Prohibitionists. Good guys or bad guys?

[HondurasKeiser]

Prohibition was a mistake. At best its proponents were well intentioned. In reality they were misguided. Sin is in the drunkeness (lingering long at the wine) not the drink. A case of professing Christians going over and above Scripture.

Est-ce toi, OJ?

[Ken]

Prohibition was a mistake. At best its proponents were well intentioned. In reality they were misguided. Sin is in the drunkeness (lingering long at the wine) not the drink. A case of professing Christians going over and above Scripture.

People make the exact same identical argument about guns.

[ohio jones]

Est-ce toi, OJ?

I'm not sure what is going on, but there should probably be a prohibition.

[HondurasKeiser]

Est-ce toi, OJ?

I'm not sure what is going on, but there should probably be a prohibition.

Well now I am very confused.

[ken_sylvania]

Est-ce toi, OJ?

I'm not sure what is going on, but there should probably be a prohibition.

If the mods don't even know what's going on around here - who does?

[ohio jones]

Well now I am very confused.

I think things are back to normal now, but if you are still confused we could brew up some proof about what was going on.

[AnthonyMartin]

Sin was found in structures, institutions and society-at-large, not in the person. Their mission then was not to evangelize people so that they might be freed from sin but to remake society so that people might be freed from oppressive systems.

This seems a bit problematic to me, and possibly leaning toward a false dichotomy? I’m not so sure Progressives seeing sin problems in structures, institutions, and society-at-large, necessarily requires a movement away from sin in the individual person.

[HondurasKeiser]

Sin was found in structures, institutions and society-at-large, not in the person. Their mission then was not to evangelize people so that they might be freed from sin but to remake society so that people might be freed from oppressive systems.

This seems a bit problematic to me, and possibly leaning toward a false dichotomy? I’m not so sure Progressives seeing sin problems in structures, institutions, and society-at-large, necessarily requires a movement away from sin in the individual person.

Don't take my word for it: The Social Gospelers

The Social Gospel was a social movement within Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, lack of unionization, poor schools, and the dangers of war. It was most prominent in the early-20th-century United States and Canada. Theologically, the Social Gospelers sought to put into practice the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:10): "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".[1] They typically were postmillennialist; that is, they believed the Second Coming could not happen until humankind rid itself of social evils by human effort.[a] The Social Gospel was more popular among clergy than laity.[2] Its leaders were predominantly associated with the liberal wing of the progressive movement, and most were theologically liberal, although a few were also conservative when it came to their views on social issues.[3] Important leaders included Richard T. Ely, Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch.

To be sure, I'm generalizing and eliding disagreements the various Social Gospelers may have had amongst themselves. Rauschenbusch in that same entry is quoted as saying: "the individualistic gospel has made sinfulness of the individual clear, but it has not shed light on institutionalized sinfulness: It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion."
In the main though, they [the Progressives/Social Gospelers] located the sinfulness of the world in systems and maintained a fairly optimistic view of human nature. That kind of goes without saying right? - if you're of a progressive bent you tend to think that humans are generally good and able to progress - to build a kind of Heaven on Earth.
Compare that way of viewing human nature, to this entry on the theological reaction against Liberal Theology/Social Gospel/Progressivism, i.e. Neo-Orthodoxy:

In neo-orthodoxy, sin is seen not as mere error or ignorance; it is not something that can be overcome by reason or social institutions (e.g., schools); it can only be overcome by the grace of God through Jesus Christ. Sin is seen as something bad within human nature itself.[7] This amounts to a renovation of historical teachings about original sin (especially drawing upon Augustine of Hippo), although thinkers generally avoided forensic interpretations of it and consequential elaborations about total depravity. The means of supposed transmission of sin, to neo-orthodox minds, is not as important as its pervasive reality. The association of original sin with sexuality—an abiding idea—leads to moralism, a rectitude that is overly optimistic about human capabilities to resist the power of unfaith and disobedience in all areas of life, not just sexual behavior. This core conviction about the universality and intransigence of sin has elements of determinism, and has not surprisingly offended those who think people are capable, wholly or in part, of effecting their own salvation (i.e., synergism). In other words, neo-orthodoxy might be said to have a greater appreciation of tragedy in human existence than either conservatism or liberalism, a point emphasized by a latter-day interpreter of the movement, Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall.

[HondurasKeiser]

Sin was found in structures, institutions and society-at-large, not in the person. Their mission then was not to evangelize people so that they might be freed from sin but to remake society so that people might be freed from oppressive systems.

This seems a bit problematic to me, and possibly leaning toward a false dichotomy? I’m not so sure Progressives seeing sin problems in structures, institutions, and society-at-large, necessarily requires a movement away from sin in the individual person.

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.

[HondurasKeiser]

This essay is a good distillation of the point I was driving at:

The great theologian of the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch, would later refer to the 1890s as a “dark time” for those who advocated the Social Gospel. The times undoubtedly seemed dark because those who preached seemed not to be reaching many of the people who sat in the pews. Following the Civil War, American Protestantism began to split into what Martin Marty has termed “Two party Protestantism”, composed of a “private party” and a public party.” Each of these parties drew from the force and energy of the Second Great Awakening. The private party focused on saving individual souls; in revivals in the rapidly expanding cities, they attempted to get people to turn away from their own sins and to embrace personal salvation. The public party focused on the sins of society, such as poverty and inequality, and asked people to seek salvation through building “the Kingdom of God on this earth.” Through the 1880s and 1890s, the private party raced ahead of the public party in popularity and public appeal.

Each of the groups was evangelical, meaning that they drew their message from the Bible, and each of them focused on redemption. But their objects of concern were very different. So were their sources of inspiration. In many ways, the private party harked back to the traditional themes of the First Great Awakening. Although the First Great Awakening has been driven in part by concern for how a Christian polity could be sustained if succeeding generations did not embrace their parents’ beliefs, the solution hinged solely on securing the salvation of the individuals who made up that polity. If people could be made to understand their own sinfulness and repent, their salvation would guarantee their membership in the Christian polity. Like these eighteenth century Protestants, the advocates of the private party saw their work as focused on the redemption of individual souls.

The partisans of public party, however, built on the reform elements of the Second Great Awakening, while also drawing from other new nineteenth century ideas, to build a new understanding of society and the church. In particular, they were influenced by the Higher Criticism from Germany and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

In the mid-nineteenth century, there was still no graduate education in the United States, so most serious scholars went to Germany if they wanted to pursue post-baccalaureate work. Many of the young men who traveled to Germany discovered the Higher Criticism while there, a method of Biblical interpretation that argued against seeing the Bible as literally true. Scholars of the Higher Criticism believed that the stories in the Bible might contain insights into the nature of the Christian God, but they believed that understanding that nature would require careful explanation of the Bible’s complicated narratives. In this view, there was no easy literal truth to be found in reading the Bible. Coupled with Darwin’s ideas, the Higher Criticism opened up a new and unfamiliar self-understanding for Protestants who were already shocked by the changes in the rural, agrarian society they had known before the Civil War.

For those who embraced both the Higher Criticism and Darwin’s work, there seemed to be the possibility to build a new world that ameliorated the dislocations of the new industrial capitalism. Darwin’s work, however, had also been embraced by some late nineteenth century American academics such as William Graham Sumner, as an explanation and justification for the outcomes of the new industrialism. When these conservative academics looked at the widespread poverty and the high levels of disease and infant mortality, they saw the work of natural selection. This so-called Social Darwinism offered an argument that allowed some people to see the dislocations of industrialism as the necessary weeding out of the weak and unfit as society evolved toward a new and higher form of social organization.

The advocates of the Social Gospel, however, saw things in a very different light. Instead of seeing the dislocations caused by industrialism as inevitable or desirable, the Social Gospelers saw them as the result of greed and the collective failure to protect people. Social Gospel leaders such as George Herron saw the terrible living conditions of workers and their families in urban areas as evidence of the beginning of a new millennium in which Christians were called to build the Kingdom of God. Not to make an effort to build this Kingdom in the face of such human suffering would be a social sin in the eyes of the Social Gospelers.

The real strength of this support became obvious within the churches in 1907 and 1908 when The Social Creed of the Churches was adopted by virtually all the mainline Protestant churches. Passed first by the Methodists in 1907, the Social Creed called for many measures to alleviate the conditions created by the new industrial workplace, for instance, the alleviation of Sunday working hours, the elimination of child labor, and the creation of disability insurance for workers injured in factories. The next year, the National Council of Churches was founded as a part of the effort to get the other Protestant churches to accept the Social Creed.

The Social Gospel’s role in the Progressive Era was amplified by the close connection between the Social Gospel and the emergence of professional social science in the late nineteenth century. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, economics, political science, and sociology all emerged in American universities as the result of the influence of the Social Gospel. The leaders in all three disciplines were “social Christians” who saw their work as central to showing the truth about American society and the need for reform. This often lead them to grief as there were no guarantees of tenure and academic freedom in the nineteenth century and many academic careers were ruined by trustees and college presidents who dismissed advocates of the Social Gospel from their faculties; but with the emergence of the Progressive movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, many squelched careers and silence voices were resurrected and social scientists became central in the political work of the Progressives.