hayez (1867)
It is important to note that contemporary dispensationalists are not alone in possessing an apocalyptic worldview. Similar theologies exist today among Muslims and other world religions. It is also crucial to understand that many theologians and scholars of ancient literature contend that apocalyptic writings were not intended to be interpreted literally. Nevertheless, throughout history people have read them literally and millennialism has frequently taken root among those who have been marginalized in society or suffered under foreign invasion. For example, the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Daniel contain millennial and apocalyptic themes and date from periods when the Jews faced national extinction, while the book of Revelation and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which also contain apocalyptic themes, sprang from a period of persecution by the Romans.
Under Roman domination apocalyptic literature abounded in the Jewish tradition between the second century BCE and third century CE. Moreover, in his landmark study, ThePursuit of the Millennium (1957), Norman Cohn established that although millennialism had been condemned early on by the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, it remained constant during the Middle Ages on the margins of society. Sects of this type, Cohn demonstrated, came in a wide variety ranging from violent aggressiveness to mild pacifism and from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earthbound materialism. Most expressions of millennialism both past and present are counter-cultural and many are heavily influenced by the conspiratorial nature of apocalyptic writings.
It would seem as though conspiracy theories are most attractive to those who feel downtrodden and oppressed or who reject the dominant culture for political and religious reasons. All are born of some degree of mistrust and feelings of helplessness. A few are actually true. In most cases, however, they are the result of ignorance and paranoia. But as someone once quipped, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!”
History, Religion & Culture 