How Should We Then Live Part 5: The Revolutionary Age (II)

We then turn to the questions surrounding the French Revolution. Schaeffer argues that the legal basis of the Glorious Revolution and the events of 1776 were rooted in the Reformation while the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was rooted in humanism. That's a very interesting claim which can be contested on both ends. I've already addressed the Anglo-American side of the question but in terms of the French document, given that Jefferson was consulted and Lafayette was one of its authors, one is compelled to question Schaeffer's claims. The fact that Lafayette who played such an important role in the US rebellion, was friends with Washington and other founders and was one of the chief architects of the French Revolution presents (at even this very basic prima facie level) a serious challenge to Schaeffer's narrative.

Obviously Washington saw the events in France and America as connected. Lafayette's gift, the key to the Bastille still hangs on the wall at Mt. Vernon. Schaeffer falls into a common albeit convenient trap. The French Revolution as indeed so many revolutions do – went sideways. It went astray and lost its way and degenerated into something other than what was intended. And thus one must be careful in how one interprets the course of events, the origins and early motivations and what came after. They are not one and the same. The Terror and the chaos that would lead to Bonaparte were indeed tragic and many evils were committed. And without a doubt it was a harbinger of the secular age that was coming but to the intellectuals and thinkers in Europe (with a few exceptions), they saw the same trajectory and forces at work in what had happened in 1776. The two revolutions were fueled (at least initially) by the same motivations and spirit. This coupling of the revolutions is to this day met with hostility in some American circles as it destroys their narrative regarding the Founders. Schaeffer is among these.

Why did they go in such different directions? I've wrestled with these questions elsewhere but as this is a compressed commentary I will simply say that the American Revolution was a secession facilitated by an ocean. The French Revolution could not merely break off a piece of the pie so to speak. It had to toss out and re-cast the whole thing. The American rebels did not need to overthrow the monarchy in order to win their freedom and this reality set a very different tone. Additionally unlike Britain, France's ecclesiastical system was still intertwined with the feudal order. France's system was archaic and less reformed than Britain's and so the revolt had to be more comprehensive. You couldn't just break with the king and the Church. They had to be cast down and thus the context for the American and French Revolutions was different. The American experiment was less brutal and ugly although there was a great deal of ugliness in the American war but romantic historians (like Schaeffer) have swept these things under the rug so to speak. This is in keeping with Schaeffer's completely misleading and self-serving narrative.

Does Materialism lead to repression? Schaeffer was (as expected given the Cold War context) quick to unite the French and Russian Revolutions and not all of his comments and observations were wrong. Revolutions lose their way, resulting in Bonapartism or Bolshevism. Even the Bolshevist movement lost its way and was replaced by Stalinism. But there is a blindness at work in Schaeffer if he cannot see that Capitalism also produces repression. Those atop the system flourish but all too often their success is built on the pain and exploitation of others. Am I saying that Communism is a viable alternative? By no means. We should recognise that all man-made systems are wicked and fail. Some are more wicked than others and this is true at different times and in different places. But when Christians champion one and identify it with Christianity then the honest reader of the New Testament and the honest assessor of both history in general and Church History in particular must protest. Puritan government while not materialist was certainly oppressive. We can quibble over numbers and the level of brutality but this is difficult given the very different contexts and the nature of their conflicts. The Irish certainly thought it to be pretty brutal. Slavery and colonisation were also pretty brutal and yet much of that history is ignored, downplayed or glossed over.

Schaeffer echoes a certain Cold War narrative that ignores the realities of how both sides controlled their empires. Of course the American side won't acknowledge that theirs was and is an empire and so there's a fundamental dishonesty at work that inhibits genuine and serious historical examination from taking place. Such questions stray into the realm of thoughtcrime and for the Christian Right, heresy. Schaeffer, while attempting to interact with a grand sweep of history (1517-1917) is incapable of doing so. What he's really affected by are the events of his day and his specific focus on Prague in 1968 I think reveals this.

Materialism does produce cruelty and yet the lessons to be learned are not about the Reformation order versus humanism but about the nature of power itself. Was the Inquisition materialist? Again what of the Puritan order? What about Spain under Franco? I realise that's not part of the Reformation heritage but the intellectual foundations of Francoism were rooted in the same kind of rejections of modernism. What about what the Americans did in Indochina? The wanton destruction of life and mass-murder, was it rooted in Materialist Humanism? Maybe Schaeffer would agree to some extent but as with most of these questions, he continues to miss the point.

While Schaeffer's analysis of slavery leaves out the effects of what I could call Neo-Zionism, the identification of one's nation and culture with the Kingdom of God – and the consequent racism it produces, he also ignores the meaning and impact of the Age of Exploration, the discovery of the New World and how these events shaped a new economics, a demand for slaves and the hunt for resources and trade routes. A Christianised sanctified understanding of greed played a large part in the story and allowed Christians to brutalise others and turn a cold blind eye to theft, suffering and a lot of murder and other evils.

In some respects his commentaries on slavery and the Industrial Revolution are better than what we might encounter today. While still self-serving and reductionist he nevertheless is candid and I couldn't help but think that some contemporaries would paint him as a Social Justice Warrior, which to them is tantamount to being a Marxist. The sad degenerate state of the Christian Right makes Schaeffer seem like a breath of fresh air by comparison. I appreciated his admission that Cultural Christianity failed, that wealth was not used in a compassionate manner, that capitalism succumbed to Utilitarianism and a kind of Social Darwinist ethic. These were excellent comments but they would certainly come under great criticism today – once again demonstrating how much the Evangelical and Christian Right have shifted to the Far Right and in other cases have morphed into a kind of Libertarianism.

Whether the Methodist revival saved Britain from a French-type Revolution is still debated. The truth is it probably played a part, one over-emphasised by some and under-emphasised by others. There was certainly a reaction to the events in France that would establish a new and somewhat repressive order in Britain in the 19^th century. It would of course collapse during the World Wars and lead to the Britain we know today.

Schaeffer lauds the efforts of early British Evangelicals and their attempts to combat child labour and argue for prison reform. He's not going to get into the questions surrounding the oft Left-ward tilt of British Nonconformity and listening to him one is reminded that there is some truth to the argument that the Church pursuing Social Justice leads to trouble down the road. These movements in combating the evils of the Industrial Age also (wittingly or unwittingly) opened the door to feminism and other movements. In the United States feminism and temperance went hand in hand and there were other theological angles to these movements that are beyond what's being discussed here.

Schaeffer concludes with a brief commentary on the Social Consensus and argues that because the nations of Northern Europe and America   were rooted in a Biblical social order brought by the Reformation, they were able to control despotism. We've addressed that in brief and hopefully demonstrated that such arguments don't really stand. There's just a lot more to it, especially when considering America. The vastness of the land alone is part of the story, the room and resources for a population to keep spreading. Once that period ended or began to end with the dawn of the 20^th century, the nature of American culture began to seriously change.

The American consensus was largely what folks used to refer to as WASP... White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That of course is somewhat misleading in its simplicity but it's not that far off. The Northern European and generally Protestant Consensus began to fragment around the turn of the 20^th century. As mentioned, the end of the frontier played a part in this as did the massive immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Catholics who came to America fomented a reaction as seen in the re-birth of the KKK in the 1920's. While they had more in common with the WASP Establishment then say the Chinese or people from the Middle East, there were still some very strong cultural differences. They assimilated over time but their visions of America and their attachment to the history and even mythology were certainly different. Blacks who had been continually repressed even since the end of the Civil War began to get a taste of mainstream life in the 1920's and after World War II began to finally assert themselves and utilise much of the legislation and legal apparatus that had been ignored and shelved for a generation or more. The World Wars themselves, the Depression, the newness of urban life, the technology and many other factors generated a social crisis and the consensus finally began to fragment and break. The process didn't begin in the 1960's. That was but the culmination of a trajectory that had already begun in earnest back in the late 19^th century.

So was the consensus really rooted in Biblical values and ideas or in the fact that most of the population had come from a fairly tight region within Northern Europe that while not uniform was nevertheless fairly similar in its cultural values and proclivities? Maybe these lands were more Biblical in their cultural structures, or maybe not. Maybe they like many other cultures found ways to make the Scriptures conform with and explain their norms. In other words was the consensus a question of the Bible or was it really a question of the tribal? This debate over American identity continues to this day. For some, America is a people and for others it's a nation of diverse people that embrace a set of ideas. In one sense (the tribal-ancestral sense) I could be as American as you can get. In another sense there are Americans who would look at me and say, "You're not really an American at all. In fact, you're hostile to the things America stands for." And to be frank, they would have a point. Ideologically as a conscientious Biblically-minded Christian I stand in opposition to many basic American values and treasured concepts. I live here but I'm not 'of' America. I'm not invested in the project.

And then of course on another level, America is a complex society, in some respects far more complex than what might be found in some of the smaller mostly homogeneous nations of the Old World. These questions aren't easy and their evident complexities belie the simplistic self-serving narratives presented by Schaeffer. In the end we must conclude that this episode was a mix of facts, lies and inaccurately presented and mis-contextualised facts but more than anything it was a narrative dominated by myth and in Biblical terms – heresy and error. And yet it can be stated without a doubt that his ideas helped to affect and shape the Evangelical movement of the 1980's up to the present. His presentation and shaping of the narrative has sunk deep roots. For many the 'facts' Schaeffer presents are givens, not to be questioned.

Continue reading Part Six