Tracing the Roots of Modern Morality: Calvinists and Ethical Foundations

By Gary S. Smith

Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania 16127

America is experiencing a moral crisis. While church attendance and membership today are near all-time-high levels and the number of those claiming to be born again has risen substantially in the past decade, our moral practices have become worse. Abortions, child and wife abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual aberrations and crime have steadily increased in recent years. Fraud, economic exploitation and racism continue to plague social relations. Underlying these manifestations and contributing significantly to them is a deep uncertainty about the nature of morality itself and the basis for law. The traditional foundation for our ethical practice has been seriously questioned, challenged and even denied. Our present confusion over morality is in part a product of earlier historical developments. To understand the nature of our problem today, it is necessary to trace the rise of secular views of morality. By teaching that all moral ideas and principles are relative, that they are socially produced and maintained, these views have weakened commitment to the Judeo-Christian foundation of ethics and law in America. This essay focuses on the response of Reformed Christians to these secular ethical systems during their most formative period of development, the years between 1870 and 1920.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, antagonism between two fundamentally different moral conceptions was clear. Traditional theistic moralities made divinely revealed truths the authority in ethics; such emerging secular moralities as pragmatism, naturalism, positivism, utilitarianism, and idealism did not. All these secular systems substituted various forms of situationalism or relativism for the long-standing belief in the Bible as the foundation for morality. Expressing this antagonism, such titles as “Are We Passing Through a Great Moral Crisis?” “Blasting at the Rock of Ages,” “The Modern Assault on the Christian Virtues,” and “Can We Have Morality Without Religion?” adorned the pages of the popular American periodical, Current Literature.[1] A British writer observed that humanity was currently “passing through one of the most acute crises since the age of Charlemagne.” The clash between the traditional religious moral code and the one slowly evolving from naturalistic conceptions of the world, he asserted, was producing problems in such varied areas as the relationship between the sexes, the attitude of youth toward the older generation, the conflict between individualism and collectivism, and the tension between internationalism and patriotism.[2] Similarly, the editors of The Outlook concluded in 1909 that Americans faced “the greatest demoralization of moral standards since the beginning of the Christian era.”[3] The editors of The Nation insisted in 1912 that the central question of the early twentieth century was: is secularism right? “It is right to take a purely human attitude towards life, to assume man is the measure of all things, and to believe that, even though the unseen may be there, still we can know our duty and our life without reference to it.”[4]

By the 1920s it was apparent that secular ideas had significantly influenced American ethical standards and practices.[5] The impact of pragmatism and humanism in education, naturalism in the physical and social sciences, the application of social Darwinism to business and social relationships and even the promotion of Christian antinomianism all promoted this effect.[6] Increasingly, in the years after 1890, American schools and universities influenced their students to view ethics in a pragmatic way that identified the good, not with the right, but with advantageous outcomes. This trend was further enhanced by the new currents of thought which tended to undermine the traditional theistic foundation for ethics. A few taught that God was either non-existent or unknowable. Scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the doctrine that ethics had no absolute sanctions, but rather must be justified pragmatically. By seriously challenging the existence of God, naturalism helped weaken belief in the concepts of divine authority and absolute standards. Naturalistic ideas had a strong impact not only in the physical sciences but also in such social sciences as psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics and history. Business and social practices offered everyday confirmation of utilitarian ethics. In commerce and industry Andrew Carnegie and scores of other businessmen put into practice Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the social sphere. Thus new directions in these areas strongly encouraged Americans to base morality on flexible and practical guidelines rather than on fixed norms.[7]

While it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the debate between Judeo-Christian and secular moralities received widespread public attention, Calvinists, those who embraced the theology of John Calvin’s Genevan Reformation, had complained much earlier, as had many other Christians, that the moral implications of these secular systems were dangerous to traditional theistic views. In the first volume of his Systematic Theology published in 1872, Princeton Seminary professor Charles Hodge denounced the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1859) for teaching that the five senses were the sole source of knowledge and that therefore only matter existed for certain. Hodge warned, as did many other Reformed thinkers, that positivism was a world view which sought to control all human affairs—education, politics, social organization, religion and moral conduct—and he repudiated its central premise that all morality was determined simply by physical laws and material changes.[8] Several years later, a reviewer in the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review declared that Christian theology and ethics must contend against Herbert Spencer’s naturalistic system for their “very life.”[9] James McCosh, president of Princeton College, complained as early as 1881 that Spencer’s Data of Ethics and Sidgwick’s Method of Ethics had seriously shaken the foundations of morality and had caused promising youths everywhere to question ethical sanctions. McCosh warned that many colleges were asleep on the edge of a volcano which was soon likely to erupt and spew ethical expediency across the land.[10]

In 1890 prominent Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney joined the three major arguments—that all secular moralities had inadequate standards, improper goals, and insufficient power to inspire upright behavior—advanced by Calvinists against these systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking for many Calvinists, Dabney asserted that these systems would “never win a permanent victory over the human mind.” For, on their basis, there could be “no moral distinction, no right, no wrong, no rational, obligatory motives, no rational end save immediate, selfish and animal good, and no restraint on human wickedness.”[11]

By offering a materialistic explanation for all reality, the theory of naturalistic evolution, Calvinists complained, had given strong support to such diverse philosophical systems as materialism, pragmatism, positivism, utilitarianism and humanism. All of them repudiated divine sanctions and absolute standards for moral conduct. Infidelity, the various forms of mysticism and rationalism, and philosophies which held that morality was the result of tradition and education, a Southern Presbyterian noted in 1891, “all converge in denying the existence of any eternal abstract principles of morality engraven upon the heart and read by intuitive consciousness…. In short, they all exalt subjectivity excessively.”[12] While Kantians and pragmatists usually did not deny God’s existence, Calvinists observed, they did not base ethical practices on his laws or authority. For Immanuel Kant, the great German metaphysician, the foundation of ethics was the autonomous human conscience, not divine standards. Pragmatists and naturalists agreed that the ultimate test of any behavior was not whether it conformed to God-given rules, but whether it was socially advantageous and expedient. Therefore, Calvinists judged, they evaluated conduct not by norms, but by results.[13] Thus while believing that differences existed between these various philosophies, Calvinists used similar arguments against all of them, contending that none of these ethical systems had a proper basis for authority, adequate ethical goals, or sufficient power to stimulate righteous conduct. Calvinists insisted that all secular schemes of morality lacked adequate foundations for ethical behavior. They emphasized that Christian ethics were rooted in an unchanging, holy, just, and sovereign God who had revealed moral laws in the Bible. Because God was supremely powerful and entirely good, Reformed conservatives declared, he provided both the ultimate moral standards and the sanction to enforce them. Because secular ethics were not based upon divine authority, they could not motivate people to obey the law. They provided neither a positive moral example like Jesus nor any threat of eternal punishment for disobedience.[14] Calvinists argued that, in addition to the Bible, an individual’s conscience also testified that he was subject to divine commands. It taught him, Francis Patton asserted, that duty was not determined by self-interest, but by an undeviating law of right.[15]

Calvinists protested especially that the ethical system of Immanuel Kant was built upon moral sand. Kant acknowledged that humans were obligated by conscience to perform their duty, but declared conscience to be autonomous, independent of God. To Kant, reason legislated within the soul by its own right; the will of God had little to do with determining questions of duty.[16] Attacking Kant’s views, Francis Patton asserted that the most rational way of accounting for the intuitive idea of “oughtness” was to explain it as a natural result of human subjection to God’s moral government.[17] Charles Hodge agreed that human moral convictions necessitated belief in a God to whom all must give account.[18] The conscience did not determine the good or make the law, James McCosh added; it was merely the faculty through which the good and the true were revealed. Standards of truth existed for morality just as they did for mathematics. While believing that the conscience played a vital role in ethical choices, he argued that it could not be the final standard because it constantly erred; rather, God’s infallible moral law must be the supreme authority.[19]

Supporting McCosh’s position, William B. Greene, Jr., of Princeton Seminary contended that several considerations demonstrated that there was objective righteousness outside the conscience to which rational beings must conform, a view which was increasingly attacked by American scientists, professors and journalists in the early twentieth century.[20] One was the clearness, distinctiveness and universality of the human perception of oughtness. All peoples had a sense of right and wrong and, given human selfishness, the force and extent of agreement on morals among them was remarkable. Equally important was the pervasiveness of the concept of duty. Although individuals often desired emancipation from this idea, they could not silence its imperative. Finally, Greene declared, experience also taught that the world was constituted and administered according to absolute standards.[21]

Despite Kant’s belief that fundamental moral truths could be known intuitively, Patton argued that in the final analysis he was a utilitarian. The German thinker had asserted that moral action was a response to an a priori dictate of the will, without reference to the consequences; yet when asked for an example of a universal maxim, Kant gave one that promoted personal advantage or general well-being. To Patton, there were two ways to settle such a particular ethical question as, “Should laws be passed against theft?” Human beings must either have a supreme norm of right; or they must empirically test the maxim by asking people whether they preferred to live in a thievish or honest community. “If I take the latter plan,” Patton maintained,

I surrender my a priori morality and am no better then Spencer, Mill, and the empiricists generally. This is exactly what Kant does. To Kant, if I seek for a norm of Right, I make a concession to heteronomy. I pay deference to an external will. This is exactly what, as a Theist, I am bound to do. And this only shows we must have a theistic basis for morality or accept some form of the happiness theory of ethics.

Kant’s attempt to find a via media failed, Patton said, for morality must rest on a higher standard than the individual conscience. Ethical principles sanctioned only by the human will eventually came to rest on convenience and expedience.[22]

McCosh and others observed that subsequent thinkers had strongly assaulted Kant’s view of conscience. John Stuart Mill explained human moral convictions by his theory of the “association of ideas.” Herbert Spencer argued that conscience was merely the remembered collective experience of one’s ancestors. Materialists explained moral beliefs as simply the product of the movement of molecules in the brain. All these alternative explanations had helped undermine Kant’s view of intuitive morality.[23] In 1899 a writer in the Presbyterian and Reformed Review declared that “Kant’s categorical imperative used to be the final word in the ethical controversy, but today this is set aside for a doctrine which robs the inward law of its authority and sets the soul adrift on the shifting currents of human opinion. It doesn’t matter what a man believes if he is sincere.”[24]

Calvinists insisted that the naturalistic moralities which were rapidly displacing Kant’s moral schemes offered an even less firm basis for ethical authority. Christians had always believed that morality was a law, written by a higher power on the tablet of the soul. Naturalists, however, could not account satisfactorily for the intuitive sense of duty, nor show the intimate connection between the moral and religious natures. Francis Ferguson argued that history demonstrated that a society’s moral conduct was always directly related to its religious beliefs; morality and religion had common aims—to promote the health and righteousness of individuals and society.[25] Human beings, Calvinists and other theists repeatedly declared, could not abandon their religion and maintain their morality. These considerations indicated to Reformed Christians that the moral and religious natures must have had a common origin.[26]

Naturalists, however, taught that they arose from different sources—morality from the needs of sentient nature, religion from some “morbid imagination.”[27] According to the chief architect of the new naturalistic ethics, Herbert Spencer, the theory of natural selection was destroying the sacred sanction of moral injunctions, causing them to lose their authority. Because so many were rejecting the conception of a supreme righteousness, whose codes defined what was good and directed conduct, it was imperative, he believed, to place morality on a secular foundation.[28]

Calculations of expedience, Spencer concluded, must guide human moral practices. Behavior should be considered good or bad to the extent that its total effects were pleasurable or painful. Moral standards were not given by the gods, rather they had developed progressively through the interaction of social convention, education, and environment.[29]

Calvinists agreed with Spencer that epistemology and ethics were connected. If people abandoned belief in God, they would naturally reject the authority of the Bible and its moral system. Without a divine sanction, ethics logically would be subjective, based on each person’s inclinations.[30] It was futile, McCosh maintained, to believe that people would love God with all their hearts if they thought that the argument for his existence had been demolished. He ridiculed the contention of secular moralists that they could rewrite the second table of the Ten Commandments on a profane basis, for, he declared, all the statutes are “provokingly prohibitory.”[31], “If you take away from men the belief in the supernatural and the authority behind the categorical imperative,” another Calvinist added, “you destroy all incentive to morality.”[32] Lyman Atwater cautioned that rejecting God’s authority left “only self-interest.”[33] How long would religious sanctions prove binding, George Patton of Princeton College asked, when they were “shown to be irrational?”[34] To materialists, the concept of authority was, in fact, absurd. For will, conscience, and duty were not real entities or feelings but were merely the product of molecular movement in the brain.[35] Although most materialists would deny it, Francis Patton argued, their view logically implied that thought was “as mechanical as digestion”; conduct was as “purposeless as soda-water.” Materialism could not provide an authority sufficient to enforce the law.[36] Calvinists believed intensely, as Lyman Atwater put it in 1880, that “morality severed from the light and sanctions of religion” was “maimed and paralyzed.” Thus they especially denounced naturalistic ethics, one of the systems arising out of Darwinism.[37]

Although appreciating their support against materialists, Calvinists believed that idealists also had an inadequate basis for moral authority. Idealists emphasized human moral freedom and the primacy of the mental or spiritual over the physical or material. Led by Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosopher, they attempted to show that naturalistic interpretations of Darwinism could not adequately explain the human predicament or inspire upright behavior. Francis Patton protested, however, that Royce attempted to do what “even Jesus could not do—find some self-supporting moral ideal.” Royce discovered this absolute in Universal Will, a common consent underlying all thought. But, Patton argued, common consent was “not a proof of rightness.” By making human opinion the supreme arbiter in moral decisions, Royce had “founded the Lofty Ought on the Paltry Is.”[38]

While strongly denouncing materialism and idealism, Calvinists paid little attention to reform Darwinism, which was also a powerful current in the late nineteenth century.[39] Reform Darwinists such as Henry George believed that although humans were the product of natural evolution, the emergence of consciousness and the capacity for care had added a new dimension to the evolutionary dynamic which made it possible for humans to help and love one another. Calvinists may have ignored the ethical views of reform Darwinism because they were preoccupied with secular moralities which denied the existence of God, the authority of the Scripture, the spiritual nature of human beings, and important biblical ethical teachings. They considered materialism, positivism and social Darwinism to be greater threats to Christian morality.

By the first decade of the twentieth century another ethical system, the pragmatism of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, was adding a new challenge to biblical ethical standards. While Pierce originated pragmatism as a philosophical system and Dewey spelled out its implications for education, politics, and social action, Harvard psychology professor William James was its primary popularizer. In some areas the pragmatists had to fight an uphill battle against social Darwinism and idealism which were dominant in late nineteenth-century America. Pragmatism, however, soon surpassed these other philosophies in importance.[40]

Pragmatism, one Calvinist argued, was an eclectic philosophy. The powerful impact of evolutionary theory, the alleged inadequacy of traditional logic, the extraordinary progress of modern science, the increasing emphasis on utility and effectiveness in industry, and the theological influence of Kant, especially as mediated through Ritschl, all contributed to its growing attractiveness.[41] Pragmatism appealed to Americans because they were a very practical people and because it supported religion’s claim that there was an area of human experience into whose fundamental meaning science could never penetrate.[42] Many Christians applauded James’ argument that the religious world view was superior to a materialistic one from a functional and emotional standpoint.[43]

Despite its differences with other current philosophies, Calvinists contended, the ethical views of the pragmatists rested also on a repudiation of divine authority as the basis for morality.[44] According to one Southern Presbyterian, pragmatists revived the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ fundamental error of reducing every principle to a practical test.[45] For them, the postulate that was true would “work” the best in daily life. John Dewey claimed that ethical theory had been “hypnotized by the notion” that its goal was to “discover some final end or good or some ultimate and supreme law.” Rather, he insisted, people must believe in a “plurality of changing, moving, individualized goods and ends.”[46] This, Calvinists argued, was precisely pragmatism’s central problem; it had no ultimate standard for judging what worked best. Granted, pragmatists were devoted to social expediency, not merely individual advantage; they insisted that the welfare of all humanity and not of any group or person was the governing goal.[47] But, Robert Dabney protested, utilitarian principles could lead people to use evil means to achieve good results. “If the consequences of the evil act, so far as foreseen, seemed beneficial, it would be right to do it.”[48] Calvinists insisted that the chief weakness of all utilitarian systems was that expediency could never produce oughtness. In fact, without an absolute standard, they argued, the best would always be relative and in flux.[49]

All these philosophies, positivism, Kantian ethics, materialism and pragmatism, a Southern Presbyterian concluded in 1891, had made “no authority” Satan’s slogan in the present age. “In politics, business, science, morals, and religion he raises up anarchists, soulless corporations and impersonal stock companies, materialists, evolutionists, rationalists to push the campaign, either by tearing down the flag of authority completely or by shifting the base on which it is planted.”[50] Removing the divine sanction for moral conduct, Calvinists warned, left only human standards which were temporal, whimsical, and insufficient. Without the protection of a transcendent lawgiver and a supernatural moral code, people could always be victimized by political, economic, or intellectual elites or subject to the tyranny of the majority.[51] To McCosh, doctrines of expediency, convenience, and concern for the public good were inadequate to restrain selfishness and lust, and so keep humans from preying on one another.[52] Even naturalistic evolutionists, such as T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, did not know by what sanctions the new morality would be enforced; they could only hope that the social instincts, hereditary conscience and desire to serve others, characteristic of any “refined mind, conversant with history,” would overrule passions and direct conduct. Having banished religious sanctions to the region of the unknown and unknowable, Calvinists averred, Spencer rested morality on political and social sanctions which depended on the general beliefs and sentiments of the community and the age. Spencer insisted that history was moving toward a millennium when all people would act morally, for all motives to sin would be eliminated.[53] But until this golden age was reached, he offered no ethical absolutes to inhibit and counteract people’s natural depravity.[54] In short, Calvinists argued, all secular schemes of morality led to relativism and subjectivity, for lacking fixed and final commandments, the only basis they could offer for ethics was common human opinion, the will of the majority or the arbitrary values of an elite.[55]

Not only did secular philosophies have no adequate basis of moral authority, they also seemed to Calvinists to offer insufficient goals for ethical behavior. They did so largely because they misunderstood human nature. Secular schemes taught that humans were in a normal state; Christian ethics declared that because of sin humans were in an abnormal condition. Secular ethics began with the false assumption that people were self-sufficient, able to be wise and good without any divine assistance.[56] Unless they correctly understood human nature and destiny, Calvinists asked, how could secular moralists construct proper rules for either individual conduct or social life.[57]

Reformed leaders protested that secular moralists’ inadequate ethical goals led them to devise faulty methods for promoting human development and achieving individual happiness. As utilitarians having no transcendent standards, secularists tended to consider collective humanity God, and serving humanity the supreme object of moral action.[58] For the Christian who believed that God was Creator and Father, as well as First Cause, a person’s highest end was to glorify him.[59] But by serving God, Calvinists declared, people would best help others and most enjoy life. Aiming at happiness as the primary goal always led one to miss it; doing God’s will produced true felicity. This was so, they continued, because people were created in such a way that they would have purpose and joy only as they realized their calling as children and servants of God.[60] George Patton nicely summed up this Calvinist contention when he wrote in 1895:

The individual in order to realize his own best interests is, according to Christianity, bound also at the same time to manifest ‘brotherly love’ (altruism) which is the life of the community and the condition of progress…. And conversely in manifesting brotherly love which has its root in the love of God, the individual attains to perfect happiness. Only along these lines can the problems of social evolution be solved.[61]

Calvinists believed that, in addition to being misdirected, some secular moralists’ goals were inconsistent with their naturalistic premises. Francis Patton objected that naturalistic evolutionists had no right to insist upon any particular type of conduct, and he repudiated their contention that people should love each other and “struggle for the lives of others” to enhance survival. A naturalistic evolutionist could not be consistent and defend an ideal. When one did, it showed that he could not refrain from believing that all reality was moving toward a goal of final perfection.[62] Francis Ferguson observed that the advocates of naturalistic ethics presumed that the “struggle for existence” was worthwhile. This assumption, however, was unprovable. If humans were merely accidents of nature, why were they significant? Strip evolution of its illogical presupposition that human life was intrinsically valuable, Ferguson declared, and it would seem pessimistic and nihilistic.[63]

Calvinists also claimed that many of the goals secular moralities offered could not inspire people to act righteously. While the example of Christ’s sinless life and belief in the advancement of God’s Kingdom on earth motivated most Christians to be loving, kind and just, even under difficult circumstances, secular systems had no moral ideal which would produce self-sacrifice and virtue in cases where such actions brought humans only suffering and danger.[64] Patton insisted that secularists’ arguments would rarely convince those who considered virtue irksome, to behave morally. All secularists could do was to plead with people to act uprightly.[65] Moreover, Calvinists claimed, the ultimate goal of secular moralities, happiness, could not properly regulate human conduct. Suppose, Ferguson said, that a Fijian told a positivist that he found his greatest happiness in murdering his fellowman. The positivist could only expound the beauties of altruism. But, Ferguson concluded, the single trait of beneficence would never be strong enough to counter the selfishness of humanity.[66] Only love for God, another Calvinist added, not the quest for personal gratification, could inspire individuals to obey the moral law.[67]

The final objection of Reformed Christians to secular moralities was that they possessed no power sufficient to motivate people to follow the moral code. Lack of potency, declared James Orr, had been the fatal weakness of every morality divorced from Christianity. Without the inner compulsion and incentive of Christian faith, Orr claimed, some individuals might live righteously but the masses would not. All purely prescriptive moralities had this defect. Only the moral example of Jesus and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, Orr concluded, could inspire people to obey the biblical commandments. For a personal relationship with God brought new light to one’s mind, “new power to his will, new support in temptation, new elevation of his feeling and purification of his affections.”[68]

Many other Calvinists agreed that secular systems could not empower humans to act properly. Francis Patton asserted that morality was internal and not external; the underlying principle of law was not “Do this,” but “Be this.” The gospel taught Christians to obey God’s norms as “an expression of character rather than a slavish conformity to rules.”[69] William B. Greene insisted similarly that morality rested fundamentally on dispositions, on “what underlies and determines the will, of what we are; not merely of what we do or resolve.”[70] The gospel, Patton added, had the power to transform personality and a norm for character; naturalism had neither.[71] Influential Baptist theologian A. H. Strong agreed that biblical ethics refused to accept mere external conformity to right precepts, but rather judged all action by the thoughts and motives from which it sprang. While Christian morality affirmed humans’ depravity and their inability, by their own strength, to keep the law, it supplied reasons for obedience and the aid of the Holy Spirit to make this obedience possible.[72] The Holy Spirit who indwelt believers, others echoed, stimulated Christians to love God and neighbor.[73]

Writing in the North American Review of 1881, James McCosh denounced the secular moralities as ineffectual. Since people were naturally hedonistic, constantly seeking to satisfy their own appetites, utilitarian moralities were powerless to prompt them to noble actions or prevent them from doing evil. Nor, McCosh proclaimed, could secular ethicists consistently maintain that to be morally right, the good must proceed from love. For by eliminating God, they had abolished the basis for and the source of love.[74]

A third development which influenced increasing numbers of Americans to reject biblical ethical teachings was the rise of new viewpoints in the natural and social sciences. By advancing a naturalistic explanation for all reality, many scientists and professors helped erode belief in the authority of the Bible. Some strongly challenged traditional beliefs in fixity and eternal truth. In the years following 1870 many psychologists shifted the foundation of their discipline from metaphysics and theology to biology and the physical sciences. Anthropology and sociology which emerged as new disciplines in the late nineteenth century were also strongly influenced by mechanistic conceptions of evolution. History and political science increasingly employed relativistic and reductionistic methods during these years.[75] At the same time for some Americans, science replaced religion as an object of devotion and worship and a source of strength and certainty. It offered the most validated truth, provided the most venerated method, and guaranteed the most valuable achievements. Its amazing advances in knowledge and its marvelous technological improvements promised to bring a new age.[76]

Bertrand Russell believed in the 1920s, as Francis Crick does today, that science could alleviate the “craven fear” in which people had lived for generations. It could teach them “no longer to invent allies in the sky” but to depend on themselves and to root ethics in humanistic values in order to create the best society on earth. Science could enable people “to live the good life, by giving them knowledge, self-control, and characters productive of harmony rather than strife.”[77] Both the natural and the social sciences then diminished confidence in the authority upon which Christian morality was based and sanctified the experimental methodology of the new morality.

Christians’ neglect of biblical moral responsibilities and duties and their frequent failure to live by their own ethical standards during the early years of the twentieth century was a fourth factor which enhanced growing acceptance of secular moral principles.[78] During this period Calvinists and other evangelicals often protested that churches were not providing sufficient instruction on moral issues. William B. Greene of Princeton Seminary complained in 1900 that direct, ethical teaching was uncommon in evangelical pulpits. Too many ministers preached the gospel exclusively as a plan of salvation rather than as a way of life.[79] “One of the more notable defects” in contemporary preaching, the editors of a Southern Presbyterian periodical lamented in 1910, was “the absence of the ethical element, clear cut, outspoken, and bold.”[80] Christian attitudes and actions toward blacks, the poor, and immigrants, the crass materialism of some Christian industrialists and financiers and the immorality of some confessed believers also prompted some Americans to reject biblical morality. Moreover, the growing polarity between Christians which erupted into the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s caused some to question Christian doctrines and traditional ethical practices.[81]

A final factor which encouraged Americans to abandon their long-standing moral beliefs was the industrial and social climate of the early twentieth century. During these years industrialization, urbanization and massive immigration made human relationships more complicated and broke down traditional community and neighborhood restraints. For many the anonymity and impersonality of city life replaced the close ties and mutual accountability of small town and rural living. At the same time countless Americans became preoccupied with business ventures, commercial achievements and material gain. While some vigorously promoted industrial efficiency and productivity, others pursued pleasure and plenty which were made increasingly possible by rising standards of living. All these developments combined to diminish commitment to traditional ethical values.[82]

By the 1920s the conflict between secular and Christian moralists had become intense. Bertrand Russell lamented in 1925 that current morality was a “curious blend of utilitarianism and superstition” (the latter word, to Russell, primarily meant theism) and that superstition still held the upper hand.[83] It was clear, however, in 1929 to Walter Lippmann that the old morality could no longer inspire Americans to practice their traditional ethical values. Its authority had been radically undercut. Yet no new ethical system had clearly replaced it. Looking to the future, Lippmann called for a new humanist morality to replace the discredited biblical one and joined John Dewey, Harry Elmer Barnes and others to bring this to fruition.[84] Secular humanism differed fundamentally from many of the naturalistic schemes of the late nineteenth century. Its proponents found value in the teachings of the world’s great religions and denied that the universe was totally mechanistic. With the advocates of biblical ethics they rebuked dishonesty, theft, slander and greed and affirmed love and faithfulness. Yet they agreed with the materialists that ethical standards were not given and sanctioned by God and that people must rely upon their own inward strength to act properly. And with pragmatists they affirmed that all norms must be tested by experience.

For the past fifty years American ethical practices have been based upon a curious amalgamation of secular and Judeo-Christian moralities, systems which have fundamentally different views of ethical authority, goals and motivation. Because biblical ideals have been so deeply imbedded in the fiber and flavor of American institutions and life and because many individuals have been firmly committed to biblical values, these convictions have continued to sustain the moral practices of many Americans. Yet since the 1920s secular philosophies, especially humanism, have also powerfully influenced the validation and principles of ethics in American education, politics, economics, and society. Humanists’ insistence that humans are autonomous and that morality should be based upon common or shared human values rather than on divinely revealed teachings has contributed significantly to our contemporary confusion over moral values and practices.

Notes

1. “Are We Passing Through a Great Moral Crisis?” Current Literature 43 (1907) 87–88; “Blasting at the Rock of Ages,” Current Literature 46 (1909) 654–55; “The Modern Assault on the Christian Virtues,” Current Literature 40 (1906) 49–50.
2. “Are We Passing Through a Great Moral Crisis?” 87–88.
3. Quoted in “Blasting at the Rock of Ages,” 654.
4. “Humanism,” Nation 97 (1912) 140–41.
5. Some observers complained about or applauded this trend even earlier. John M. Bonham (Secularism: Its Progress and Its Morals [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894] 5, 21, 131–32, 170–74, 192, 372–73) praised growing acceptance of secular ethics. James Bixby (The Ethics of Evolution: The Crisis in Morals Occasioned by the Doctrine of Development (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co., 1900] 16) lamented that “the time honored principles of ethics that recognized the moral sense as innate, the verdict of the conscience as authoritative and the sanctions of morality as God-given are daily discredited.” A. O. Lovejoy commented on the same trend in 1908 in “Religious Transition and Ethical Awakening in America,” HibJ 7 (1908) 500–14.
6. On the vital connection between the common schools and morality, see Lyman Atwater, “The State in Relation to Morality, Religion and Education,” Presbyterian Review (PR) 1 (1878) 413–15.
7. Alexander Koyre, From the Closed to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957) 3–4; Kenneth Cauthen, Science, Secularization and God (New York: Abington Press, 1969) 19ff; William Quillian, Jr., “Evolution and Moral Theory in America,” in Evolutionary Thought in America (ed. Stow Persons; New York: George Braziller Inc., 1956) 398–417; John Dewey, “The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality,” Philosophical Review 11 (1902) 107–24, 353–71; Martin Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1970) 133–54; Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas (Huntington, N.Y.: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1975) 237–350.
8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1872) 1.254-61. Cf. William B. Greene, Jr., “The Metaphysics of Christian Apologetics,” Presbyterian and Reformed Review (PRR) 9 (1898) 72–75. Charles Cashdollar’s survey of textbooks, exercise books and extant lecture notes of Reformed scholars offers abundant evidence that these men frequently criticized Comte’s ethical views in college and seminary classrooms. See “Auguste Comte and the American Reformed Theologians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978) 61–79.
9. Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review (PQPR) 6 (1877) 188–89. Cf. E. D. Campbell, “The Outcome of Evolution,” United Presbyterian (UP) 38 (March 18, 1880) 179.
10. James McCosh, “What Morality Have We Left?” North American Review 33 (1881) 497–98.
11. Robert Dabney, Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1890) 63.
12. T. P. Epes, “Authority in Revelation and Morals,” Presbyterian Quarterly (PQ) 5 (1891) 324.
13. Atwater, “The State in Relation to Morality, Religion, and Education,” 415; Francis Patton, book review, PR 4 (1883) 216–18; Dabney, Syllabus and Notes, 98-107; William B. Greene, Jr., “The Metaphysics of Christian Apologetics: Morality,” PRR 9 (1898) 678–80; Thomas Nichols, “Morality: Intuitive and Imperative,” PRR 10 (1899) 511–16; N. M. Steffan, Princeton Theological Review (PTR) 1 (1903) 151–52; James Coleman, Social Ethics: An Introduction to the Nature and Ethics of the State (New York: The Baker and Taylor Co., 1902) 180–88; William H. Johnson, “Pragmatism, Humanism and Religion,” PTR 6 (1908) 548–49.
14. McCosh, “An Advertisement for a New Religion, By an Evolutionist,” North American Review 27 (1878) 50; Francis Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” PR 7 (1886) 137–39; Greene, “The Metaphysics of Christian Apologetics,” 680; Greene, book review, PTR 3 (1905) 516; James Orr, “Autonomy in Ethics,” PTR 6 (1908) 271.
15. Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” 137. Cf. Nichols, “Morality: Intuitive and Imperative,” 523–24.
16. Orr, “Autonomy in Ethics,” 270; Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” 143–45.
17. Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” 139.
18. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1.279.
19. McCosh, “Religious Conflicts of the Age,” North American Review 33 (1881) 36–37.
20. See Henry May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Alfred A Knopf 1959) 153–64, 193–212. H. L. Mencken led the assault on the traditional view: “And what is this king of all axioms and emperor of all fallacies? Simply the idea that there are rules of ‘natural morality’ engraven indelibly upon the hearts of men—that all times and everywhere, have ever agreed, do now agree and will agree forevermore…that certain things are right and certain other things are wrong….” The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (3rd ed.; Boston: Luce, 1913) 282. Such views were also expressed by William Graham Sumner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thorstein Veblen, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser and James H. Robinson.
21. Greene, “The Metaphysics of Christian Apologetics,” 664. Cf. George Patton, “Kidd’s Social Evolution,” PQ 9 (1895) 458; William Findley, “Two Divine Witnesses,” UP 38 (September 9, 1880) 1; Thomas Nichols, “Morality: Intuitive and Imperative,” 513–14.
22. Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” 141–46, 149.
23. McCosh, “What Morality Have We Left?” 499–505.
24. Nichols, “Morality: Intuitive and Imperative,” 512–13.
25. Francis Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics—Mallock and Spencer,” Catholic Presbyterian 4 (1880) 36, 42–44. Cf. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1.276–79. Hodge claimed that while materialism contradicted the facts of consciousness, the theistic solution satisfactorily accounted for all the facts of consciousness and observation, satisfying the reason and the heart.
26. W. A. Cocke, “Moral Philosophy and Christianity,” Southern Presbyterian Review (SPR) 22 (1871) 22; William B. Greene, Jr., “The Importance of Preaching the Ethics of Christianity,” PQ 14 (1900) 517; “Can We Have Morality Without Religion?” 49–50.
27. Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 44.
28. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics (2 vols.; New York: D. Appleton, 1898) 1.xiv declared that the primary reason he published The Data of Ethics in 1879 was that “the gap left by the disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics” had to be filled by a “code of natural ethics.” Cf. The Data of Ethics (New York: D. Appleton, 1883) 49–51; T. H. Huxley, “Religion and Morals,” Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions (New York: D. Appleton, 1893) 183; Henry C. Minton, “Theological Implications of the Synthetic Philosophy,” PRR 7 (1896) 406, 408; Coleman, Social Ethics, 180-88. According to Perry Miller, Herbert Spencer’s popularity in America between 1865 and 1900 was “staggering.” Americans enthusiastically recapitulated Spencer’s thought to justify a competitive America. See Miller, American Thought: Civil War to World War I (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1954) xxiii. From 1860 until 1900 Americans bought more than 350,000 copies of Spencer’s books. See Nelson M. Blake, A History of American Life and Thought (New York: The McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963) 399. Bixby (The Ethics of Evolution, 19) argued in 1900 that Spencer’s writings in biology, psychology, sociology, religion and ethics, more than the efforts of any other person, gave the evolutionary theory its completeness, persuasiveness and public acceptance.
29. The Principles of Ethics, 1.79, 87; Data of Ethics, 123, 126; The Principles of Psychology (2 vols.; New York, 1899) 1.279-80. Cf. Bonham, Secularism: Its Progress and Its Morals, 170-74.
30. Epes, “Authority in Revelation and Morals,” 321; Johnson, “Pragmatism, Humanism and Religion,” 549; Presbyterian of the South (February 23, 1910) 225.
31. McCosh, “What Morality Have We Left?” 508–509.
32. Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 35.
33. Atwater, “The State in Relation to Morality, Religion, and Education,” 415.
34. Patton, “Kidd’s Social Evolution,” 463. Evolutionists such as Thomas Huxley refuted this claim, arguing that morality was not dependent upon Christianity. Christianity had inherited many of its moral principles from Judaism and paganism and if ethics were stripped from their Christian foundation, science could support their observance. See “Science and Morals,” (1886) in Huxley, Evolution and Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897) 145–46.
35. McCosh, “An Advertisement for a New Religion,” 50, 56, 58–59; Patton, “The Metaphysics of Oughtness,” 134; Epes, “Authority in Revelation and Morals,” 330. Cf. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology 3.277. Hodge protested that man’s knowledge of his own mind as a thinking substance “is the first and most certain and most indestructible of all forms of knowledge. It is impossible that the materialist can have any higher evidence of the existence of matter than he has of his own mind.”
36. Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 36. Cf. “Rats Wiser Than Men,” Presbyterian 50 (January 3, 1880) 4–5.
37. Lyman Atwater, “Religion and Politics,” in Proceedings of the Second General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System (Philadelphia: Office of the Alliance, 1880) 325.
38. Patton, book review, PR 7 (1886) 199.
39. Stow Persons, “Evolution and Theology,” in Evolutionary Thought in America, 434ff; Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955) 73–80, 90–91; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) 67–84.
40. Miller, American Thcught, ix-xiv, xxiii-xxxiii; Francis P. Weisenburger, Ordeal of Faith (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959) 150–52; Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 123.
41. Johnson, “Pragmatism, Humanism and Religion,” 551, 560. Similarly, in 1909 the editors of Current Literature (“The Modern Assault on the Christian Virtues,” 68–69) protested pragmatism’s assault on Christian morality. The books of H. G. Wells, the plays of Henry Ibsen, the attack on self-sacrifice by George Bernard Shaw, and the doctrine of the will to power proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche all exalted expedience and declared that humanity had largely outgrown Christian virtues. Cf. Henry Minton, book review, PTR 1 (1903) 466.
42. Weisenburger, Ordeal of Faith, 153-54.
43. Johnson, “Pragmatism, Humanism and Religion,” 548, 561–62. Cf. Greene, book review, PTR 9 (1911) 475.
44. See for example, Bonham, Secularism: Its Progress and Its Morals, 186, 192. Since God could not be known, Bonham argued, the “objective manifestations of Nature are the only means of determining the whole relationship of men to Nature and of man to man” (248).
45. Cocke, “Moral Philosophy and Christianity,” 2.
46. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920) 161–62. Dewey denied that transcendent or eternal values existed. See “Consciousness and Experience,” in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (New York: H. Holt, 1910) 263, 267–68. Cf. A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934) 71–72, 77, 80. On Dewey’s pragmatic ethics, see James H. Tufts and John Dewey, Ethics (New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1908). From the podium and in print Dewey argued that ethics was a positive science continuous with the physical sciences. Rejecting the idea of antecedent fixed moral absolutes, he urged people to treat moral principles not as norms but as tools for analyzing ethical situations. In his many essays on teaching morality in public schools Dewey repudiated all ethical approaches rooted in an “a priori determination of morality,” insisting rather that morals were a function of “the interaction between intrinsic human nature on the one hand and social customs and institutions on the other.” Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1922) viii-ix. See also Democracy and Education (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1916) and The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1929).
47. E.g., H. L. Minton, book review, PTR 1 (1903) 463–66; William B. Greene, Jr., PTR 9 (1911) 475–76.
48. Dabney, Syllabus and Notes, 106.
49. E.g., Nichols, “Morality: Intuitive and Imperative,” 516–18.
50. Epes, “Authority in Revelation and Morals,” 330–31. Cf. George T. Purves, “Problems of the Twentieth Century,” in Twentieth Century Addresses (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1902) 164.
51. William B. Greene, Jr., book review, PTR 11 (1913) 656; James Howerton, The Church and Social Reforms (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1913) 34–36.
52. McCosh, “Religious Conflicts of the Age,” 38.
53. E.g., Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, 1.114–21, 127–29, 252–55, 300; 2.425. T. H. Huxley, however, had basic disagreements with Spencer. He believed that such institutions as “laws” and “the state” could civilize man (see Evolution of Ethics and Other Essays, 62, 87–88, 91–92).
54. McCosh, “What Morality Have We Left?” 501–504; “The Morality of the Future,” Presbyterian 50 (November 13, 1880) 10; Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 44.
55. E.g., Francis Patton, book review, PR 7 (1886) 199.
56. Nicholas Steffens, “The Ethics of Natural Man,” PRR 11 (1900) 469–70; Orr, “Autonomy in Ethics,” 271, 275; William B. Greene, Jr., book review, PTR 13 (1915) 286–87.
57. E.g., P. P. Flourney, “Evolutionary Ethics and Christianity,” SPR 35 (1884) 436. For an example of the secular ethical view, see John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: H. Holt, 1922) 231, 234.
58. Dabney, Syllabus and Notes, 105; McCosh, “An Advertisement for a New Religion,” 51.
59. G. J. A. Coulson, “God and Moral Obligation,” SPR 29 (1878) 330; Minton, “Theological Implications of the Synthetic Philosophy,” 408.
60. Lyman Atwater, “Christian Morality, Expediency and Liberty,” PR 2 (1881) 70, 75; Steffens, “The Ethics of Natural Man,” 475; Carroll Cutler, book review, PRR 2 (1891) 551.
61. Patton, “Kidd’s Social Evolution,” 476.
62. Francis Patton, book review, PR 4 (1883) 218.
63. Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 39.
64. Flourney, “Evolutionary Ethics and Christianity,” 437–38; James A. Quarles, “Two Current False Philosophies,” PQ 14 (1900) 203.
65. Patton, book review, PR 4 (1883) 218.
66. Ferguson, “Evolution in Ethics,” 43.
67. Cutler, book review, PRR 2 (1891) 551.
68. Orr, “Autonomy in Ethics,” 276–77.
69. Patton, book review, PR 4 (1883) 217. Cf. S. L. Orr, “John Calvin and His Ethical System,” in Proceedings of the Ninth General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System (ed. G. D. Matthews; London: Office of the Alliance, 1909) 127–30. “Calvinism,” Orr wrote, “places the believer before the face of God and writes the Law on the tables of his heart.”
70. Greene, book review, PRR 7 (1896) 699. Cf. Greene, book review, PTR 9 (1911) 500.
71. Patton, book review, PR 4 (1883) 217.
72. A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology (Rochester, New York, 1899) 86. Cf. W. G. T. Shedd, Theological Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887) 375, 377. According to Shedd, the “utmost that Confucius, Sakyamuni and Socrates can do is give good advice. They cannot incline and enable men to obey it…. Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that the ideas of ethics and natural religion are in men’s reason but are not obeyed and realized in man’s will, the most convincing evidence that humans are at schism with themselves and therefore depraved and fallen.” Yet these men did not know how to deliver humans from their sinful condition.
73. Flourney, “Evolutionary Ethics and Christianity,” 446–47; William B. Greene, Jr., book review, PTR 6 (1908) 688. According to Greene, a man “cannot love his neighbor as he ought unless he does so for God’s sake.”
74. McCosh, “What Morality Have We Left?” 500, 509. Cf. GoldvAn Smith, “The Prospect of a Moral Interregnum,” Atlantic Monthly 44 (1879) 629–42.
75. Persons, American Minds, 249-55, 271–84, 318–44.
76. On the general effects of science, see Merle Curti, “The Delimitation of Supernaturalism,” in The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943) 531–55. John Dewey complained about the worship of science in Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1931). Dewey observed that the prestige of science was “so great that an almost superstitious aura gathers around its name and work” (pp. 320-22). Yet Dewey seems to glorify the scientific method as an instrument which could solve all human problems (pp. 329-30). Cf. Edward A. White, Science and Religion in American Thought: The Impact of Naturalism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1952) 110, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion? (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 184, who lamented “the unchallenged dominion of science” in the West.
77. Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian (London: George Allen, 1957, from essays originally published in 1925 and 1927) 16, 68–69.
78. E.g., R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin, eds., A History of Education in American Culture (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1953) 325; Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) 179.
79. Greene, “The importance of Preaching,” 503–505, 519. Cf. E. D. Morris, “Ethical Preaching,” Catholic Presbyterian 9 (1883) 165–67; Faunce, “Survey of Moral and Religious Progress,” 366.
80. “Bibfical Ethics,” Presbyterian Standard (January 5, 1910) 1.
81. See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 21, 24, 26–28, 35–37, 66–68, 73–74, 156–64.
82. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) 44–75, 133–64; Gerald Heard, Morals Since 1900 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950) 117–28; Marquis Childs and Douglass Cater, Ethics in a Business Society (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954) 63–100.
83. Russell, Why I am Not a Christian, 51. Cf. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization, 319. Dewey observed that the “earlier optimism which thought that the advance of natural sdence” would “dispel superstition, ignorance and oppression, by placing reason on the throne, was unjustified.” He also complained (Democracy and Education, 394) that it would take a long time for people to employ the experimental method in forming and testing social and moral matters. “Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority….”
84. Walter Lippmann, Preface to Morals (New York: MacMillan, 1931) 3ff, 37ff, 68ff, 314ff.