Appendix E WINNERS AND LOSERS
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you (Matthew 7:7).
On Friday, September 15, 1995, I celebrated. First, I had enough money in my checking account to cover the check I wrote to the Internal Revenue Service to pay my quarterly income tax bill. Second, I had finished all but the final proofing of the index of Crossed Fingers after about a hundred hours of work on it. So, it was time to celebrate. I took my wife out to the local Barnes & Noble bookstore that opened last month. She sat and read an R. C. Sproul book that she had smuggled in; I shopped.
By the providence of God, my eyes lighted on the blue spine of a book, The Churching of America, 1776-1990, by Finke and Stark. I pulled it down. I opened it. I skimmed sections. And I marveled. There, before my very eyes, was the mother lode that I had been looking for since mid-September, 1962.
Crossed Fingers was finished. Should I begin a re-write? The index was finished. Should I risk having to re-index the entire book? I would call that approach mad -- Stark raving mad. My solution: add a few footnotes retroactively and write another appendix. As I always say: "When you've written a book over a thousand pages long, what's an extra appendix among friends?"
What Hath Sociology Wrought? Finke and Stark are sociologists. (Beware of sociologists bearing gifts, I usually say.) They are sociologists who understand free market economics, especially the economics of cartels. This is extremely rare among sociologists. They also are well-versed in American religious history. Finally, they write in clear, straightforward English. This is simply astounding.
They have presented the statistical and historical evidence that validates the following themes in Crossed Fingers:
1. The connection between seminary education and ecclesiastical liberalism in the nineteenth century2. The coming of liberalism as the beginning of ecclesiastical stagnation and then decline
3. The shortage of ministers (at the price offered) in the hierarchical denominations
4. The failure of hierarchical denominations on the American frontier as the result of 1-3
5. The long decline of mainline Protestant denominations after 1920
6. The ecumenical movement as a cartel
7. The Rockefeller connection
Obviously, I wish someone had written the book in 1961 and I had read it in the summer of 1962. It would have saved me a lot of time. I would have gone down fewer rabbit trails. But better late than never.
Finke and Stark have not been bowled over by the standard historiography of American Church history. They recognize that those who have dominated this academic field have shared a common worldview since at least the 1920's: theological liberalism and ecumenism. The historians have interpreted American Protestant Church history as the growth of theological liberalism in the churches, with fundamentalism supposedly confined to small, isolated groups, mostly in the rural South. They write:
For most historians, religion means theology, and therefore the history of American religion is the history of religious ideas. There is nothing wrong with writing histories of ideas, of course. But when historians trace the history of American religious ideas they nearly always adopt (at least implicitly) a model of intellectual progress. Their history is organized on the basis of showing how new religious ideas arose and were progressively refined. Moreover, the standards against which refinement is usually judged are entirely secular--parsimony, clarity, logical unity, graceful expression, and the like. One never encounters standards of theological progress or refinement based on how effectively a doctrine could stir the faithful or satisfy the heart. As a result, the history of American religious ideas always turns into an historical account of the march toward liberalism. That is, religious ideas always become more refined (i.e., better) when they are shorn of mystery, miracle, and mysticism--when an active supernatural realm is replaced by abstractions concerning virtue.(1)
Success and Failure To be successful, argue Finke and Stark, a religious movement must do two things: comfort the soul and motivate its adherents to a higher standard of performance than the average person is willing to commit.(2) This is not what mainline denominational liberalism offers. Instead, it offers theological refinement. In American religious history, "theological refinement is the kind of progress that results in organizational bankruptcy."(3)
Men want a religion that offers rewards for sacrifice. "People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition."(4) Men are asked to pay costs in there here and now in order to receive greater rewards "elsewhere and later."(5)
I would add that theological liberalism denies or de-emphasizes the elsewhere and later aspect: beyond the grave. Then where and when will payday arrive? In its Social Gospel aspect, "later" refers to life on earth. Liberalism secularized traditional postmillennial eschatology, which had faded by 1900. This left the liberals as near monopolists regarding the historical continuity between today's sacrifice and tomorrow's rewards. But when this liberal optimism faded in the economic pessimism of the 1930's, and especially in the economic optimism and "Philistinism" of middle-class America's post-War boom, it was replaced by Norman Vincent Peale's individualistic power of positive thinking and by neo-orthodoxy's noumenal individualistic encounter theology, which hardly any of its adherents have ever encountered. Liberalism went bland; it also visibly went bankrupt organizationally after 1965.
The decline of America's mainline denominations did not begin in the 1960's. It was far along by 1812.(6) Most academic commentators have blamed the decline of the 1960's on too little modernism or on too much secularization.(7) But they and their predecessors had contributed to this process of secularization, as the authors show. Those whose theology had caused the crisis now proclaimed that the churches needed more of the same. And so they got it, such as the Presbyterians' Confessional revision of 1967 or the Angela Davis incident in 1971. So, the pews emptied further. They continue to empty.
On page 232, the authors offer a table showing the relationship between ecumenism and denominational growth. In 1932, a survey was taken that showed the extent of denominational acceptance or resistance to ecumenism. The most hostile large denomination was Missouri Synod Lutheranism: 89.5 percent rejected ecumenism. Yet from 1916 to 1926, this denomination had experienced the highest net growth: over 50 percent. The next highest groups were the other Lutherans, excluding only the United Lutherans: 60 percent rejection. These groups experienced the second largest rate of growth, over 45 percent. And so it went, down to the Evangelical Synod, in which 10 percent rejected ecumenism (lowest), and which had suffered a 22.6 percent decline in membership (largest). The Northern Presbyterians were, as usual, right in the middle: about 21 percent rejected ecumenism, and growth had been an anemic 1.4 percent. This was in contrast to the Southern Presbyterians, who rejected ecumenism by almost 53 percent, and which had enjoyed an 11 percent growth rate.(8)
Price Competition and Market Share If there is a testable law in economic theory, it is this one: at a lower price, more will be demanded, other things being equal.(9) The story of the demise of Calvinism in America is the story of above-market pricing.
Calvinism was dominant in the United States in 1790: Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, and Episcopalianism. A century later, Arminianism was dominant. I have already dealt with this transformation, using E. S. Gaustad's Atlas of American Religion (1962) as my source.(10) Finke and Stark have used other primary sources to reach similar conclusions. There were fewer than 5,000 Methodists in 1776.(11) There were 65 Methodist congregations averaging 75 members. Membership per congregation was similar among the Baptists and Presbyterians.(12) The percentage of Church members in the colonies was generally about 20 percent. The highest was in South Carolina: 31 percent (white members). The lowest was in Vermont: 9 percent. Massachusetts and New York were around 20 percent. Pennsylvania was high: 26 percent.(13) The vast majority of America's population in 1776 was outside the authority of the churches.
New England was overwhelmingly Congregational: 63 percent. This was by law: Congregationalism was an established Church. Taxes supported the ministers. This would remain true in Massachusetts until 1833. (At that time, Horace Mann's public school system replaced Congregationalism as Massachusetts' established Church.) The ecclesiastical results of this subsidy were these: upper class, well-paid pastors; a highly educated ministry; creeping liberalism (Harvard College went Unitarian in 1805); and an inability to compete outside of the region. Congregational home missions efforts were impotent. When the Plan of Union of 1801 created joint home missions outside of New England, most of the newly formed Congregationalist congregations joined the Presbyterian Church.(14) What Adam Smith had predicted in 1776 had come true: the State's infusion of funds had reduced the clerical recipients' ability to compete.(15)
(A similar strategy was used by the modernists a century later: the Federal Council of Churches' control over radio air time through the government's Federal Communications Commission, which in the mid-1920's imposed a requirement that all radio stations set aside free time for public service broadcasting. The religious FCC persuaded the newly created national radio networks to allow only FCC representatives to fill these free time slots. Then the religious FCC persuaded the national networks to sell commercial air time only to FCC-linked pastors. The evangelicals could not crack this cartel, not even Charles E. Fuller's "Old-Fashioned Revival Hour," which was limited to buying air time on local stations. When the National Religious Broadcasters -- the evangelicals' organization -- in 1960 persuaded the government's FCC to authorize payments for public interest time slots, the National Council's radio cartel collapsed. Liberals could not compete with those evangelical ministries that had been built up on local radio stations for three decades through donations from the audience. The same sequence was repeated on television.(16) There was another factor: technology. The tape recorder, first used by Hitler in the early 1940's to broadcast simultaneous speeches across Germany, was pioneered on commercial radio by Bing Crosby, beginning in 1947. Crosby hated rehearsals and hated doing his radio show three times for three of the four time zones. The audio tape made it possible for evangelical ministers to buy air time from lots of local stations. Technological breakthroughs -- videotape and satellite broadcasting -- performed the same cartel-busting feat in the 1970's. Once again, it was reliance on State coercion that doomed the liberals.)
The Congregationalist-Presbyterian Plan of Union was a cartel: restricting denominational competition on the frontier between Presbyterians and Congregationalists. It failed because suppliers from outside the cartel met the growing demand. The Methodists and the Baptists were not participants in the agreement.(17) The Presbyterians and Episcopalians tried to keep out interlopers by controlling public real estate. In Buffalo, New York in 1818, the Presbyterians controlled the court house on Sunday; the Episcopalians controlled the school house.(18) The Methodists and Baptists had to build their own buildings. Then they filled them.
The American Home Missionary Society was one of the parachurch ministries that caused such dissention between Old School and New School Presbyterians in the 1820's and 1830's. The authors point out that this organization was a response to the price-competitive Methodists and Baptists, whose pastors served free of charge or close to it. The AHMS raised funds to help finance well-paid and well-educated missionaries from the hierarchical churches to evangelize frontier regions that were in the middle of the Second Great Awakening. But price competition on the frontier was fierce. "The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians could not sustain churches in these areas without home missions subsidies, if for no other reason than that they depended on a well-educated and well-paid clergy."(19) In the 1830's, an urban Presbyterian or Congregationalist pastor was paid anywhere from $1,000 a year to $3,000.(20) Meanwhile, a Methodist circuit rider was officially paid $100, but very often they were paid even less by the organization.(21) They were the Protestant Jesuits. Of the first 700 circuit riders, almost half died before age 30, 199 of them within the first five years of service.(22)
By 1850, the 65 Methodist congregations of 1776 had grown to 13,300: 2.6 million members -- over one-third of the churched population. The Baptists had risen from 16.9 percent to 20.5 percent. The Episcopalians had fallen from 15 percent of the churched population to 3.5 percent. The Presbyterians had fallen from 19 percent to 11.6 percent.(23) So desperate were the Calvinist denominations that they often persuaded town councils to outlaw camp meetings as disturbances of the peace in the early 1800's.(24) They called on the State to defend their oligopoly. This did not work; in fact, it weakened them. It made them organizationally flabby.
I have stated in this book that the word "shortage" should not be used apart from the qualification "at some price." The price of entry into Calvinist pulpits was advanced education: grammar school Latin above all, followed by college, and after 1808 (Congregationalism) and 1812 (Presbyterianism), theological seminary. This price of entry was a cost. As costs rise, the quantity supplied falls. Fewer men will pay the cost. They must be lured by future compensation to justify their present expenditure. This created a shortage of qualified ministers. Well-educated pastors could demand high wages, but only from prosperous eastern and urban congregations. Actual demand for such high-priced pastors, as registered in the total number of calls from all churches, necessarily fell. Calls from tiny churches were numerous on the Western frontier, meaning calls at low prices. Who would meet this demand? Baptist and Methodist laymen-turned-pastors.
The Presbyterians did keep pace proportionally: the number of members in relation to the total population. They had not enjoyed State establishment. They could compete more successfully than Congregationalists and Episcopalians, who fell permanently into insignificance numerically. Meanwhile, Baptists and Methodists increased their share of the population, as more Americans than ever before joined local churches.(25) In 1776, about 17 percent of Americans were local church members. By 1860, it was 37 percent. In 1906, it was 50 percent. In 1926, it was 56 percent. In 1980, it was about 62 percent.(26) Although the standards for membership have declined since 1776, those churches that have held their members to standards that are more in conflict with the secularism of the prevailing culture have grown, avoiding the decline suffered by liberal mainline denominations.
Seminaries and Liberalism When the innovative Methodist missionary Francis Asbury died in 1916, there was no Methodist college. In 1847, Methodists started a seminary. By 1880, there were 11 Methodist theological seminaries, 44 colleges and universities, and 130 women's schools.(27) There was also liberalism: New School Methodism. Centralization proceeded apace after 1850; so did the beginnings of Unitarianism in the denomination. So did personal wealth, pew rentals, and other signs of creeping social legitimacy.(28) These developments led to a split in 1860: the creation of Free Methodism.(29)
Liberalism led to a decline in the number of Methodists as a percentage of the overall population ("market share"),(30) which peaked for Methodism in 1850. The Baptists overtook them in sheer numbers in 1906.(31) But the market share of the Northern Baptists, with their seminary training and higher salaries, declined side by side, though at a slightly lower rate, from 1850 to 1926.(32) It was the Southern Baptists that provided the growth.(33)
By the time the Methodists opened their first seminary, the mainline denominations had turned out 6,000 ministers.(34) Yet the replacement of the original Big Three denominations was visible to all by 1847. Meanwhile, the Congregationalists had gone Unitarian. As the authors note, "religious doctrine often seems to become accommodated and secularized whenever it is delivered into the control of intellectuals."(35) It happened to the Methodists, too. The entry point was the seminary by way of German graduate schools.(36)
Rural Ecumenism and the Rockefeller Connection Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, modernists actively pursued the goal of consolidating rural churches. This was part of the larger ecumenical movement. The initial organizational impulse for this began with a 1908 government project promoted by Teddy Roosevelt: the Commission on Country Life. This was the same year that the Federal Council of Churches came into existence. The report of the Commission was published in 1909. It recommended the creation of an agricultural extension service, initiation of government research projects in America's land grant colleges and universities, and the inclusion of home economics courses and agriculture courses in America's high schools.(37) This was necessary, the report said, because America's rural communities were declining rapidly. The government had to do something soon, in the report's words, to "unite the interests of education, organization and religion into one forward movement for rebuilding of rural life."(38)
The work of the Commission was taken over by Kenyon L. Butterfield, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, a leading member of the Commission. In 1921, Butterfield was a co-founder of the Institute of Social and Religious Research. The ISRR had just been created by Raymond Fosdick in his capacity as Rockefeller's lawyer. It inherited the field reports of the Interchurch World Movement, which Fosdick had just shut down.(39) Under Butterfield, the ISRR promoted what Finke and Stark call the myth of the country church crisis.(40) This myth rested on two assumptions: (1) cities were growing while rural areas were declining; (2) all denominations were being forced to close country congregations and subsidize others. This perspective had been stated clearly in a 1911 essay by Presbyterian minister Warren Wilson in the American Journal of Sociology.(41) But the story was entirely fabricated. The evidence did not support the myth, and its statistically competent promoters knew this.(42) First, rural population was not shrinking: 41 million (1890), 51 million (1920), 57 million (1940). As a percentage of the total U.S. population, rural population was shrinking, but this is not the same as saying that rural population was shrinking. Finke and Stark therefore conclude: "Consequently, the closure of rural churches could not have been the result of a decline in the potential church population."(43)
Wilson's proposed solution to the non-existent problem -- non-existent for Bible-believing Arminian churches -- was Church unity: ecumenism. He was in charge of the Presbyterian Church's rural surveys, conducted from 1911 to 1913. In the report on Ohio rural churches, published by the Presbyterian Church's (i.e., Wilson's) Department of Country Life (probably published in 1912 or 1913; there is no date), this bit of ecumenical ecclesiology appeared: "The Survival of the Fittest. . . . The large Church is the more efficient working Force. Small, weak churches would fare better if combined."(44) This became a constant theme for the next half century.
Saving Faith in Sociology
Finke and Stark rely heavily on an article by James H. Madison, published in 1986 in the Journal of American History. Madison reports that in 1912, at a the quadrennial meeting of the Federal Council of Churches,(45) a dozen men committed to rural ecumenism met in Butterfield's hotel room. They proposed that the denominations create research departments to conduct huge statistical surveys of rural churches. Their model was the Presbyterian Church's Department of Church and Country Life, part of the Board of Home Missions.(46) Its founder and director was Wilson, a Union Seminary graduate and a Columbia University Ph.D. in sociology.(47) Following Wilson's lead, conservationist promoter Gifford Pinchot and Charles Otis Gill issued a report through the Federal Council in 1913 that announced: "With the whole world turning to combined or cooperative action as the basis of efficiency, the program of the country church continues to deal wholly with individuals, and hence remains defective and one-sided."(48) (In that same year, the Presbyterian Church shut down the Department of Church and Country Life.(49) This was one year after the Church had cut funding for socialist Charles Stelzle's urban social activities.(50)) In 1915, the Federal Council's Conference on Church and Country Life was regarded as sufficiently important by President Woodrow Wilson to warrant delivering the closing address of the conference. The other Presbyterian Wilson, Warren, also spoke.(51)
By 1912, faith in sociological surveys was widespread in liberal theological circles. Charles E. Hayward had written as early as 1900: "The sociological movement is born of God, and is destined to be the mightiest power behind the Gospel the world has ever known."(52) In retrospect, Rockefeller's similar enthusiasm for the Interchurch World Movement's surveys in 1920 was not unique.
In 1920, the IWM published two volumes of guidelines for organizing rural churches to meet standards of efficiency. "Rural churches are dying," it announced.(53) Reform was needed. To revitalize fading rural Church leadership, pastors had to be paid more. After the report was issued, one of its directors announced that the minimal salary should be $1,200 a year, plus a free parsonage. Every church needed an organ, a well-equipped kitchen, and a moving picture projector.(54) To accomplish this, small churches would have to merge into large non-denominational community churches.
This was one more example of the liberals' cartel mentality. The liberals' hoped-for cartel was breaking down before it was even imposed, mimicking the Calvinist's would-be cartel on the frontier a century earlier. Price competition was still at work; so were creedal competition and liturgical competition. Fundamentalist interlopers kept invading the market. In 1914, John Hargreaves had predicted in the American Journal of Sociology that within ten years, community churches would be everywhere. In 1926, the reality was different: 301 federated congregations out of 167,864 congregations.(55)
A series of Rockefeller-funded reports, like their predecessors, promoted the myth of the death of country churches. But what was dying after 1900 was mainline denominational presence in rural areas, not the rural Church. Nevertheless, a stream of these reports continued through the 1950's, all making the same grim forecasts, all calling for ecumenism as the cure.(56) Finke and Stark write:
How could the reformers have been mistaken about the "fact" that rural churches were closing left and right? It depends on what kind of churches one counts. If we confine our attention to the mainline churches, Wilson's comments are not only accurate but prophetic. Between 1916 and 1926 the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. lost 826 churches (-8.5 percent), the Congregationalists dropped 872 (-14.8 percent), the Disciples lost 748 (-8.9 percent, and the Methodist Episcopal Church lost 3,185 (-10.9 percent). Many, if not most, of these losses were country and village churches.
But if we broaden our view to take in the entire landscape of rural American religion, the picture looks very different. Between 1916 and 1926 there was a net increase of 4,667 in the total number of American churches. The number of Lutheran and Catholic churches increased by 2,746, but this can account for only a modest part of the gain in churches. Given that the mainline churches mentioned above had lost 5,631 congregations, more than ten thousand new churches were needed to reach the new total. If the mainline was declining, someone else must have been quickly gaining. In addition to the Southern Baptists, who gained 1,178 churches, the "someones" included the Assemblies of God (+553 percent), Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) (+442 percent), Christian and Missionary Alliance (+169 percent), Church of the Nazarene (+577 percent), Churches of Christ (+656 percent), Free Will Baptists (+274 percent), the Pentecostal Holiness Church (+60 percent), and the Salvation Army (+310 percent).(57)
There was a hidden agenda behind the liberals' stream of deliberately misleading reports: consolidation. During World War I, Wilson was a faculty member at Columbia Teachers College. His colleague was Mabel Carney. This school was the central institution for progressive education during the Progressive era. The faculty in Wilson's day included John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, and William H. Kirkpatrick,(58) all of whom were leaders in the progressive education movement.(59) Wilson and Carney promoted rural consolidation of the churches and also the schools.(60) Carney's educational program was an extension of the General Education Board's long-term plan to create a system of public schools throughout the South and rural areas. This plan succeeded with the schools, which were funded by taxation and subject to political control. It failed with the churches.
The liberals knew that they had to overcome the national influence of rural, conservative areas, where saving faith in Jesus Christ was dominant, not saving faith in sociology. They viewed the revivalism and emotionalism of rural churches as a mere "backwash," to cite Edmund Brunner,(61) whom Wilson had recommended when he turned down the directorship of the ISRR's town and country survey program.(62) Their media efforts culminated in the Scopes trial in 1925.
Conclusion Finke and Stark end their book with this key rhetorical question: "When hell is gone, can heaven's departure be far behind?"(63) The denial of hell -- point four of the biblical covenant model, sanctions -- is the primary confession of covenant-breaking modern man. This denial has been theological modernism's most important doctrine, just as it has been modern science's.(64)
The decline of conservatism in Presbyterianism was intimately connected to the unwillingness of conservatives to screen access to the pulpit and the ministry in terms of the doctrine of hell. By the 1920's, those ministers who had rejected the doctrine of hell had ceased to be interested in preaching the Westminster Confession's way of salvation. The Presbyterian Church conformed to Finke and Stark's suggestion.
The authors also draw an inference from the history of American religion. If we view improvements in theology as inherently liberal improvements (as good liberals believe this must be), their conclusions seem consistent with the data. "In this book the history of American religion is the history of human actions and human organizations, not the history of ideas (refined or otherwise). But this is not to say that we regard theology as unimportant. To the contrary, we shall argue repeatedly that religious organizations can thrive only to the extent that they have a theology that can comfort souls and motivate sacrifice. In a sense, then, we are urging an underlying model of religious history that is the exact opposite of that based on progress through theological refinement. We shall present compelling evidence that theological refinement is the kind of progress that results in organizational bankruptcy."(65)
If they are correct, then for Calvinist theology to do more than survive in tiny denominations, Calvinists must find a way to match any proposed theological refinements with both the comforting of souls and the sacrificial motivation of the laity. Problem: it is easy -- confessionally, financially, and liturgically -- to be a member of a Calvinist denomination. The denomination calls upon its pastors (and their wives) to do the most of sacrificing. In this sense, Calvinism long ago adopted what would become the ecclesiastical legacy of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism: high academic standards and low pay for ministers, but hardly anything demanded from the laity. Roman Catholicism began an historically unprecedented rapid decline in 1966, the year after Vatican II ended: declines in attendance, giving, and new priests and nuns.(66) This does not bode well for Calvinism.
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Footnotes:
1. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 4-5.
2. Ibid., p. 5.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 275.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 249.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 232.
9. Of course, other things in history are never equal.
10. See Introduction to Part 2, above: section on "The Second Great Awakening," pp. 108-12.
11. Specifically, 4,921. Ibid., p. 25. The rely on the Minutes of the Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
12. Ibid., p. 26.
13. Ibid., p. 27.
14. Ibid., p. 74.
15. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Cannan edition (Modern Library, 1937), pp. 741-42; cited in ibid., p. 52.
16. Ibid., pp. 218-23.
17. Ibid., p. 63.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 65.
20. Ibid., p. 82
21. Ibid., p. 81.
22. Ibid., p. 153.
23. Ibid., pp. 55-56.
24. Ibid., pp. 101-102.
25. Ibid., p. 72.
26. Ibid., p. 15.
27. Ibid., p. 154.
28. Ibid., p. 150.
29. Ibid., pp. 151-52.
30. Ibid., p. 145.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., chart, p. 171.
33. Ibid., chart, p. 149.
34. Ibid., p. 77.
35. Ibid., p. 158.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 202.
38. Cited in ibid.
39. See Chapter 6, above: section on the Interchurch World Movement, 1919-1921," pp. 392-403.
40. Ibid., p. 207.
41. Ibid., pp. 207-208.
42. Ibid., p. 214.
43. Ibid., p. 208.
44. Reproduced in James H. Madison, "Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900-1950," Journal of American History, 73 (1986), p. 651.
45. Where Shailer Mathews was elected president.
46. Ibid., p. 652.
47. Ibid., p. 649.
48. Cited in ibid., p. 652
49. Ibid., p. 653.
50. See Chapter 6, above: section on "Alliances vs. the Broadening Church," p. 361.
51. Ibid., pp. 632-33.
52. Charles Hayward, Institutional Work for the Country Church (1900), p. 32, cited in ibid., p. 647.
53. Cited in ibid., p. 635.
54. Ibid., p. 660.
55. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 212.
56. Madison, pp. 664-65.
57. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 208.
58. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage, [1961] 1964), pp. 172-73.
59. See the chapters on all three in R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963).
60. Madison, p. 644.
61. Cited in Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 238.
62. Madison, p. 655.
63. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 249.
64. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.
65. Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 5.
66. Ibid., pp. 259-61.