Millenial ideals were also preached during the time of and after the American Revolution pointing more and more to America’s God-chosen role in the bringing in of Christ’s Kingdom, linked to evolutionary progress. President of Yale College Ezra Stiles said;
It may have been of
the Lord that Christianity is to be found in such greater purity in this church
exiled into the wilderness of America, and that its purest body should be evidently advancing forward, by an augmented natural increase and
spiritual edification, into a singular superiority, with the ultimate
subserviency to the glory of God to converting the world.[1]
The nineteenth century was an era in secular
and religious thought of a progress that was inevitable.[2]
In Protestant evangelical faith, Postmillennialism, that mankind would create a
millennial kingdom without Christ’s physical presence, was, “the commonly
received doctrine,” of the century.[3]
The documents, the speeches, the sermons are available for you to read, mostly
free. Don’t take my word for it. During this period this doctrine was the
intellectual compromise between the devastation of God’s judgment on the world
portrayed in the book of Revelation in the Bible and the evolutionary theory of
constant movement upward to better and better times, and a utopia.[4]
Liberal religious thought in collusion with the growing atheism of science
brought about a weakening of the hopeful, religious viewpoint of a coming
golden age created by Christians dependent upon their own righteousness but it
was the nightmare of the Civil War and the calamity of World War One that drove
the nail into the coffin and, “it became a relic of a lost world.”[5]
But, at the time of the Civil War’s
commencement most evangelical Christians in America believed that the United
States was God’s Promised Land and
white, Anglo-Saxon Americans His chosen people, destined to bring in a ‘golden
age’ of peace, prosperity, and righteousness as Christ ruled the earth for
either a literal thousand years or for just a long period of time, represented
by the word millennium, through His
church. Lincoln himself referred to America, not Christ, as the last best hope
of earth.[6]
It
was not unusual for nations with a state church to view themselves as God’s
chosen people. England, Russia, and Germany were notorious for this view.
German sermons during World War One even likened the German Army to the Holy
Spirit moving in the world and ‘God With Us’ in German was on the belt buckles
of soldiers. Glorification and even deification of the state was one prime
motivator in the half-century of war.
President
Woodrow Wilson’s mentor at Johns Hopkins University, Richard Ely, put the
thought of the elite and great planners whose government was God’s agent on
earth or His replacement even like this;
Now, it may
rationally be maintained that, if there is anything divine on earth, it is the
State, the product of the same God-given instincts which led to the
establishment of the Church and of the Family. It was once held that kings
ruled by right divine, and in any widely accepted belief, though it be
afterwards discredited, there is generally found a kernel of truth. In this
case it was the divine right of the state.[7]
But
worshipping the state as a “Christnation,” as the Redeemer Nation of the world,
was America’s undoing. With the leadership making government God’s agent on
earth rather than God’s people and with the common Christian expecting that we
could create a perfect world without Christ physically present we had this
great religious expectation that was blatantly false.
That’s
why today so many think that they are electing a pastor or a messiah when they
vote for a president and then try to Christianize their candidate if elected to
make him look like something he is not. It all boils down to state-worship.
[1]
Ezra Stiles, “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” in The Pulpit of the American Revolution, or,
The Political Sermons of the Period of 1776, John Wingate Thornton, ed.,
(Boston: D. Lothrop & Publishers, 1876), 405, 472.
[2]
Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 52.
[3] Henry Boynton
Smith,”History of Opinions Respecting the Millennium,” The American Theological Review (Boston: Charles Scribner &
Son, 1859), 642. https://books.google.com/books?id=hWrUAAAAMAAJ&vq=millennium&pg=PA642#v=snippet&q=millennium&f=false (accessed
11.14.2015).
[4] James H.
Moorhead, “The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought,
1865-1925,” Church History Vol. 53,
No. 1 (Mar. 1984), 61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3165956 (accessed 11.14.2015).
[5]
Ibid., 77.
[6]
Jean H. Baker, “Lincoln’s Narrative of American Exceptionalism,” in We Cannot Escape History: Lincoln and the
Last Best Hope of Earth, James McPherson, ed., (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 42.
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