Okay, so today I'm going to talk a little bit about progressivism and how progressivism becomes this movement that really transforms the United States in a lot of ways. In some respects, it's a very simple philosophy, and in other respects, it's actually very murky and convoluted and difficult to define. So I'll do my best to try to give you a broad overview of what progressivism looked like, and the kind of problems progressivism is attempting to respond to, and the kind of problems that progressivism, in some respects, creates or leaves open.
So, first thing, like populism, progressivism was really a response to industrialization, the robber barons, the gilded age, and the world that kind of the robber barons built. It is, in some respects, also a response to social Darwinism, although this is complicated, and we can talk about that. But, and it really, at its core, it really just has a very simple...
kind of axiom. And this axiom is that society can progress and become better through human action. This may seem somewhat intuitive and obvious to us, but I think perhaps as we've been talking about through the confines of, you know, industrialization and through the confines of kind of what that means and what that sets up and the sort of problems that that creates, we can maybe see that that's less obvious. And I think also very much in our current moment there are debates about this right how much free will the people actually have how much autonomy in agency to people have do more people or certain groups of people have autonomy and other groups don't this is a it was a major things that progressivism kinda takes up and offers really a very simple solution and the simple solution is that human action can make the world better now This produces a combination of things, economic and social platforms that emerge out of progressivism. And progressives will have a number of presidents that will be very, very successful.
They will produce several constitutional amendments. And there are, in many respects, actually still progressives today. Now, I would caution you against drawing a line between modern progressives and the progressives of the early 1900s.
There are some pretty big differences between the two, namely, especially, I think, some of the religious tensions of each group. But nonetheless, there are also some similarities. Now, for progressives, the concern...
Well, progressivism emerges, first and foremost, out of a Protestant concern for the overall... the overall makeup of society. Protestantism tends to be very individualized and it tends to really emphasize kind of like individual salvation and the individual's relationship with God and the individual's faith and this kind of thing especially American Protestantism and especially American evangelicalism in the context of this. This is in some respects a uniquely American thing in other respects it's it's somewhat reflective of the broader tradition of Protestantism within the history of Christianity and the Western world. So one of the things that's starting to happen that engenders the creation of progressive or liberal Protestantism is the idea of liberal theology.
Now liberal theology doesn't really have a, well it doesn't have the political connotation that you might expect it to have. So when we're talking about a liberal theology, uh... what we mean here broadly speaking is attempting to apply the rationalist lanes of uh...
the of the kind of scientific worldview to religious scripture and religious ideas so for instance uh... in christianity there's the idea that jesus christ is the son of god he's the uh... incarnated god uh...
in person and he's perfect and he dies and and he's crucified mean the is resurrected and through that and then talking from the transcend death and suffering. This is broadly speaking what Christianity posits. And so liberal theology in the context of Christ's existence, he performs all kinds of miracles. I'm sure some of you have heard of these before, even anecdotally, even if you're not necessarily aware that they come from Christianity in the Bible. So for instance, Christ turns water into wine.
and this is a miracle christ walks on water christ raises a man from the dead dashes demons et cetera et cetera et cetera right there's there's a lot of these miracles in the performance in his life and and So, conservative or classic or orthodox theology will say that, you know, these are literal occurrences that actually happened, and they are miracles. Liberal theology is going to try to take a rationalist lens of this, and they're instead going to sort of say something like, well, Christ probably doesn't actually turn water into wine, that would be scientifically impossible, and we're not really, they're not really emphasizing the supernatural. Instead, this is kind of a metaphor or a symbol for something else, something that happens within human practices, human society.
So, for instance, one way of thinking about this would be kind of imagining a situation in which, you know, the community is starving, but they manage to subsist on much less than they thought was necessary, or that kind of thing. Liberal theology starts to really kind of gain a hold and gain a tract within American thinking, especially American Protestant thinking, around the turn of the century. It's bolstered heavily by the idea of Darwinism, and it's in some respects a response to social Darwinism and the kind of philosophical worldview that social Darwinism presents, and it's a reaction to this. Now, liberal theology is going to have...
a couple of components to it that are pretty important to the advent of progressivism. The first of which is it's going to kind of reject the very individualistic Protestantism that American evangelical is known for, and sort of take it to the next level. So for instance, it's going to say something like, well, social problems are really just individual moral problems magnified. So for instance, you know, theft. is not just an individual problem, it's a social problem because it reflects the fact that people are stealing, and people are stealing because they're desperate or because they're not taught right or because they're not acting right or all of these things.
So it's not just an individual problem, it's a social problem. And to some extent, this is kind of like the advent or the beginning of social justice. Now, here's where I'm The theology, I think, will hopefully start to make a little bit more sense. So you're going to have a bunch of Protestants, people like Walter Ralkenbusch and others, who are going to come in and say, like, well, we as a society, we have to stop paying attention to individual errors, individual problems, and we need to start spending or paying attention a lot more to these social issues, and we need to combat them, and we need to attend to them, and we need to find mechanisms to do this. And some of their answers are, well, their first answer, right, is that this can be done through human action, right?
So people can change and better their circumstances. We don't need anything else besides people to accept this, so we don't need God. And this comes to one of the central sort of theological doctrines of the progressive era, and especially of the social gospel.
And this is called millennialism. So in Christianity, there is this idea that Christ will come again, Jesus Christ, the perfect Son of God, will come again, and he will reign on earth for a thousand years. And when he comes, you know, there's a time of trouble, and this is like the apocalypse and the end of the world, but after he comes back, there's this thousand-year reign of perfection, and this is called the millennial, right?
This is millennialism. Now, classic or traditional Orthodox Christian thought says that this is like the time at which this will occur, only God knows. and we will have this perfect society only after God comes, or only after Jesus comes. Liberal theology is going to start to play with that a little bit. And one of the things that they will decide to start to argue is that, well, maybe Christ only will come once we as a society have reached the pinnacle.
So we have to come closer to creating the kingdom of God on earth. And only when that happens, then Christ comes back. In some understanding of this, in fact, it's possible that we even reach this perfect society, and we have this perfect society for a thousand years, and then Christ comes back, and then the world ends.
This is some of the imagining that they come, you know, theological imagining. So anyway, they're kind of like apocalyptic. imaginings of the end of the world.
So progressives then are sort of implicitly suggesting something, right? They're implicitly suggesting that people can in fact create the perfect world. right if you can if you can and people in fact can can make not just their own lives better but all of society better so that to a certain extent history is kinda progressing on an arc right we're starting down here and we're moving forward we're going up and beyond we're ascending to something greater right and and here and is where you can the rubber sort of really meets the road for the progressives and they are going to argue right that there that you can at better society through human action you can create this perfect society and the best way to do this is to start attending to things on the social level and what is going to come out into being for the most part is that government will be the mechanism by which we enact as a society these reforms to make society better so in other words government becomes the mechanism through which people make the world better now This idea gets a lot of traction.
There are a lot of people who really like the idea of making the world better through human action. It's empowering, right? It says we can do something, we can make things better, we can attend to them right now.
It's communal, right? It brings a lot of people together. It encourages them to work towards something, work toward making the world better.
And it also is, it's also vague. It's actually really pretty vague. What is the perfect society? What does that look like? And another way of thinking about this is, well, what happens if you don't exactly believe in the theology of liberal Protestantism?
Or what happens if your understanding of what's perfect is different from someone else's understanding of what's perfect, right? And what does this mean within certain other lenses? So this is one of the reasons I would suggest that progressivism is really successful. It's vague.
It's action-oriented and it's vague. So this means someone like a social Darwinist can, in fact, in a lot of ways, agree with the progressives. Yes, we can make the world better. Yes, we should make the world better.
Yes, society is going to progress. But, of course, what the social Darwinists mean by making things better and what the liberal Protestants mean by making things better are not always necessarily the same. And then you can magnify this to different lenses, right? Well, what about what African Americans are looking for? What about what Chinese laborers are looking for?
So you see how this idea of progressivism has a problem with what we call telos. Telos is like an ultimate aim or goal. If the ultimate aim is a perfect society, then you have to ask yourself a couple of serious questions. One, what does that perfect society look like? Two, how would you go about getting there?
Three, is that something that's possible in the first place? And this becomes very... nebulous really fast right and and if you don't think that's true then I just encourage you to to think about what the perfect society would be in your own mind and then compare that to say that of your friends and see see how much even the two of you might disagree with the three of you and then now magnify that out right start bringing in other worldviews okay and so like this has all kinds of problems with things like imperialism right well well what if the best thing What if the way to make the world progress is to, you know, end slavery and end world hunger?
Well, how do you do that? Well, you can't stop slavery in Africa unless you go there and you conquer Africa. Yes, of course, there's the hypocrisy of the fact that the United States just fought a war over slavery. But now the ascendant position is that slavery is wrong.
So because it's wrong, we have to go into these other places, conquer them, remove their old... traditions and customs and enter them into our system so this is this is a lot of respects the justifications for imperialism in here you can see right to a certain extent social social justice or the social gospel has built within it a desire maybe not in all this is not of course an automatic given right and this is why also I would say be careful about drawing lines between contemporary progressives and progressives of the early 1900s, but there is this desire, there's this impulse within progressivism to expand, to crusade, to grow, to get bigger, to build this all-encompassing system. And this is a major component of what liberal theology and progressivism will produce in the United States.
Another way of thinking about this question is thinking exactly, so I'll come back to this question of the perfect society. Okay, so telos means like ultimate aim. Okay, so I'll give you an example. If you're a football player, the telos right is to make it to the NFL and then to win a Super Bowl that is the ultimate aim right so so that becomes the number one priority and in order to do that right you're going to have to sacrifice all kinds of things right in order to have even a chance to do that you're gonna have to sacrifice all kinds of things so you have to put everything else in the hierarchy so that at the top of your values your most important aim that which gets your most attention is getting better at football right so instead of going out with friends you might be studying game film Instead of eating pizza, you might have to only have a grilled chicken because you have to make sure your body is as strong as possible. Instead of staying close to home, you might have to travel all over the country so that you can get the best coaches and be on the best teams in order to have a chance to do this.
So all of these things require sacrifice. All of these things require an alignment of priorities. So this is the idea. of telos, right?
So again, I'll come back to the question. What is the telos within progressivism? If the telos is, say, equality, right, then the goal has to be something like, well, everything has to fall in line to make sure that we have equality first.
This is the problem in a lot of respects that communism in practice produces. How do you end up with equality, or how do you manifest or produce equality if people have different skills, if people have different backgrounds, if people have different abilities, if some jobs are more difficult than others, if everybody doesn't always want to do the same task, right? And some people are more disadvantaged than others, right?
Some people are better at some things than others. This is a difficult problem that we have with equality, right? So, okay, are you going to make taxes? Are you going to make government systems? How are you going to do this?
Right? And so again, I'll come back to this idea that this is why I think progressivism kind of works because it's vague. It leaves open the question of what the telos is exactly, and it just has within it this idea that we're going to make the world better, and we're going to do it through human action, and how exactly we're going to do that, where we're going to do that, through what purpose we're going to do that, is not really defined. And we'll see this, right? And we can see this within progressivism itself.
If you compare, say, the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, they're both progressives, technically. but they have very different understandings and ideas about what the perfect society is and what it should look like okay so practically speaking one of the things that progressives and produces is it produces organizations the YMCA is a very classic example that the Salvation Army you can still see the Salvation Army today right around Christmas time the people who stand out with the bells with the Christmas music and they encourage you to donate right this is the Salvation Army These are sort of like a Christian, Protestant Christian charity organization. The YMCA is the sort of youth of Christian America education, youth men's Christian America education thing. Just like boys'schools, boys'Catholic schools are a major thing that's part of the YMCA. So you can see this impulse within progressivism to bring people together, to organize, to try to solve social problems, right?
Salvation Army, to try to solve poverty. uh... ymca is to try to give uh... young people an education give them uh... you know a chance to to uh...
to get better and succeed in life and in practice the progressives are going to produce a very powerful political coalition this coalition is going to be a middle class reformers northern laborers intellectual elites very strong protestant courage uh... some black intellectuals w e b dubois is a progressive right we can see this within his is thinking of racial uplift right the leaders will be the ones who bring us on our trajectory upward. Education is the mechanism by which the black community will accomplish this. And reform is a key notion of the group. Government is the mechanism through which we produce this, as I said.
And they'll be leaders, in a lot of respects, in socialist-esque workers'reform, but also, in relation to that, also social reform. So, for instance, and here again we can see our question of Telos really fast, prohibition. It becomes clear, or at least progressives will argue, that the world would be a much better place if people didn't drink alcohol.
Alcohol produces too many problems. It produces accidents, it produces violence, it produces foolishness, it produces alcoholism. So the world would be a whole lot better off if we didn't have it.
So let's ban its sale and manufacturing. and there we end up with prohibition anti-prostitution immigration controls anti-abortion is another thing that becomes a major part of original progressive protestant progressive action and these are some of the ideas and policies that they will pursue right prohibition will eventually have a constitutional amendment progressives in power will try to do a couple of different things right their their biggest And most successful, I think, advents are going to be the birth of what is called conservationism. You can think of it as kind of early environmentalism, although it's not exactly the same.
Conservationism is the idea that the United States needs to protect its natural resources, and through progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, when he becomes president, we will have the creation of the national park system. You'll see some of this in the documentary. Muckrakers are going to be...
They're going to be journalists who try to go and expose the practices of companies. So one of the most famous examples is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. A lot of people read this in high school if you're familiar with the book.
He talks about all the kinds of problems within the meatpacking industry and the really sort of dirty and unsanitary things they do with people's food in Chicago. And from there, we will have the creation of federal legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The FTC is going to try to regulate trade. The Federal Trade Commission will be created. Theodore Roosevelt is going to try to bust trusts, break up the monopolies of the major big corporations. And these are going to be all the sorts of things that progressives try to do when they're in power.
Women are going to be enormously important in the progressive movement. They're probably the most important progressive players, although for the most part when people think of famous progressives, tend to think of American presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt. Really it's women who are kind of like the backdrop of this. Jane Addams, whole house is a big example of this. Addams is creating these Protestant hospitals and health care and social organizations, poor organizations to try to help people.
This is, and Adams of course, as we read, will also make this argument for the women's right to vote. Again, this question, what is our end goal, what is our ultimate aim? In this case, the progressives will start to argue, or at least the women within the progressive movement will start to argue that, well, the world would be a lot better place if women could vote. And this is going to, they're going to be bolstered by the fact that women are participating in industry, the Women's Christians Temperance Union.
that is the largest in fact private organization in the United States for decades and the temperance in this case refers to the restriction or the consumption or use of alcohol so they're supporters of prohibition and they are these are going to eventually transition into bona fide suffrage movements although in a lot of respects this will be dominated by white middle-class educated women and eventually then we'll have the culmination of the first progressive president in Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.