Americans in the 1890s lived in a golden age of utopian and futuristic speculation, and those visions inevitably included visions of the religious future.
Consciously or otherwise, we all speculate about the future, and we make assumptions about how the world will develop in coming decades. Usually, we just project our present realities. In the 1960s, for instance, many informed people envisaged something like the coming Secular City, when old religious forms would fade away. In the 1890s, American visions likewise built on the trends they witnessed around them. These included the commitment to social reform and the Social Gospel, and the new globalization that permitted close interfaith dialogue. Some observers were keenly aware of the likely impact of new technologies, above all in matters of communication. And however strange this might seem in retrospect, a surprising number contemplated the mainstreaming of mystical and supernatural forces – of what we might describe as superpowers.
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A World of Faiths
Extrapolating from present trends can be a risky business. Looking at the religious trends of his day, Mark Twain predicted in 1899 that Christian Science might make “the most formidable show that any new religion has made in the world since the birth and spread of Mohammedanism, and that within a century from now it may stand second to Rome only, in numbers and power in Christendom.” In 1907, William James made a similar point when he remarked that “It is quite obvious that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.” He was referring to Mind Cure movements, such as Christian Science and New Thought.
Obviously both Twain and James were wrong in their prediction, but other would-be prophets emerge much more impressively. At the great World’s Parliament of Religions held in 1893, for instance, most of the speakers acknowledged that globalization was now a vital force in human affairs, and that would be still more true in the coming century. Christians and Jews inevitably would interact more closely with other world religions, and especially with the great traditions of South Asia. “The world” was not simply going to go away.
The Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire
The other great trend of American Christianity in this era was the deep involvement in social reform and the Social Gospel. One celebrated expression of that idea was in Walter Rauschenbusch’s book The Social Gospel (1908), and closely following the utopian fashions of the day, he framed his arguments in a vision of the far future:
The cry of “Crisis! crisis!” has become a weariness. Every age and every year are critical and fraught with destiny. Yet in the widest survey of history Western civilization is now at a decisive point in its development.
Will some Gibbon of Mongol race sit by the shore of the Pacific in the year A.D. 3000 and write on the “Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire”? If so, he will probably describe the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the golden age when outwardly life flourished as never before, but when that decay, which resulted in the gradual collapse of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, was already far advanced.
Or will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which all past history has no parallel ?
It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm. It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge.
Inventing the Televangelist.
As I have noted, utopian works proliferated from the late 1880s onward, although very few specifically sketched the future of religion. One reason for that was that much of what could naturally be said had already appeared in by far the most successful utopian work of this era, namely Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). This described a man of the 1880s who finds himself in a technologically sophisticated America in the year 2000, which is organized under a benevolent state socialism.
Although Bellamy came from distinguished Puritan and Baptist roots, he had no particular religious commitment. Even so, his analysis of that American utopia had to address obvious questions about the fate of Christianity. He did so in his sizable Chapter 26, which comprises some 5,000 words. The nineteenth century time traveler, Julian West, discovers it is Sunday and his hosts ask if he would like to hear a sermon. He is startled to find that organized religion still endures, and asks if they have a “national church with official clergymen.” His hosts laugh: of course not! They are not barbarians. But there is total religious toleration, and the omnipotent state allow the use of facilities and time to anyone who wishes to serve a ministerial function. But really, churches as such are not required, and Bellamy’s words genuinely do reflect a reasonable prediction of future conditions:
Now, as to hearing a sermon to-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear it or stay at home.”
“How am I to hear it if I stay at home?”
“Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour and selecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hear sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musical performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically prepared chambers, connected by wire with subscribers’ houses. If you prefer to go to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don’t believe you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than you will at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences often reaching 150,000.”
This has to be the first recorded vision of a system in which citizens delight in the sermons that they hear remotely in the comfort of their homes, as preachers reach hundreds of thousands. If not exactly a televangelist, he is a phono-evangelist. Bellamy, like most of his imitators, stressed the likelihood that the very rapid modern communications of the late nineteenth century would become ever faster and more convenient, and would spark cultural revolutions.
Mr. Barton’s Sermon
The rest of the chapter, Mr. Barton’s sermon, represents a statement of the progressive values of the time, most of which fall within the general category of the Social Gospel. And as I have so often mentioned in these posts, the underlying assumptions rely heavily on evolutionary thought and language:
Since then, humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the animating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic conception of the opportunities of our earthly existence, and the unbounded possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from generation to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the realization of God’s ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step upward.
“Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God ‘who is our home,’ the return of the individual by the way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”
I will highlight here the words about “a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected.” Bellamy intended these, I think, in the context of a new moral awareness of shared purpose and social benevolence. But there were plenty of his contemporaries who saw them in a far more mystical way, and who saw these new “higher faculties” as the heart of the future development of religion.
And that is what I will be talking about in my next post.
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