Surprising Discoveries About 19th Century Religious Embraces of Evolution

UC Berkeley's LeConte Hall

In doing research over the past few years on the relationship of science and religion in America, I've had some discoveries, and even had a few surprises, which I intend to blog about in upcoming posts. One of those is that that liberal theological approaches to integrating science sometimes sound as crazy as the fundamentalist ones in rejecting it.

Let it be said--because this is a common misconception--that certainly not all religious responses to Darwin's theory of evolution were critical. Some might even sound a bit too enthusiastic.

I'll offer two examples. 

The first is Joseph LeConte (1823-1901), educated under Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz at Harvard, proposed a philosophy of creative evolution. (For what it's worth I first encountered his name as an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley where a building is named after Joseph and his brother John). LeConte described himself in 1868 as

an evolutionist, thorough and enthusiastic . . . not only because it is true, and all truth is the image of God in the human reason, but also because of all the laws of nature it is… the most in accord with religious philosophic thought. It is, indeed, glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all peoples.

It's probably that last part--a clear allusion to Luke 2, equating the proclamation of Jesus's birth with evolution--that sounds discordant to my ears.

But LeConte is certainly not alone. The late nineteenth century version of evolution as a  theory of progressive improvement melded exquisitely well with liberal theological postmillennialism (that each day we are getting better and better, as a sign of Christ's thousand year reign). And here enters Henry Ward Beecher, whose 1885 Evolution and Religion adapted evolutionary concepts for the purpose of Christian proclamation. 

Incidentally, it isn't clear to some that Beecher clearly grasped evolution. William Schneider offered this evaluation with more than a hint of snarkiness: “there was scarcely even a pretext of science in him. 

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87)

At any rate, gone is the brutality of "survival of the fittest" and Alfred Lord Tennyson's nature "red with tooth and claw." In its place is a serene progress, which, according to Beecher, mirrors the teachings of Jesus. All of this is worth a lengthy citation from his preface to this collection of eight sermons:

Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine of Evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul, but in the world; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed; I was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the kingdom of God in this world. Later I began to feel that science had struck a larger view, and that this unfolding of seed and blade and ear in spiritual things was but one application of a great cosmic doctrine, which underlay God's methods in universal creation, and was notably to be seen in the whole development of human society and human thought. That great truth—through patient accumulations of fact, and marvelous intuitions of reason, and luminous expositions of philosophic relation, by men trained in observation, in thinking, and in expression—has now become accepted throughout the scientific world. Certain parts of it yet are in dispute, but substantially it is the doctrine of the scientific world. And that it will furnish—nay, is already bringing—to the aid of religious truth as set forth in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ a new and powerful aid, fully in line with other marked developments of God's providence in this His world, I fervently believe.

Beecher subsequently considered the core teaching for Christian life, and he offered this: “The Bible is thus a grand evolution of the nature of God. It is the unfolding of his progress, that is to say, of the progress of the human mind respecting him."

I suspect this is enough citing to establish how and why I find some of these late nineteenth century theological approaches to evolution excessive, and even rococo, in their rhetorical flourishes.

-->

But maybe you don't agree. Feel free to comment one way or the other.