CHRISTIANITY

As social, economic, and intellectual changes occurred in the United States from 1870 to 1920, reactions from religious communities ranged from those who welcomed and embraced the changes to those who saw in those same changes dire threats not only to religion but to the nation's future as well. The fracturing of denominations within Protestantism and a profound diversification of Roman Catholicism and non-Christian religions further complicated the spiritual landscape. The diminution of the place and prestige of religion in society, as Henry Steele Commager has noted, amounted to one of the essential differences between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century mind-sets.

The nation's effort to recover from the Civil War experience marked the beginning of this transition. Denominations divided during the struggle between the North and the South (principally Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) considered how and even whether they should reunite after the war. Congregations and denominations of black worshippers emerged to provide leaders and direction for their people. Newly arriving immigrants brought with them sometimes quite different religious practices and beliefs. Revivalism became a prominent, if stereo-typed, outlet for periodic religious fervor. Earnest desires to improve literacy yielded an impulse not only for public education but also for the establishment of Sunday schools. The rapid expansion of the Roman Catholic population gave clerics stronger voices while also presenting problems of diversity, sometimes addressed by founding parochial schools. It was a time of opportunity but also a time when the culture's values and beliefs were challenged on almost every level. That challenge could only be fully addressed by a broad-based reconsideration of the religious paradigm.

FOUR FORCES

Typically, historians of the period from 1870 to 1920 identify at least four forces shaping intellectual and religious life: industrialization-urbanization, immigration, Darwinism, and European thought, particularly biblical criticism. The political, social, and economic manifestations of these forces can be elaborated in the stories of burgeoning cities and factories, semicompetent presidents, corrupt politicians, populism, progressivism, nativism, trade unionism, and three wars (the Indian wars, the Spanish-American War, and World War I). As a result, the nation looked quite different in 1920 than it had in 1870. It was an urban nation, one of the most powerful in the world, and had shed its "innocence."

In the fifty years between 1870 and 1920, dozens of cities in the United States tripled, quadrupled, and even quintupled in population. Individuals and families from rural communities and immigrants from abroad flooded into towns, transforming them into cities teeming with diverse peoples. They pursued fabled opportunities to prosper in the emerging industrial economy. Relocation often entailed a bitter adjustment not only to the physical environment but also to the emotional landscape of the cities. For one familiar with patterns of rural life, being surrounded by cluttered buildings and incessant noise alienated the individual from "nature's" God and God's nature. The sermons of a country parson or parish priest, reflecting on the wonders of creation evident in a field of hay or on the truths of many parables rooted in agrarian lifestyles, seemed irrelevant amid the jostle of urban survival. Village churches gave way to storefronts, and uniform congregations became confusing conglomerates.

At least among many Protestant churches, a wellchronicled "work ethic" seemed to predispose members to active participation in the Industrial Revolution. On closer examination, however, many of the values of industrialization contradicted traditional teachings of Protestantism. Martin Luther and John Calvin had indeed opened the door to the possibility that all vocations might be considered sacred. They, however, operated primarily in a commercial agricultural context. Industrialization, as it developed in Europe well after the Protestant Reformation and eventually exploded in the United States after the Civil War, encouraged and rewarded unbridled competition, emphasized profit, and exploited labor as a means to a capitalist end. Religious leaders who spoke against the abusive nature and contrary values of the new economy sometimes found themselves challenged either to moderate their positions or to reinterpret scripture in light of the realities of modern life. Catholics could take some solace from the position of Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum that soundly defended private property as well as the rights of labor to organize and agitate for social change.

A new wave of immigration added to the growth of the cities. Between 1865 and 1920, 25 million immigrants poured through the gates of opportunity into American society, increasing the population by 80 percent. The unplanned increase in demands for housing, basic services, and jobs both taxed the social resources of American cities and provided a cheap labor pool for industry. This new period of immigration brought people from eastern and southern Europe and from Asia rather than from western and northern Europe. The new immigrants were Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists rather than Protestant Christians. As they settled into neighborhoods in large cities or secluded themselves in the countryside, many of the immigrants struggled to maintain homeland traditions while adjusting to the demands of their new environments. The new immigrants formed parochial school systems, settled in strictly defined neighborhoods, built their own churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples, and sometimes identified with a single segment of the economy. The paradox of engagement and isolation often created tension with people who touted longer histories in the United States. A vigorous nativist movement reemerged in the country, questioning the desirability of so much immigration and intimating dire consequences from the unchecked mixing of diverse populations. Henry Adams brooded over the decline of America in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), while Jacob Riis in The Making of an American (1901) and Mary Antin in The Promised Land (1912) chronicled the triumph of their Americanization.

The dark foreboding that centered on immigration came not only from workers being displaced by cheaper laborers but also from a variation of Darwinian thought. First, the formal works of Charles Darwin were debated in the universities, and then religious leaders began to tease out the theological implications. Some rejected the theory of evolution. For example, Charles Hodge, Princeton Seminary professor and leading conservative theologian, labeled Darwinism "atheism" in a famous 1874 publication. Others embraced evolution; James McCosh, president of Princeton University, found no incongruities between faith in a God with unlimited creative capacity and the mechanisms, even evolution, through which that creativity might be manifested. Eventually, the use of the theory of natural selection took an ominous turn when Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner (an ordained minister as well as a sociologist), and later Francis Galton argued that public social policy should be shaped by assumptions about "survival of the fittest" and the elimination of "defective" gene strains from the human pool.

The impulse to examine critically the sacred texts, generally labeled "higher biblical criticism," spread across the Atlantic primarily from German universities and English scholars. Appropriation of techniques from linguistics, history, anthropology, and archaeology to the examination of the text, rather than relying on church doctrine and a literal reading, challenged standard interpretations of authorship, meaning, and application of Christian scriptures. Generally labeled as an element of liberal Protestantism, higher biblical criticism served the interests of those searching to understand the context of the ancient writings as well as to extend their application to the modern environment.

Many other historical factors, such as westward expansion, entailing conflict with Native American peoples and spirituality, influenced the course of religious thought and behavior in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. None, however, carried the weight of the four noted above. Similarly, these four points of social cleavage—industrializationurbanization, immigration, Darwinism, and European thought, especially biblical criticism—formed the most significant framework for a consideration of literature with religious themes. On many levels, the culture felt its religious moorings slipped by the necessity to reject or accommodate new ideas and practices. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. may have expressed the thoughts of thousands when, while convalescing from Civil War wounds, he concluded that he was done with religion and would henceforth seek meaning and comfort in other sources of belief. Many of the intellectual elites of his generation no longer felt obliged to acknowledge theological or doctrinal roots of their thoughts and theories. The experiences of war, followed by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the chaos of Reconstruction, were dark clouds at the dawning of a new era. Gradually and in diverse ways, literary figures, politicians, artists, and ministers responded to the challenges.

REJECTIONS OF "MODERN" LIFE

The nation struggled with the implications of building a modern society. Whether due to the failure of "cultural authority" or as the culmination of a "crisis of belief and values," social critics rejected what they considered the negative implications of modern life. Some turned away from the rigors of modern life and encouraged a resurgence of Romantic ideals. The comforts and conveniences of the modern age eroded sensitivity to sin and induced an "abandonment of moral responsibility," they argued (Lears, p. 300). The postwar "Holiness movement" encouraged its followers to adopt traditional dress, behavior, and thought in order to resist corruption by modern ways. At the other extreme in the rejection of modernity lay an effort to meet head-on the forces that threatened to pull the nation along the path of modernity. Reform movements motivated by an effort to prevent the abuses of industrialization resulted. Henry Adams (1838–1918) and William Dean Howells (1837–1920) were representatives of these branches of antimodernism. Adams's "religious quest," prompted by the deaths of his wife and sister, was a metaphor for the quest many experienced after the cultural death experience of the Civil War. Inspired by religious architecture such as the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Chartres, Adams wrote that the modern scene lacked an ability to conceive of and execute such monuments to God and to beauty. His critique of contemporary America embraced the old virtues and beliefs and mourned their degradation. In a letter to a friend, Adams lamented: "Hell is all there was to make life worth living. Since it was abolished, there is no standard of value" (p. 285).

A variation of Adams's Victorian antimodernism may be found in the work of William Dean Howells. Howells's novels and public expressions displayed the confrontation with each of the threatening forces evident on the late-nineteenth-century scene, including capitalist individualism, Social Darwinism, and scientific positivism. In The Leatherwood God (1916) and The Undiscovered Country (1880), he examined the flaws of hyperemotional spirituality and the threat of spiritual manipulation. Howells saw not only rampant industrialization but also the quasi-scientific efforts of the Progressive Era reforms as elements of social policy that threatened to overturn the virtues of collective identity. In one historian's analysis, Howells came to "espouse Marxian socialism" but one that was firmly rooted in Christianity (Parrington 2:245). In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells examined the personal and spiritual costs of participation in the aggressive capitalist order. Through the Eye of the Needle (1907) even more pointedly infused Howells's critique of modern culture while offering his utopian solution. A New Moral World (1885) by James Casey, Garden of Eden, U.S.A. (1895) by W. H. Bishop, and Paradise on Earth (1913) by Jeff Hayes—all promoted optimistic visions of social change predicated on goodwill and cooperation, whereas Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) presented a dark picture of Jewish assimilation.

LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM

Howells recognized the need for a religious response to modernity that used arguments and ideas not entirely dredged up from the past. He supported an approach known as "liberal Protestantism," headed by Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher, which argued that biblical higher criticism and Darwinian thought, rather than contradicting Christian belief, provided deeper understandings of the marvels of God's creative ability. In addition, it confronted the doctrines of original sin and eternal punishment as faulty readings of the text. Ministers such as Charles Sheldon, William Ware, and E. P. Roe produced novels that placed moral messages in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century American context. Sheldon (1867–1928) used the simple question "What would Jesus do?" (again in vogue in the early twenty-first century) to suggest that the truths of the New Testament could be appropriated for an ethic in modern times. Sheldon introduced the question in In His Steps (1898). Edward Bellamy's (1850–1898) Looking Backward (1888) advanced his hero into the future in order to comment on the state of contemporary society. Bellamy's utopia was a profoundly Christian critique of his own age, encouraging a revival of faith in order to redeem all of society. Similarly, Howells's A Traveler from Altruria (1894) cast his version of a utopia based on true Christian principles. On another track, Abbott and others argued for a kind of "Christian evolution," whereby believers might become more and more perfect through the practice of Christ-like behavior. Washington Gladden's Who Wrote the Bible? (1891) contributed to what came to be called the "New Theology" school that welcomed biblical criticism and comparative religion as tools to deepen spiritual sensitivities. Liberal Protestantism also opened the door for even more unorthodox expressions. Francis Ellingwood Abbot drafted "Fifty Affirmations" for the Free Religious Association. Its essence promoted a universal affiliation of believers, without the need for denominations, creeds, or specific views of divinity. The association eventually merged with the much older Unitarian Fellowship. Felix Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture, and Mary Baker Eddy established the Christian Science Church.

Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller provided still other options for reconciliation with modern life. Carnegie defended the accumulation of wealth as a worthy goal in life by touting a "Gospel of Wealth" based on the "sacred" principles of free enterprise. He argued, and demonstrated in his own life, that the duty of the rich was to spend their money on projects improving society. As far as he was concerned, "the man who dies rich dies disgraced" (Mathisen, p. 216). John D. Rockefeller taught Sunday school nearly all his life, helped found the University of Chicago as a Baptist institution (but which later originated the New Theology), and funded an inquiry into the effectiveness of missions that became a model for many organizations. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others thus testified to a link between the industrial elite and the religious ethos of the nation. Certainly the novels of the Unitarian-educated Horatio Alger elevated the image of the decent young man achieving respectability by the exercise of good character. Even more popular was the minister Russell Conwell's "sermon," Acres of Diamonds, in which he defended the accumulation of wealth as a natural process and the rich as models of character.

CYNICISM AND PRAGMATISM

On the opposite end of the spectrum from liberal Protestantism lay a pervasive cynicism regarding religious practice and its positive influences on culture. When Beecher became embroiled in a sensational morals trial (he was accused of having an illicit affair with one of his parishioners), caustic commentators intimated that a "modern" view of the doctrine of eternal punishment had produced the "loosening" of standards of behavior. Mark Twain (1835–1910) employed religious themes and subjects in many of his works and consistently challenged hypocrisy and intolerance. To him, the standard beliefs and practices of American Christianity defied logic and smelled of pomposity. In a series of articles in the North American Review (1902–1903), Clemens ridiculed the Christian Science Church. Especially in The Diary of Adam and Eve and Letters from the Earth, Clemens revealed that he knew a great deal about the Bible but also that a serious subject could be handled well with humor. Going one step further, Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899) came to be known as "the notorious infidel" for his aggressive promotion of atheism. Ingersoll traveled the country debating ministers, giving public lectures, and challenging the religious elite to think beyond their prescribed boundaries.

William James (1842–1910), a leading figure in the development of pragmatism, posed still another set of responses to the forces confronting religion at the end of the nineteenth century. James's work, especially his landmark The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), focused not only on the psychological dimensions of belief but also on the social impact of expressed faith. He argued that pragmatism offered a reorientation of the focus of religious life, resembling the Protestant Reformation and on the same order as the campaign against established churches and toward voluntary associations that had begun at the time of the American Revolution. Furthermore, as a "theistic evolutionist," he found much to admire in evolutionary theory, especially as it might apply to the social sphere. James saw nothing incongruent between his Protestantism and a deterministic description of society. But his admiration of religion was limited to his particular brand. James discounted Catholic contributions and bordered on anti-Semitism.

THEOLOGY

A theological analysis of the religious trends of the period reveals a decidedly mixed bag. Within its boundaries, arguments for a "social" gospel, fundamentalism, and even atheism made their cases. In the process, public figures and private citizens struggled to discern their own paths and the purpose of their religious institutions. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this struggle appeared in Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). The novel serves as an object lesson for understanding the personal toll of the theological battles raging as a simple upstate New York minister struggles to understand and to contend with the modern world. Ware steps into the fray when he decides to write a book. In collecting materials, he finds his long-accepted religious beliefs challenged, and he moves inexorably toward doubt. Exposure to biblical criticism, comparative religions, and scientific rationalism leads to risky behaviors and nearly personal disaster. The message is that one option for addressing the modern world is to embrace it, but at great personal hazard. This message, embedded within a popular novel, demonstrated that the popular press had become the chief agent for engaging rather sophisticated religious debate and was much more persuasive in informing the masses than the traditional pulpit.

Though the Social Gospel movement did not entail a highly developed theology, it nonetheless posed theological arguments that deserve attention. Not content to await God's judgment of society nor to condemn "the world" in a detached manner, Social Gospelers sought ways to enlist liberal Protestantism in political, social, and economic battles. Primarily through the work of Washington Gladden, George Herron, W. D. P. Bliss, and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), the Social Gospel centered on providing social services through urban churches. Criticized for its thin emphasis on sin and salvation, the movement replied, in effect, that it was difficult to hear the Gospel message when one's stomach was growling. The Social Gospel movement supported reform measures designed to improve housing, food distribution, medical services, and general living conditions of the urban poor, often invoking the Golden Rule as their justification. Social Gospelers were often associated with worker organizations, publicizing their plight and motivating church support. Rauschenbusch's A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) attempted to capture both the need for and the justification of an ecumenical approach to social ills. Gone was the antebellum confidence that reform might happen one person at a time. The church, social agencies, and even government itself must be organized and focused on the amelioration of misery and injustice.

One final theological impulse emerged around the resistance to biblical criticism and Darwinian evolution. When some seminaries and ministers tried to incorporate elements of these new views into the curriculum or sermons, cries of heresy arose and several trials ensued. Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian seminaries, and several ministers, stood trial for their expressions of unorthodox belief, particularly on the inerrancy of Scripture and the literal reading of the stories contained therein. "Holiness" movements in the late nineteenth century emphasized personal purity through adherence to a strict behavioral code and a conservative view of Scripture. Ostensibly rooted in Methodism and tied to antebellum "perfectionism," the postwar movements attracted rural followers who intuitively believed that the challenges to biblical authority sprang not from scholarship but from a spiritual crisis. D. L. Moody (1837–1899) championed the more urban wing of the revivals that invariably accompanied the expression of spiritual angst. Moody skillfully combined marketing techniques usually used to promote consumer goods with traditional messages of sin and salvation to forge an international revival organization. Edward Eggleston in The Faith Doctor (1891) subjected "faith healers" to ridicule for their hyperemotionalism.

FUNDAMENTALISM

Moody stood in the gap between the holiness groups attempting to address the evils of society by providing a positive alternative and the more Calvinistic rejection of society as a whole. Late in the nineteenth century, pastors and denominational leaders began to form discussion groups and Bible schools to explore the implications of the "dispensationalist" writings of J. N. Darby (1800–1882). At first loosely organized, "fundamentalism" took center stage in the spiritual wars brewing in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Drawing on fears within society, the fundamentalists spotlighted the most obvious religious threats of the day. No one was more visible in this struggle than Billy Sunday (1862–1935), the man who, one historian contends, "stands at the center of the cultural confusion of the years 1890–1920" (McLoughlin, p. 146). Capitalizing on his popularity as a professional baseball player, Sunday crafted an influential series of campaigns as a traveling evangelist. His message was traditional though his methods matched those of the finest marketing firms of the day. Sunday was a consummate entertainer, playing on the emotions and sentiments of his audience. He preached against the evils of the day (including the liberal Protestants) and of the necessity to "hit the sawdust trail" (many of his revivals were held in large tents with aisles covered in sawdust). Sunday focused his social reform enthusiasm on Prohibition and "cleaning up" the cities in which his revivals took place.

Sunday's popularity illustrated the swing in theological temperament and general religious sentiment. Antebellum America's optimism, expressed in reform impulses and exuberant expansion, rested on an anticipation of the literal return of Christ to the earth, known as postmillennialism. In this view, society's improvement was a precursor to the fulfillment of prophecies regarding the Messiah. After the Civil War the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and the Witnesses (later Jehovah's Witnesses) built significant followings based on their message anticipating the imminent return of Christ to the earth. The Witnesses went so far as to target 1914, ironically the year of the beginning of the Great War, as the time when the Kingdom of God would be fully established. Premillennialism, the expectation that a time of trials and testing of the faithful would precede the Second Coming, became the more compelling popular view following the culturally devastating effects of the Civil War and in light of the nation's declining moral character into the twentieth century. Woven together with dispensationalism from England and enlivened by revivals such as Sunday's—particularly the Pentecostal Azusa Street revival of 1906—fundamentalism both reflected and fed popular apprehensions about society. Pentecostalism eventually yielded to the pressures for greater organization, gathering together in the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Assemblies of God, and the Foursquare Church.

THE END OF AMERICAN "INNOCENCE"

It is fitting to end with a comment about Henry James (1843–1916), brother of the psychologist and pragmatist William James. Henry James reflected the double-mindedness of Americans about their newfound state of being. At once proud and insecure, the characters in his novels fumbled into the modern world expectantly and afraid, just as the nation did in reality. In the midst of the paradox of renunciation and confident engagement, the period immediately after the Great War witnessed what Henry May called the "end of American innocence." By that turn of phrase May meant that America came fully to grips with the implications of the period of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, expansion, education, philosophy, and intellectual challenges. One segment of society, the liberal Protestants in the case of religion, adopted the values of efficiency and professionalism and applied them across the board. Another segment—the fundamentalists, holiness advocates, antimoderns, and cynics—found ways of resisting and subverting the forces of modernity. With new technologies allowing wider distribution of their works, literary figures described and elaborated on Americans' attempts to maintain their moral and spiritual footing.

See alsoThe Bible; Catholics; Christianity and the Social Crisis; Christian Science; The Damnation of Theron Ware; Jews; Mormons

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Adams, Henry. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, 16 April 1900. In Letters of Henry Adams, 3 vols., edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, 2:285. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1930–1938.

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Handy, Robert T., ed. The Social Gospel in America, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

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Hutner, Gordon. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Kazin, Alfred. God and the American Writer. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.

McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay of Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865–1914. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967.

Mathisen, Robert R., ed. The Role of Religion in American Life. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

May, Henry F. The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time, 1912–1917. New York: Knopf, 1959.

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Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literaturefrom the Beginnings to 1920. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927–1930.

Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Reynolds, David S. "Shifting Interpretations of American Protestantism, 1870–1900." Journal of Popular Culture 9 (winter 1975): 593–603.

Cole P. Dawson