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Several key events occurred in these pivotal years. The Scopes trial took place in 1925. Prohibition ended in 1926 in Canada, demonstrating that evil could not be abolished simply by passing a law. The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 out of three denominations: Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Canadian Baptists split into Convention Baptists and Fellowship Baptists in 1926. There were other splits and mergers in US denominations.
Underlying many of these events was a philosophical debate between optimists and pessimists, Christian postmillenialists and Christian premillenialists, modernists and fundamentalists. Postmillenialists believed that the world would become better and better, increasingly Christian, until the millennium, the time of Christ's rule on earth, arrived; after this, Christ would return. (The Latin word "post" means "after".) Premillennialists believed that the world would get worse and worse, until finally Christ would come and dramatically restore everything, ushering in the millennium. For them, Christ would return before (pre) the millennium.
John T. Scopes was a Tennessee school teacher charged with teaching evolution. His trial was an example of the struggle between evolutionists, who believed the world was evolving from chaos toward a higher civilization, and Christians, who believed that God had created a perfect world which had then fallen, and which was probably continuing to fall even farther. This trial marked the beginning of the separation between Christians and the scientific and educational establishment; henceforth Christians would be considered anti-scientific and anti-intellectual fanatics.
The United Church of Canada was formed largely by postmillennialists, who believed that as the millennium neared, the church would be purified and unified and would then be able to Christianize all of society.
Although there were other issues involved, for the most part Convention Baptists were postmillennialists and Fellowship Baptists were premillennialists. Similar disagreements over social trends were evident in other church splits and mergers.
Surprisingly, much of the evidence from current social trends favoured the postmillennialist position. From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, there had not been a major war in Europe: Could it be that humanity was becoming more peaceful? There were encouraging advances in medicine and technology; the industrial revolution had created the train, the automobile, the airplane, telegraph and radio, which had radically changed society. There had been a series of great evangelical revivals from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Out of those revivals had come a great wave of missionary activity that had brought the gospel to Africa and Asia. Out of the revivals had also come a whole series of social improvements. Slavery and child labour had been abolished. In Canada, the Lord's Day Act in 1910 had made Sunday a legal day of rest and worship. Women were granted the right to vote in 1916-17, which, it was hoped, would result in a gentler, more civilized and more godly society. The sale of alcohol was abolished in Canada in 1916-17.
Even the horror of the First World War did not dampen the enthusiasm of postmillenialists. They literally saw this war as Armageddon, the war to end all wars. Immediately after the war, the churches made ambitious plans for major evangelistic campaigns, which they were confident would usher in the millennium. The revival would be led, they were sure, by the returning soldiers. Who better to win the spiritual battle than those who had fought for God in the battle of Armageddon?
The postmillennialists' hopes were disappointed, of course. Many of the soldiers returned home traumatized and addicted to drinking, smoking and loose living. The planned revivals fizzled. Instead, there came the revelry of the Roaring Twenties, rum-running, the Great Depression of the 1930s and eventually World War II. The years 1925-26 were the pivotal moment in time when the balance shifted from postmillennialism to premillennialism, from optimism to pessimism.
On the other hand, the premillennialists' views were not fully vindicated either. Following World War II, there actually was a revival, not only of economic activity but of North American Christianity. Church attendance in Canada peaked, not in the 1900s, but in the 1950s. It is not surprising that this increased church attendance was followed by another period of social improvements in the 1960s: racial integration in the US and the introduction of medicare and other social programs. Many of these initiatives grew out of a Christian social concern, even though they were mixed in with (and later overshadowed by) a fair amount of self-centred pleasure-seeking. The 1950s also brought another great surge of missionary activity.
Now the pendulum is swinging the other way--in North America, at least. I suspect that Christians in China, South America and Africa are far more hopeful than we are in North America.
The challenge for Christians is to take the long view and not to be sidetracked by short-term trends. It is true that as time goes on, evil men will become worse and worse. Yet it is also true that God is continuing to build His kingdom, and we know that in the end God's kingdom will triumph. We must keep that end in view, not becoming discouraged in the bad times, or overconfident in the good times. The question for us is not really if the times are good or bad. The question for us is a more basic one: What are we doing to make the times better?
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