The View From 1776

The cornerstone of Western civilization, beginning with the Old Testament prophets and classical Greek philosophers, was the belief that human nature is constant, unchanging over the ages.  Liberal-progressive-socialist theory, inaugurated by French intellectuals before and after the bloody French Revolution of 1789, propounded the theory that human behavior can be controlled and changed by restructuring society.

In pre-French Revolutionary society, constancy of human nature meant that a good and just society depended upon every individual’s aligning himself with God-given natural law, intuited through religion and philosophy.  No matter whether the ruler was good or bad, every individual needed to do the right thing, to deal fairly with others, to aid widows, orphans, and others in need.  Every individual ultimately would be judged by his Maker.

Liberal-progressive-socialism, exemplified in psychology and the other so-called social sciences established by French intellectuals, hypothesizes in contrast that humans have no capacity to intuit a Divine Creator or a natural law imparted by His Mind, which created the universe.  Humans are just products of Darwinian evolution, beings whose fundamental characteristic is response to external agents of pleasure or pain.  Intellectuals therefore can manipulate evolution with laws and regulations to compel people in the mass to respond as the intellectuals intend.

The cornerstone question, then, is whether individuals can be relied upon to perceive their own best interests, or whether only Ivy League intellectuals and Democrat/Socialist Party politicians can know wherein lie the best interests of the masses, e.g., electric cars, shutting down industries that create jobs but emit CO2, and supporting mafia-style labor unions and “green” ventures.

If the Judeo-Christian Western civilizational paradigm is correct, government should encourage religion as the best means to impart individual morality and responsibility, and government should give maximum free rein to individual initiative and creativity.

If President Obama and his fellow liberal-progressive-socialists are correct, ultimately everyone should be employed by the government, because only government is able to improve peoples lives, only government perceives what is best for the masses, only government can protect helpless members of the mass from predations of capitalist businessmen.

Svetlana Kunin, who grew up under the liberal-progressive benevolence of the Soviet Union, explores the implications of those differing views in an op-ed piece appearing on the Investors’ Business Daily website.  Read Who Created Prosperity? Bureaucrats Or Individuals?

Jay Richards, writing in the Washington Post, debunks that thesis.

See also Social Activism and the Social Gospel and Religious Left: Same Old Social Gospel.

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.
Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism.  Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century.  Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity. 

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him.  The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

In “Christianizing the Social Order” (1912), Professor Rauschenbusch wrote:

“The Socialists found the Church against them and thought God was against them, too.  They have had to do God’s work without the sense of God’s presence to hearten them.....Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty.......Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age......God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.”

Two other prominent seminaries, among many others, were active promoters of socialism.  Their spokesmen also were nationally known figures: Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Bernard Iddings-Bell of St. Stephens College in Annandale, New York.

Dr. Ward wrote “The New Social Order,” to express sympathy for Socialism and to laud the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Russia, which he regarded as a desirable replacement for the Russian Orthodox Christian Church.  Dr. Ward also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.

Dr. Iddings-Bell in “Right and Wrong After the War,” in this case World War I, advocated Sigmund Freud’s version of Marxian materialism, in which human life is controlled by hunger and the sex urge.  From this theory of secular and materialistic human nature, he concluded that (1) private property should be abolished; (2) income earned from investments, savings accounts, and rental property is robbery; (3) the family as a social unit should be abandoned except as a temporary arrangement for purely sexual relations. 
In his sermon delivered on May 23, 1920, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dr. Iddings-Bell gave his support to revolutionary labor demands for abolishment of the wage system and control of industry by communistic labor unions. 

He declared that the New Social Order had arrived and that people were obliged to accept it.  Among other things, that meant that internationalism must replace American patriotism.

A reader posted the following comment regarding The Irresponsible Nanny State.

I missed the part in Heather MacDonald’s critique of Mayor Boomberg’s effort to encourage young men where she said that the program was “Godless.”

While she was caustic, sarcastic and defeatist about making any effort to change the ethos of the inner city situation, I did not see her level the charge that religion was not part of the proposed program.

Help us out here, Tom, and tell us how making an effort to help out young men is anti-Christian.

Responding to the comment, two points should be stated.

First, Heather Mac Donald may have been “caustic, sarcastic and defeatist,” but only in the sense that Mayor Bloomberg is apparently ignorant of the complete failure of identical programs in the past to achieve their intended results.  Moreover, as she pointed out, such programs waste large sums of taxpayers money.  In effect, the mayor is ripping off the taxpayers to buy support from liberal-progressives who without doubt want good things to happen, but who are lost in a fairy-tale world in which Cinderella marries the prince and lives happily ever after.

Second, every element of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan is materialistic, notably paying hooligans to attend school.  As Ms. Mac Donald emphasizes, the key variable in the picture is the absence of the traditional, two-parent family, the first-line agent for imparting morals and civility.  Without that, every dollar spent on the mayor’s programs is wasted.

Historian Bernard Bailyn, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in Education in the Forming of American Society:

The modern conception of public education, the very idea of a clean line of separation between “private” and “public,” was unknown before the end of the eighteenth century.

Speaking of the colonial era, Professor Bailyn wrote,

The most important agency in the transfer of culture was not formal institutions of instruction or public instruments of communication, but the family; and the character of family life in late sixteenth – and early seventeenth-century England is critical for understanding the history of education in colonial America.

…[Families and their communities] were, in the first place, the primary agencies in the socialization of the child.  Not only did the family introduce him to the basic forms of civilized living, but it shaped his attitudes, formed his patterns of behavior, endowed him with manners and morals.”

…More explicit in its educational function than either family or community was the church…It furthered the introduction of the child to society by instructing him in the system of thought and imagery which underlay the culture’s values and aims.  It provided the highest sanctions for the accepted forms of behavior, and brought the child into close relationship with the intangible loyalties, the ethos and highest principles, of the society in which he lived.  In this educational role, organized religion had a powerfully unifying influence.

Liberal-progressives such as Mayor Bloomberg either are ignorant of this historical background, or are deliberately embarked upon an effort to destroy our founding Judeo-Christian constitutional ethic and replace it with the socialistic materialism of Karl Marx.