Crolier Than Thou
24th August 2009
The late Robert Crunden got to the heart of Progressive faith when he discovered that almost all American Progressives were raised in Calvinist homes and, under the influence of some combination of the men and women of Croly’s moment, lost their Christianity and replaced it with some form of what they thought of as “science.” Democracy, activated through science, became what religion once was. Seeing a world that had changed so much since about 1850 — Henry Adams said that a boy born in 1850 was born closer to the year zero than to 1900 — and a generation that had conquered the night (electricity), geography (trains and automobiles and airplanes) and even nature itself, which was for the first time vulnerable to the whims and ambitions of human reason, Progressives had some grounds for their optimism about their belief in “mastery” as opposed to “drift,” as Walter Lippmann put it.