The World of Ellen G. White

Chapter 6—When America Was “Christian”

Jonathan Butler

Among the Christian exiles who first fled to America and sought an asylum from royal oppression and priestly intolerance were many who determined to establish a government upon the broad foundation of civil and religious liberty.... Republicanism and Protestantism became the fundamental principles of the nation. These principles are the secret of its power and prosperity. The oppressed and downtrodden throughout Christendom have turned to this land with interest and hope. Millions have sought its shores, and the United States has risen to a place among the most powerful nations of the earth. —The Great Controversy (1888), 441. WEGW 97.1

Writing of antebellum America as if it were Zion, Horace Bushnell declared, “The wilderness shall bud and blossom as the rose before us; and we will not cease, till a Christian nation throws up its temples of worship on every hill and plain.” WEGW 97.2

This renowned Congregationalist theologian and cleric looked for the day when “knowledge, virtue, and religion, blending their dignity and their healthful power, have filled our great country with a manly and happy race of people, and the bands of a complete Christian commonwealth are seen to span the continent.” WEGW 97.3

Like other nineteenth-century evangelicals, what Bushnell meant by “a complete Christian commonwealth” was a Protestant nation. And indeed, in many respects nineteenth-century America became Protestant. In political life, both houses of Congress were dominated by Protestants, and reflected the Protestant agenda of political concerns such as temperance and Sunday “blue laws.” In the media, the major newspapers and journals were owned by Protestants, and showed their bias. The Monday editions published the full texts of Sunday’s sermons. WEGW 97.4

In 1878 a premier prophetic conference was held in New York City, and the New York Tribune printed 50,000 copies of an “extra” to provide verbatim reports on it. In education, the public schools used McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, which mixed Protestant piety and American patriotism in a series that sold 122 million copies in its original and revised editions. The suffusing of American primary education with a Protestant ethos established the public schools as virtually a Protestant parochial school system. And in religion, in the spirit of Bushnell’s “temples of worship on every hill and plain,” Methodists alone aimed to build “two churches a day” across the nation. WEGW 98.1

Times have changed. It is the regret of many twentieth-century evangelicals that Protestantism no longer functions as the culture-shaping power of American life as it once did. One American church historian contrasts the nineteenth-century “Protestant hopes” to make America “Christian” to the “historical realities” of our time. Another refers to the shift “from a sacred to a profane America.” While most legislators still list their religious affiliation as “Protestant,” they certainly do not evoke an explicitly Protestant vision for American life. The secular media usually compartmentalizes religion into “local” or “entertainment” reports. The struggle to put prayer into public schools and the rise of fundamentalist Christian schools provide one index of the fact that Protestants have lost their hold on education. And the nation that once measured success in the building of churches now stares at empty pews, especially in mainline Protestantism. WEGW 98.2

In 1800, American religion, though the reasons and characteristics were different, had also reached a low ebb. In the aftermath of military victory in the war for independence, the American churches suffered spiritual defeat. The French Revolution inspired the transformation of deism, with its antagonism for revealed religion, from an aristocratic to a popular movement. Moreover, westward migration carried a vast population to “uncivilized” and “unchristian” settlements beyond the reach of the churches. WEGW 98.3

In the first flush of enthusiasm evoked by the Revolution, America had seen itself as a latter-day Israel. The dark, tyrannous powers of Europe lay behind it, and the Promised Land fell within its grasp. Thomas Jefferson recommended the pillar of cloud by day and light by night as the national symbol of the American Israel. Ezra Stiles entitled his Connecticut election sermon of 1783 “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor.” With his back turned on Europe, Stiles exuberantly predicted, “This will be a great, a very great nation, nearly equal to half of Europe.” He hoped for the day when “the Lord shall have made His American Israel high above all nations which He has made—in numbers, and in praise, and in name, and in honor.” WEGW 98.4

But the exhilaration of the moment waned. The war had left the Colonies depleted and disarrayed. The basis for optimism had been the boundless land, the enlarging population, and the diversity of interest. These very factors now undercut the hopefulness with anxiety. For more than two decades, then, the new Israel wandered in the wilderness wondering how to fulfill its promise. WEGW 99.1

As far as the American churches were concerned, the most promising and yet the most frightening feature of their new nation was the fact that it now separated church and state. The churches were no longer “established,” but voluntary organizations. This dramatic innovation of American life reduced the denominations to one resource for spiritual renewal—persuasion. WEGW 99.2

So, convinced of the Tightness of their cause, Protestants in particular expected revival preaching to make America “Christian.” Revivals had succeeded before. The Great Awakening of the 1740s had solidified a national consciousness that prompted the American Revolution. But following the Revolution, as with other postwar eras, the nation stood in dire need of spiritual rejuvenation. WEGW 99.3

While the first ripples of revival occurred in the 1790s, the great revivalistic wave called the Second Great Awakening engulfed the nation for almost two generations beginning in 1800. Typical of other great revivals in history, the schools figured prominently at the outset. The most important revival in Virginia happened among the students at Hampden-Sydney and Washington colleges in 1787. WEGW 99.4

In 1802, at Yale, President Timothy Dwight delivered a notable series of chapel talks to combat “freethinking” among the students, and prompted a revival. The real significance of the Yale revival was the fact that two students in Dwight’s student body became prominent leaders of the New England awakening. Lyman Beecher served as its organizer, and Nathaniel Taylor as its theologian. WEGW 99.5

The Second Awakening introduced a new kind of revivalism from that of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. In the earlier Calvinist awakening, the faithful heard the preaching of God’s Word and were “surprised” by the revival that resulted. They had only waited for revivals, as their God arbitrarily elected a few and damned the many without human assistance. In the Second Awakening, however, preachers provoked revivals by the use of “means” or techniques. With a shift from Calvinism to a new American orthodoxy—Arminianism—man cooperated with God in bringing on revivals. WEGW 100.1

For Charles Finney, the celebrity evangelist of the era, the new revivals were “man-made.” The revivalist elicited them by means of “new measures.” On the rugged Kentucky-Tennessee frontier, camp meetings provided a distinctive technique in American religious life marked, around 1800, by wild physical “exercises” such as falling, running, jumping, barking, and jerking. WEGW 100.2

In western New York, where Finney knew great success in the 1820s, revivals were more tame but no less novel or controversial. “Bred a lawyer,” Finney employed the tactics of a trial attorney as part of his new evangelistic techniques. He wore legal gray instead of clerical black. He referred to the “wicked” in his audience as “you” instead of “they.” The “convicted sinners” were coaxed to the “anxious bench,” a front pew roughly like a witness stand, where the lawyer-like evangelist fiercely cross-examined men and women in regard to their spiritual destinies. WEGW 100.3

Among the more scandalous new measures of Finney’s meetings was the practice of women testifying and praying in public. Another measure, the “protracted meeting”—a townwide revival campaign that lasted several weeks—was the camp meeting brought to town. WEGW 100.4

The results of the Second Awakening were astounding. Lyman Beecher had opposed adamantly the disestablishment of the church in his home state of Connecticut, for he thought religion could never prosper on an “open market.” Within two short years of this gloomy projection, however, he reversed his position as the Protestant phalanx swept the nation. WEGW 100.5

Under the experiment of religious freedom, Protestantism thrived and triumphed in establishing itself as the culture-shaping religious force in American life. Between 1800 and 1835 the nation’s church membership doubled as a result of the revivals. And when French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he reported that “there is no country in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” WEGW 100.6

Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians had dominated the Colonial scene as established churches, but under a “free enterprise” system of religion the Methodists and Baptists came into their own. Both Methodists and Baptists proved especially adaptable to the American frontier conditions. The Protestant achievement, however, crossed denominational lines. The crusade to Christianize America engaged a wide range of Protestants in an ecumenical task that saw, by the 1830s, the American wilderness begin to “bud and blossom as the rose.” WEGW 101.1

In their effort to Christianize America, Protestants sustained and spread Second Awakening enthusiasm through numerous voluntary organizations. In these societies, Congregationalists or Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists or Quakers, laid aside their sectarian differences to combine energies in specific religious tasks. American Protestants, then, expressed less concern for matters of faith than practice. They focused less on belief than behavior. The theological quarrels between various religious groups were minimized by the more pragmatic frame of mind. American Protestants, as the vernacular would have it, were “all going to the same place.” That is, they were marching in lockstep toward a Christian America—their kingdom of God on earth. WEGW 101.2

Societies founded for tract distribution or missions, education or temperance, antislavery or peace, enlisted the broadest possible support in the pursuit of single objectives. Pooling their resources in these societies, Protestant efforts flowed toward that larger, all-important objective of transforming American society in their image. WEGW 101.3

The missionary organizations, both home and foreign, were the most instrumental in this process. The circuit-riding Methodist missionary offered the best example of the expansiveness of the Protestant vision, as he showed up everywhere. Indeed, people commonly characterized the severity of a cloud burst or a blizzard by saying that “nobody was out but crows and Methodist preachers.” Numerous missionary organizations cropped up as Protestants sought to serve the Indians, or frontier areas, or foreign fields. WEGW 101.4

Bible and tract societies supplied the devotional literature for this missionary expansion. They served Sunday schools that trained children. They fed education societies, which built colleges and seminaries for the preparation of missionary personnel. Humanitarian groups provided another form of missionary endeavor whereby Protestants worked toward moral and social reform. WEGW 102.1

Voluntary societies became so pervasive that Orestes Brownson, himself an erstwhile social reformer, complained that “matters have come to such a pass that a peaceable man can hardly venture to eat or drink, to go to bed or get up, to correct his children or kiss his wife” without the guidance or approval of some society. WEGW 102.2

However one viewed the Protestant resurgence as the new nation took shape, the United States clearly illustrated Kenneth Scott Latourette’s point that the nineteenth century was “the great century” in the history of Christianity. WEGW 102.3

American Protestants of the early nineteenth century unified in their revivals and voluntary societies and therefore spurned “the spirit of sectarianism” that quenched enthusiasm or drained energy from the organizational enterprises. There were, however, dissenters within, and defectors from, the great Protestant empire. WEGW 102.4

The Unitarians and Universalists withdrew from evangelical religion because of the doctrinal harshness of revivalist preaching. James Freeman Clarke’s Affirmation of Faith summarized the minimal theology of Unitarians: “The fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.” Their well-to-do New England urbanity led to the quip that Unitarians believed in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston. Universalists were their less sophisticated rural counterparts who found eternal punishment intolerable. WEGW 102.5

Still other critics faulted evangelical religion for its doctrinal laxity. This group revived confessionalism and the sacramental life. The Old School confessionalists brought charges of heresy against New School or New Divinity men who supported the revivals. A number of heresy trials resulted in the early 1830s, though in each case the charges were dismissed. WEGW 102.6

The “high church” sentiment found its ablest spokesman of what was termed “evangelical catholicism” in John W. Nevin. He wrote The Anxious Bench as an outright attack on the “new measures” of revivalism. WEGW 103.1

The Second Awakening ethos produced unusually widespread religious ferment, marked by boundless expectation and unbridled enthusiasm. The millenarian and utopian movements of this time were less a rebuttal of evangelical revivalism than unique extensions of it. American church historian Winthrop Hudson identifies three emphases of revivalist preaching that created the climate of enthusiasm out of which came the new religious sects and social communities of this era. First, revivalists demanded an immediate confrontation with God, which could take the form of a vision of new revelation. Second, the revivalists stressed the potential for complete sanctification, which encouraged the holiness impulse and a life free from sin. Finally, they heightened millennial expectations of a golden age to come. All the groups that deviated from the evangelical religion of the era contained one or another of these emphases, and usually all three of them. WEGW 103.2

Ann Lee and her Shaker following, or John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Perfectionists, or Joseph Smith and the Mormons—each blended a new revelation with perfectionist and millenarian ideas in the formation of communal societies. The similarities between them ended in the way they viewed marriage and sexuality in the communal context. The Shakers rejected it altogether in adopting celibacy; the Mormons went to the opposite extreme in embracing polygamy; the Oneida Perfectionists fell somewhere in between in opting for the sexual promiscuity of “spiritual wifery.” WEGW 103.3

William Miller and the Millerites also flourished in this religious climate and should not be dismissed, according to social historian Whitney Cross, “as ignorant farmers, libertarian frontiersmen, impoverished victims of economic change, or hypnotized followers of a maniac, ... when the whole of American Protestantism came so very close to the same beliefs.” Cross believes that Millerites held to “the logical absolute of fundamentalist orthodoxy,” much as another historian, Timothy Smith, finds among them “a sensational variant of the views [other Protestants] all preached.” WEGW 103.4

Prior to the American Civil War, evangelical Protestantism held a position of dominance, despite the factions that either opposed it or introduced their own novel versions of the Protestant vision. For the most part, America had achieved “a Christian commonwealth” of Bushnell’s terms. The Civil War, however, was a watershed between an earlier and later America in which Protestantism began to lose its firm grip on the nation and became just one hand among many that reached for a hold on American life. WEGW 104.1

After the Civil War, Protestantism faced a conspicuously different population. In the decade before the war, the number of foreign born had increased by about 85 percent. Between 1860 and 1870, there occurred a further increase of almost 35 percent. This first great influx came from Ireland and was mostly Catholic, or from Germany and was made up of both Catholic and Lutheran Protestants, none of whom shared the Calvinist-Methodist roots of American evangelicals. By 1900, out of a population of 75 million, one third of Americans were either of foreign birth or children of foreign-born parents. Most of these new Americans were Catholics, Jewish, or Eastern Orthodox. WEGW 104.2

Not only did the demographic landscape profoundly change after the Civil War, but the intellectual climate shifted radically as well. In the earlier half of the century, geology rewrote the Genesis account of the origin of the world in the work of Charles Lyell. Biology, however, came to symbolize dramatically the era’s intellectual revolution with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. WEGW 104.3

Evolution was not new, nor was it confined to biology. Philosophers such as Hegel and Comte had heralded evolutionary thought earlier in the century, and Herbert Spencer superseded Darwin in importance by spelling out the implications of evolution in philosophy and ethics, psychology, and sociology. On the heels of the “new science,” a “new history” adapted its methods to fresh ways of understanding the past. “Higher criticism” soon followed with its disturbing reinterpretation of the Bible. WEGW 104.4

Intellectual change in America was accompanied by a rapid urban and industrial transformation of the nation. Before the war a simple Jeffersonian ideal had prevailed. The people were lured by the land, the unsettled, beckoning West. But as early as the decade of the 1840s, the population of the cities increased by 90 percent while the country as a whole grew only 36 percent. By 1860 the capital invested in industry, the railroads, commerce, and urban property exceeded the value of the farms. The Civil War then escalated this industrial growth into an explosion. The military needs put heavy demands on industry, and industry responded with immense growth and expansion. By the end of the war, America clearly had evolved from a rural to an urban and industrial society. WEGW 104.5

Conflicts arose politically between rural western interests and the powerful urban commercial interests concentrated in the East, but rural America gained no more than regional victories. Rural Americans also fought a losing battle in the face of the changing social values of the big city. It became increasingly difficult to “keep ‘em down on the farm once they’d seen” New York and Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. WEGW 105.1

The demographic, intellectual, and urban-industrial changes in national life posed serious challenges to American Protestants. The new immigrants eroded the Protestant domination both ethnically and religiously. The new science imperiled pivotal Protestant views of the Bible and history. The new industrialism left rural and small-town Protestants at a loss in dealing with the wage-earning masses of the megalopolis. WEGW 105.2

The new immigrants aroused nativist reaction on the part of old stock Americans for several reasons. Culturally, the Irish and Germans of the first wave and the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the second wave brought with them new folkways, customs, and values. Socially, they prompted apprehension by their poverty, illiteracy, and lack of sanitation. Politically, they seemed to arrive one day and vote the next in machine-style, “block” voting patterns. Economically, they did cheap labor for an industrializing nation, but they also depressed the wages and lowered the standard of living for Americans of longer standing. WEGW 105.3

Religiously, Protestant-Catholic tensions resulted from the nativist sentiment. Roman Catholicism was portrayed as part of an international conspiracy to subvert American democracy. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, had written a series of letters to the New York Observer in 1834 to this effect, entitled “A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States.” In the same period, Lyman Beecher and Horace Bushnell believed that Roman Catholicism sought to conquer Middle America and thus that area would become a battlefield of cosmic importance. WEGW 105.4

The Civil War diverted American attention from all but the conflict at hand, but the conspiracy theme was revived in 1887 with the formation of the American Protective Association. That organization pledged its members “to strike the shackles and chains of blind obedience to the Roman Catholic Church from the hampered and bound consciences of a priest-ridden and church-oppressed people.” WEGW 106.1

In addition to their concern that Catholics were plotting to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, Protestants collided with Catholics in two areas that embodied, for evangelicals, bulwarks of “a Christian commonwealth.” One was Sabbath observance. From Colonial Puritan days, American Protestants had looked upon strict Sunday observance as a cornerstone of the communities’ religious, social, and even political life. The “Continental Sunday” injected into American culture by the Catholics permitted a more relaxed, permissive observance and seemed to Protestants to sap the nation’s strength. WEGW 106.2

Another issue that divided Protestants from Catholics was temperance. While traditionally Protestants had drunk, they had long lambasted the evils of drinking to excess. Temperance societies proliferated in the late 1820s and 1830s with temperance pledges of varying degrees of strictness. As the temperance crusade shifted toward prohibition, Protestants divided on the question of whether persuasion alone could achieve their ends or whether coercion was necessary. Protestants had come to see temperance as vital to the nation’s welfare morally, politically, commercially, and domestically. Catholics dismayed them, then, by bringing in “their grog shops like the frogs of Egypt upon us.” WEGW 106.3

On the issues of Sabbath observance and temperance, Protestants hoped they could hang on to or reassert their ascendancy in American culture by way of two legislative efforts: the Sunday “blue law” and prohibition. WEGW 106.4

The new science prompted a less united response from Protestants than the new immigration. Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, spoke for Protestant liberalism in declaring that ministers cannot afford to become “apostles of the dead past” by letting “the development of truth run ahead of them.” Beecher counted himself “a cordial Christian evolutionist.” In a similar vein, philosopher John Fiske, in his Outline of Cosmic Philosophy, coined the formula “Evolution is God’s way of doing things.” WEGW 106.5

The theory of evolution actually posed less serious a problem than the “scientific” study of the Bible. Biblical scholars pointed up apparent conflicts within the Bible that challenged its authority. Ultimately, Protestants developed different ways of understanding biblical authority; but first, many of them sought a new basis of authority, either in “evangelical liberalism” or in “scientific modernism.” WEGW 107.1

Among evangelical liberals, Bushnell became a key figure in framing a theology that provided escape from bondage to the verbal form in which doctrine had been cast. He fashioned a Christocentric theology based upon internal Christian experience rather than external dogmatic authority. Later nineteenth-century theologians would enlarge upon this system by posing a spiritual faith based neither on the church nor on the Bible but on the Christian experience of man. In this way, evangelical liberals believed the Bible remained aloof from the assaults of “higher criticism.” WEGW 107.2

Scientific modernists suggested a more radical approach on the relation of science to religion than did the evangelical liberals. They used psychological and sociological analysis to explain not only religious experience but doctrine and church practice. Biblical theologian Shailer Mathews defined modernism as a faith in which “science” became the final arbiter on matters of religion. His sociohistorical approach to theology viewed all doctrinal statements as products of a cultural context. Thus, historic Christian doctrines were neither normative nor permanent. WEGW 107.3

Appalled by the accommodation within Protestantism to the new science, conservatives launched a counterattack. This involved primarily an emphatic, dogmatic denial, based on their indifference to “scientific” studies. Princeton theologian Charles Hodge, for example, adopted a defensive posture impervious to the new scholarship when he insisted, “We can even afford to acknowledge our incompetence to meet them in argument, or to answer their objections; and yet our faith remains unshaken and rational.” The notorious heresy trials that resulted when conservatives brought charges against liberals gained wide attention in the public press, but were confined largely to Hodge’s own Presbyterian church in the North. WEGW 107.4

Protestant conservatism, however, involved more than an attack on liberals. The conservatives proposed an agenda of their own. The “dispensationalist” and “premillennialist” speculations of J. N. Darby in England inspired “prophetic” Bible conferences in America. Meeting annually after 1876, these conferences supplied the leadership in the newly established “Bible schools.” The popularity of the Scofield Reference Bible, annotated according to dispensationalist theories, further solidified the importance of the “prophetic” movement in virtually all Protestant denominations. WEGW 108.1

The new science divided Protestants into two divergent parties—modernists and fundamentalists. Urbanization and industrialization presented challenges that similarly split American Protestantism. The working-classes confronted Protestants with an impenetrable barrier. Their evangelistic successes were achieved among white-collar workers who had come from rural areas, not the blue-collar ethnic masses. The poor, the destitute, and the unskilled laborers were an entirely lost cause for Protestants. The finely dressed, sophisticated Protestant congregations made all but the middle and upper-middle classes uncomfortable. WEGW 108.2

By the 1870s the radical criticism of society that had marked the antebellum socialistic and millenarian movements in the 1830s and 1840s had passed away. Historian Henry F. May observed that “in 1876 Protestantism presented a massive, almost unbroken front in its defense of the social status quo,” and Roman Catholicism did likewise. By the 1890s several outbreaks of violence between labor and management had shaken people from their social complacency. And by the turn of the century a two-party Protestantism revealed itself in two different gospels: the gospel of wealth and the social gospel. WEGW 108.3

The gospel of wealth baptized laissez-faire economics into American evangelicalism. The foremost apostle of the system was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who believed civilization depended on the “sacredness” of property, free competition, and free accumulation of wealth. He tempered the harshness of his economic survival-of-the-fittest, however, with the Wesleyan slogan that one should not only “gain all you can” and “save all you can,” but “give all you can.” WEGW 108.4

Carnegie’s gospel interlaced the stewardship of money, time, and talent, and found able clerical spokesmen in Phillips Brooks, Henry Ward Beecher, and Russell Conwell. In his famous lecture “Acres of Diamonds,” Conwell exhorted that everyone had a “duty to get rich.” The diamonds were in one’s own backyard. WEGW 109.1

The Social Gospel countered the economic individualism of a Carnegie and a Conwell with social concern for the laborer. Social Gospelers sought to bridge the chasm between the management types in Protestant pews and the unchurched laboring man by combating social injustice. WEGW 109.2

“Social Christianity” implied that the individual conversions of Dwight Moody’s evangelistic campaign had not done enough. The social environment to which these individuals returned after the evangelist left town must itself be transformed. Drawing upon an Old Testament prophetic tradition, Social Gospelers wanted to save society, not just “souls.” Thus, Baptist Social Gospeler Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianizing of the Social Order (1912). WEGW 109.3

If late-nineteenth-century Protestants divided in their response to an increasingly complex social and intellectual order, the non-Protestants that flooded America in this period pushed pluralism to seemingly limitless proportions. Between 1860 and 1900 a half million Jews poured into the country, escaping the anti-Semitism of Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Romania. WEGW 109.4

While Eastern Orthodoxy maintained a lower profile on the American scene than Judaism, it too added ethnic color to the urban landscape, primarily from immigrants of Russian background. The Lutherans staked out the Midwest by way of German and Scandinavian migration. Buddhism made its appearance among the Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast. Numerous esoteric faiths with varying links to the Orient introduced such religious systems as Hinduism, Theosophy, and New Thought. And in this ambience, Christian Science took hold and eventually flourished. WEGW 109.5

In the course of the nineteenth century, America evolved from a Protestant nation to a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish-Eastern Orthodox-Mormon-New Thought-Buddhist-Hindu country—and even this is not a complete list of the ingredients in the religious salad bowl. WEGW 109.6

In 1885 Josiah Strong, president of the American Home Missionary Society, wrote the book, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis, in which he summoned Americans to Christianize the world. He believed that Anglo-Saxon Americans bore two great traditions—“civil liberty” and “spiritual Christianity”—which were, for him, republicanism and Protestantism. While Strong saw the social, intellectual, and religious upheavals of late-nineteenth-century America as threats to the Christianization—really, Protestantization—of the world, he nevertheless fully expected to “save America for the world’s sake.” The course of human events steadily moved toward an ever more democratic and Christian world. WEGW 109.7

In the twentieth century, however, both democracy and Christianity occupy mere enclaves on an ominously totalitarian and non-Christian globe. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant can never expect to “hold the whole world in his hands.” Indeed, he has even lost grip on America. WEGW 110.1