The Arc of American Religious Historiography with Respect to War: William Warren Sweet's Pivotal Role in Mediating Neo-Orthodox Critique Robert A
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2012 The Arc of American Religious Historiography with Respect to War: William Warren Sweet's Pivotal Role in Mediating Neo-Orthodox Critique Robert A. Britt-Mills Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE ARC OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORIOGRAPHY WITH RESPECT TO WAR: WILLIAM WARREN SWEET’S PIVOTAL ROLE IN MEDIATING NEO-ORTHODOX CRITIQUE By ROBERT A. BRITT-MILLS A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2012 Robert A. Britt-Mills defended this dissertation on April 18, 2012. The members of the supervisory committee were: Amanda Porterfield Professor Directing Dissertation Neil Jumonville University Representative John Corrigan Committee Member John Kelsay Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT v 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Trends in American Religious Historiography 6 1.2 Early American Histories 8 1.3 Chapter Contents 9 2. WAR JUSTIFIED BY GOD AND NATURAL EVIDENCE: EARLY AMERICAN CHURCH HISTORIANS DESCRIBE PROTESTANT SUPPORT FOR WAR, 1702-1923 14 2.1 Cotton Mather 15 2.2 Baird, Bacon, Bacon, and Mode 18 2.2.1 Robert Baird 18 2.2.2 Leonard Bacon 27 2.2.3 Leonard Woolsey Bacon 33 2.2.4 Peter George Mode 41 2.3 Conclusion 48 3. AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE 1920s—1930s AND WILLIAM WARREN SWEET’S CONNECTION TO THEM 51 3.1 The Origins of the Christian Century 55 3.2 Fundamentalism 57 3.3 Chicago Divinity School Liberalism 58 3.4 Methodist Liberals 62 3.5 Wilhelm Pauck 70 3.6 Reinhold Niebuhr 72 3.7 William Warren Sweet 78 3.8 Conclusion 81 4. WILLIAM WARREN SWEET’S CENTRAL PLACE IN CRITICIZING AMERICAN PROTESTANT SUPPORT FOR WAR, 1930-1950 84 4.1 Biographical Background 85 4.2 Lone Account of Settler War against Indians 88 4.3 Revolutionary War 89 4.4 Critique of the Civil War 91 4.5 The Great War 96 4.6 Sweet’s Later Editions 97 5. A CONTINUING CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN PROTESTANT SUPPORT FOR WAR DURING THE 1960s BY RELIGIOUS HISTORIANS FOLLOWING SWEET 104 iii 5.1 Clifton Olmstead 106 5.2 Winthrop Hudson 118 5.3 Edwin Gaustad 124 5.4 Conclusion 129 6. AN INTENSIFYING CRITIQUE OF WAR: HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS CRITICIZING PROTESTANT SUPPORT FOR WAR, 1970-1992 134 6.1 Martin Marty 135 6.2 Sydney Ahlstrom 154 6.3 Catherine Albanese 169 6.4 Mark Noll 174 6.5 Conclusion 183 7. CONCLUSION 186 BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 205 iv ABSTRACT This dissertation is an examination of how American religious historians have described Protestant support for American war from 1702 through 1992. It is a historiography that contributes to the lack of recent American religious historiographies that consider church histories written prior to Sydney Ahlstrom’s 1972 text. In addressing this shortfall of scholarly attention to pre-1970s church histories, this work examines what each historian wrote about war in order to trace historical trends. Starting in 1930 here is a clear shift away from the uncritical triumphal language that justified warfare as a corollary to American expansion and exceptionalism. William Warren Sweet’s 1930 The Story of Religions in America is central to the more critical historical narratives within the field of American religious history. Therefore, this work indicates that those who view the histories written between Robert Baird and Sydney Ahlstrom as a monolithic group fail to recognize the shift toward critiquing Protestant support for war starting in 1930. The historians within the first chapter of this dissertation (Robert Baird, Leonard Bacon, Leonard W. Bacon, and Peter Mode) wrote unabashedly universal validation for Protestant support of war, especially wars against Native Indians. Therefore, when William W. Sweet was critical about Protestant support for war and wrote little concerning wars against Indians, he broke decisively with those Christian historians who came before him. These narrative trends indicated he was part of a new cultural and political paradigm. The new worldview called into question liberal Protestantism’s ability to resist American nationalism and isolationism. Protestant liberal nationalism made it impossible for many Protestants to resist enthusiastically supporting the Spanish- American War and WWI while isolationism made it impossible for many Protestants to confront fascism in Germany even as late as 1939. While critiques of liberal Protestant theology did not appear in Sweet’s work, he did provide the first significant critique of Protestant support for war. Chapter two investigates the theological developments in America during the 1920s and 1930s that William Sweet’s was aware of when writing his initial critique (1930) and his updated critique (1939) of Protestant support for the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the WWI. Sweet had knowledge of the writings of the Methodist liberals at Boston University, European neo-orthodoxy, and the Christian Century writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Particularly influential on Sweet’s concept of theology were three critiques of Karl Barth written in America in 1928 by Albert Knudson, Wilhelm Pauck and Reinhold Niebuhr. These three reviews of Barth influenced the language of Sweet in his 1939 review of theological developments in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter three traces how Sweet’s history was the first to criticize both Northern and Southern Protestant clergy during the Civil War. In addition he denounced the Protestant clergy during WWI for their turning their churches into government agencies that promoted the war. Sweet’s critical narrative stemmed from and highlighted a crisis within liberal Protestantism. This crisis was magnified by the vast majority of Social Gospel liberals abandoning their pacifistic ideals to support a war that they truly believed would free the world from future war. Once the war was over, Protestants in large v measure retreated to an idealist pacifist and a politically isolationist position that refused to resist the rise of fascist Nazism even after Hitler invaded Poland. To fundamentalist and Neo-orthodox Protestants these events clearly demonstrated the naïve way too many Social Gospel liberals approached war and their failure to understand the destructive power of social evil. The theological critique of liberalism that was spreading throughout American academic universities during the 1920s and 1930s provided a compelling and productive way to track the trends within the narrative accounts of American religious history. Chapter four evaluates how Clifton E. Olmstead’s 1960 work made significant strides in overcoming the lack of discussion of Native Indian wars within Sweet’s work. Olmstead described Protestant settlers at war against Indians, analyzed why the wars occurred, and provided a critique of Protestant support for those wars. Olmstead discussed how the settlers perceived the Indians as ignorant, shiftless, and depraved savages and pointed to these attitudes as reasons for lack of success in missions and in leading to hostilities. Earlier accounts justified settlers’ attitudes toward the Native tribes but Olmstead questioned them in an attempt to critique them. He also provided the most significant analysis of neo-orthodoxy and the Niebuhr bothers’ influence on American theology from the Great Depression through 1960. Olmstead’s work set the stage for two historians in the fifth chapter, Martin Marty and Sydney Ahlstrom. They both wrote longer and more detailed criticism of Protestant support for war against Native Indians that led to genocide-like practices against Indians especially during Western expansion. The other historians in chapter four were Winthrop Hudson and Edwin Gaustad both of whom wrote relatively little concerning Protestant support for war. Chapter five also explored how historians Catherine Albanese and Mark Noll described Protestant support for war and how their interest in describing war paralleled their interest in writing about neo-orthodox theologies in America form the 1930s through the 1960s. vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In 2002, Catherine Albanese wrote American Religious History: A Bibliographical Essay. The essay organized American religious histories into three classifications: consensus, conflict and contact. She classified consensus history as any general narrative history that made central the success of Anglo-Protestantism. For her, consensus history included all grand-narratives of American church history written from Robert Baird’s Religion in America in 1842 up through Sydney Ahlstrom’s The History of the American People written in 1972. She pointed to Ahlstrom’s work as the last American religious consensus history. According to Albanese, American religious historians that followed Ahlstrom turned to smaller more topical subjects focusing on religious pluralism. She divided the post-Ahlstrom histories into either conflict or contact narratives. Albanese designated R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986) as exemplary of conflict, suggested that Thomas A. Tweed’s Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997) was illustrative of contact, and, likewise, regarded her own America: Religions and