Evolutionary Science and Christian Belief in Progressive Era Political Economy: Adversaries or Allies?

Abstract

Historians often make Christian belief and evolutionary science adversaries (as perhaps best exemplified by accounts of the 1925 Scopes trial), but Progressive Era American political economy allied Christian belief and evolutionary science. Leading progressive economists, notably the evangelicals attached to the Social Gospel movement, readily assimilated Darwinism to their religiously motivated project of economic reform. This essay argues that the progressive economists' merger of evolutionary science and Christian belief was made possible by the fact that the Social Gospel was itself already (in part) an accommodation to the implications of Darwinism, and that Progressive Era evolutionary science was protean, fragmented and plural, enabling intellectuals to enlist evolutionary science in support of diverse, even opposed positions in political economy.

Keywords: Social Gospel, Darwinism, evolutionary science, Progressive Era economics

JEL Classification: B10, B13, B15