Prohibitionists. Good guys or bad guys?

[Soloist]

I agree with you though that an acknowledgment of the sinfulness of one does not "require" a movement away from the acknowledgement of sin in the other. Indeed, I think Anabaptists in our rejection of worldly systems are uniquely positioned to hold those two ideas in our heads at once. My point though was that Progressives particularly, by dint of their belief in man's ability to progress and through the influence of the social sciences/Darwinism that seemed to unmoor Christianity from its traditional doctrines regarding the supernatural - by and large, moved away from the conception of the sinful individual and embraced a social program to redeem the sinful institutions in a quest to establish God's Kingdom in the here and now. A very different way of viewing "Thy Kingdom Come" than even JBG/DanZ/other "Kingdom Christians" have elucidated as far as I can tell.

I would be interested in hearing you explore the connection of rejecting the "supernatural" aspects of traditional Christian doctrines and the change in the view of individual sinfulness. Wasn't the movement away from the supernatural aspect of traditional doctrine already solidified by the Deists in the late 17th Century? How did that impact the view of the natural bent of man?

Perhaps for some. Speaking of the Puritans - I read a longish essay 15 years ago about the reasons that many of the children of the Puritans became Unitarians in the late 1700's & early 1800's but I'll be darned if I can't find it or remember much of its conclusions. Deists though were a different breed as far as I can tell. Deism, flowing out of Enlightenment thinking, was a rationalist rejection of traditional doctrine regarding God's intervention in human affairs - remember the Deists held on to a notion of God because they needed a non-positivistic grounding for Natural Rights and thus the very rationale for the existence of the Social Contract. It seems to me to have been a purely philosophical affair and one that seems to have died off by the mid-1800's. The Progressives of the late 1800's were influenced by the Higher Criticism in Germany, the social sciences that exploded on to the scene in late 19th Century Germany and advances in the hard sciences. While there may be some overlap in their rejection of the supernatural - the one doesn't really seem to inform the other and indeed, more generally, the Progressives tended to reject the hyper-rationalist thinking and Social Contract theory that the elite Deists of the 1700's espoused. Both seem to be products of their particular moment.

(wife) I think I read about that too in Bercot's book, In God We Don't Trust. If he references that article, it would probably be in his bibliography.