Evolution – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?

On October 19, 1919, Lloyd C. Douglas was speaking at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on the subject of “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” and for a brief moment in that sermon he touched on the question, “Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?”

(This sermon is filed under Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Lloyd Douglas was never one to shy away from controversial topics if he felt they needed to be addressed. He wouldn’t argue with people, but he would state his opinion boldly.

In this sermon, Douglas says, “Christian philosophy – if we may deal with its elemental propositions – makes no effort to account for the exact process by which mankind came into existence. The old Hebrew religion, out of which Christianity emerged under the leadership of the young Jewish Nazarene, did account for the creation of man on the ground of a miracle. There was a collection of these creation legends which were pieced together and assumed a fairly definitive narrative, with only minor discrepancies. Jesus knew this Hebrew creation story, for it was taught Him as a child. It was presented to Him as a fundamental doctrine which, to disbelieve, made one an infidel.

“If Jesus believed it at all, He did not consider it an important matter. If He had considered it important, He would have said so. The only fact about man’s creation worth noting was the fact that he had been created, undeniably for a high purpose. Nothing else about his creation mattered.

“Whether God is to bring the human race up, through ages of discipline, by a process of patient evolution or is to create him as he is now, by divine fiat, is a non-essential.

“The ancients who tried to explain the process were doubtless seeking an easy way for God to do it – the way they might have attempted to do it, had they been God.

“The indisputable fact is that nobody knows, or has ever known, the process by which God dignified one genus of the animal order to the point of endowing it with spiritual gifts and graces. It is a practically sure venture that the early Hebrews did not know, who believed the earth to be the center of the universe, around which the sun revolved.”

Although Douglas was a Christian minister, he did not think it was necessary to defend the Old Testament or even to believe in its teachings. He didn’t even think it was necessary to believe everything in the New Testament. He considered the Bible a library of books in which the writers did their best to make sense out of life and grappled especially with the idea of God and their relationship to God. For Douglas, to follow Jesus meant to do the things Jesus taught. In that sense, he was a minimalist: nothing else in the Bible mattered as much as the things Jesus said.

To be a Christ-follower, in Douglas’s opinion, did not require a person to believe that God made the sun stand still at Joshua’s command, nor did it require him to believe that the earth and its inhabitants were created just as described in the first two chapters of Genesis. He thought Christians should not tell scientists how to do their job, for there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus that disagreed with the theory of evolution. Douglas recognized no fundamental difference between the teachings of Jesus and the theory of evolution, despite the fact that there were plenty of Christian ministers saying otherwise.

Douglas vs. De Mille

by Ronald R Johnson

From the Los Angeles Examiner, Thursday, 8/30/1928. In Burton Funeral Scrapbook, Box 6, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Several days after Lloyd Douglas gave his congregation a negative review of Cecil B De Mille’s new film, The Godless Girl, a local reporter asked De Mille for his reaction (Harry Lang, “Atheism Exists in Schools Here, Declares De Mille,” Los Angeles Examiner, 8/30/1928). I will quote from the article at length:

‘ATHEISM?—’

Cecil B. DeMille… yesterday sat at that great desk of his, under the stained glass window of his studio sanctum, and said his say:

‘—so long as atheism remains a belief, a man has a perfect right to believe as he pleases. For myself, I believe in God. I think, if a man doesn’t believe in God, that he’s partially blind and partially deaf. He may think the same about me because I DO believe in God. But those are just our personal beliefs, and we’re entitled to them—I to mine, and he just as honorably to his.

‘But when atheism becomes a profession, and when the professional atheist sneaks into our schools and tries to cram his propaganda into the minds of our school children—now, that’s something else again!

‘And if you don’t think they’re doing just that—’

DeMille pointed to the report of a sermon delivered here last Sunday by the Rev. Lloyd C. Douglas of the First Congregational Church.

‘Doctor Douglas says there’s no such thing as atheism in our schools, among our children. Now, I have the highest respect for Doctor Douglas and his sincerity and honesty—but he doesn’t know anything at all about atheism!

‘Why, one of our big schools right here in Los Angeles has in its student body no less than 269 pupils, every one of them paying dues as a member of a national atheistic society! Even if Doctor Douglas doesn’t know that, it’s a point that the principal of that school knows!’

This picture of DeMille’s – ‘The Godless Girl,’ now showing at the Biltmore Theater – deals with the planting of the seeds of atheism in public schools of America, through an insidious, outside-financed propaganda system.

Indeed! De Mille believed that there was an organization of professionals recruiting students just like the unions were doing in the factories. “Professional atheists,” he called them.

The article continues:

‘Whether you like the picture or not is one thing,’ [De Mille] tells you. ‘But remember this, the picture is true; it is fact. When Doctor Douglas or anyone else says that such things as I show there do not exist, he doesn’t know whereof he speaks.

‘Atheism is a menace in our schools today. I don’t think, mind you, that the youth of today want to be atheists. I think they are as fine and as spiritually inclined as the youth of any other age. I think they are more genuine. But the times are different. They miss, at home, the element of spirituality. I remember my dad—he used to sit every evening and on Sundays and discuss spiritual matters. There weren’t, in those days, any movies, any dances, any night clubs, any automobiles, any radio.

(So… movies have a demoralizing effect on young people? Is that what he’s saying? Should movie theaters be banned, then? Probably not what he had in mind.)

De Mille continued:

‘The lack of that spirit in the home of today gives the professional atheist his great chance. It is at that—the professional atheist—that I aim. The sincere atheist won’t try to inflict his beliefs on your child or my child; it is the paid professional who is the danger, the menace.

‘They laughted, remember, at Trotsky and Lenin. But later nobody laughed!’

In De Mille’s fanciful view of the situation, high school students were being brainwashed by these professionals, who were busy recruiting them and turning them against God. And it was easy to understand how this could happen: as students were taught the theory of evolution, their minds would naturally be more receptive to atheism. Or so De Mille seemed to think.

The article concluded with De Mille emphasizing one more time:

‘Atheism IS a menace in our schools today! And who was it that said, ‘Where there is no God…’’

Over in the corner, the press agent prompted: ‘Proverbs, Mr. DeMille.’

‘Yes,’ concluded Cecil DeMille. ‘It was Solomon who said it – wise old chap – ‘Where there is no God, the people perisheth!’’

That wasn’t what the scripture passage said, but it didn’t really matter. At issue was De Mille’s claim that cadres of “professional atheists” had declared war on the nation’s schools and were even now infiltrating them. And there was simply no way that anyone was going to change his mind. In his autobiography, years later, he started to come in Douglas’s direction. In retrospect, he said, “what seems most dated to me now about The Godless Girl is the high school atheist club. More youngsters of today are more indifferent about God than belligerent toward Him. I wonder which is the more godless of those two attitudes” (De Mille, Autobiography, p. 287). Ironically, this is what Douglas was trying to tell him: that high school students weren’t under assault from “professional atheists” trying to capture their souls but were, instead, being made indifferent to religion because of most churches’ unwillingness to face the facts of modern life.

Instead of being glum about it, like De Mille seems in his autobiography, Douglas was trying to do something about it. But it got him into trouble with a powerful core group of conservatives among the members of his congregation. To conservatives, De Mille’s stand was heroic; for Douglas to oppose him was just one more indication that it was time for him to go. So the conservatives in the congregation made their move weeks later…

The Godless Girl

by Ronald R Johnson

In the summer of 1928, De Mille released his last silent movie: The Godless Girl. The “girl” mentioned in the title was busily winning her fellow high school students away from God, inviting them to clandestine meetings in which they would publicly declare themselves unbelievers while placing one hand on the head of a monkey. This was, of course, a comical reference to the theory of evolution, which De Mille thought should not be taught in the public schools.

After seeing this film, Lloyd Douglas preached a sermon about it on August 26, 1928, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. (It’s included in “Sermons [1],” Box 3, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.)

Douglas described the scene:

“We have here the dramatic spectacle of a large hall, secretly secured, stealthily approached, up a half-dozen flights of rickety stairs, a hall crowded with high school youngsters. This is not offered as an unusual and inexplicable thing that happened somewhere, once, under strange and unaccountable circumstances. No: this is offered as a fair and normal sample of what is going on in high schools of this country.

“The meeting is presided over by a young fanatic, the Godless Girl, who frantically points to a drawing on the wall, replete with ridicule of God, and everybody interested in God. Converts are urged to come forward and take the pledge to abjure God and religion. This they do by putting one hand in the air, in the conventional sign of taking an oath, and the other hand laid upon the head of a monkey, which is the symbol and talisman and fetish of the new order that has staked its claim to knowledge of life on a materialistic biology.

“Now, it is exactly at this point that I, as a believer in an intelligent appraisal of the Christian religion, want to raise an indignant protest. For several years, the people who have been earnestly endeavoring to offer to our youth a system of religious belief which they can hold with intellectual self-respect, have been under heavy fire at the hands of the literalists and tradionalists, who interpret all scientific knowledge in terms of monkeys. If I don’t believe that Jehovah stacked up a pile of dirt and called it a man, and then took a rib from the man and called it a woman, then, perforce, I am an infidel who thinks his forefathers were chimpanzees.

For one, I am all tired of the monkey talk, and the monkey talkers! And the spectacle of a great roomful of eager, serious-minded high school boys and girls pledging their open hostility to God and religion by putting their hands on a monkey’s head, and swearing allegiance to a monkey gospel, is not only willfully and meanly untrue to the facts, but encourages the silly notions of certain classes of well-meaning but uninformed persons, that an intellectual appraisal of religion is, after all, consonant with atheism.

Later in the film, the principal characters are in a reformatory. As Douglas says:

A Bible figures in the scene. The girl who kisses it and makes soft eyes at it is religious. The girl who impatiently tosses it on the floor is an atheist. Here you have a specious form of heathenism—relic of the old obsolescent notion that the Bible… is a fetish. You don’t have to know anything about it—who wrote it and why—all you need to do is hug it and kiss it, make eyes at it – a type of benighted paganism that this age really should have outgrown!

This was Douglas’s main complaint. While he was trying to reach young people by appealing to their intelligence, so very many ministers and laypeople (aided by movies like this one) were declaring war on science, on education, and on the free exercise of the human mind. The problem, he said, “is not atheism at all… The modern student’s difficulty is complete indifference to the kind of religion that is to be had in the typical church.

Nobody can tell me that the youngsters think they have outgrown a need of religion, or emancipated themselves from God. Their seeming air of indifference is due to the fact that they have been invited by the churches to take their pick, whether they will accept a jumble of legends inherited from ancient Jewry as an adequate interpretation of life’s origin, meaning, and destiny, or repudiate the whole business and call themselves atheists! They would sincerely like to know whether they are permitted to have a religion.

“Permitted to have a religion”! That was the issue. More and more, the most vocal proponents of Christianity in America were forcing young people to choose between the things they were learning in high school and college, or the truths of the Bible as interpreted by those who had never been educated. If those young people found it impossible to deny what they had seen with their own eyes in the laboratory, then they were being told they could not call themselves Christians.

A little minority of churches is attempting to show them that they can; that spiritual energies are real; that a man can lay hold upon the power of the presence of God, and make use of that human-divine contact in every endeavor of his life and still pursue his work in the laboratories with a deep respect for the truths of modern science.

But mighty little encouragement do these churches receive. On the one hand they are bombarded by the so-called Fundamentalists who, apparently, would rather see the children lost to the church and indifferent to religion than to budge an inch from the mouldering wall of sixteenth-century dogmatism. On the other hand, they are misinterpreted by a casual public that has been fed up on talk of monkeys and the high importance of kissing Bibles… until it’s not much wonder if an intellectual estimate of religion, these days, is hard to arrive at.

This was the crux of Douglas’s complaint. The sermon ended up in the newspaper, and a reporter asked De Mille what he thought of Douglas’s remarks. I’ll tell you about his response in my next post.

Lloyd Douglas’s Views on The Long Parade

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

During his pastorate at the First Congregational Church of Akron, Lloyd Douglas first began describing his view of history and of our place within it. Later, in his novel Green Light, he would call it “The Long Parade,” but in 1926 he described it this way:

I have taught that humanity is on the way up, by the grace of God, toward some exalted destiny.

You have been encouraged by me to believe in evolution—not the kind of evolutionary theory which the untutored think resolves itself into a mere question of whether or not our ancestors were simians; but a theory of evolution which describes a vast physical, mental, moral, and spiritual pilgrimage through the ages—increasingly marking man’s rise, on the stepping-stones of his dead self, to higher things; a hope and quest he still pursues without much more certainty of his ultimate goal than John conceived when, out of the mystical faith that distinguished his radiant soul, he wrote: ‘Beloved, we are the children of God. It doth not yet appear what we shall become, but we know that when we shall see Him, and know Him as he is, we shall be found to be like Him’ [I John 3:2].
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron.” In The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955), p. 91.

It may seem strange to us now, to hear a minister saying that the process of evolution is part of God’s plan and that the end goal is for us all to become Christlike, but this was not such an odd thought in the 1920’s. In fact, John M Coulter, who was Chair of the Department of Botany at the University of Chicago, was saying similar things in The Christian Century during those years. He said them in books, too. For example, John M Coulter and Merle C Coulter, Where Evolution and Religion Meet (New York: Macmillan, 1925), is mostly about evolution, but in the final chapter, the authors say, “Religion is now known to be a universal impulse…. Any universal impulse must have some function…. It seems obvious that the function of the religious impulse is… to bring man to the highest expression of his being…. We realize that everything that is finest in human character and conduct is in response to the stimulus of love. Our conclusion is that the most effective ideal for the religious impulse is love stimulating service. This is the ideal of the Christian religion, and it makes scientific men choose it as the only religion with a scientific approach…” (pp. 103-104).

A lot of things have changed in the past hundred years!

At any rate, Douglas was hearing this kind of thing from professors in the state universities who still called themselves Christians and still believed in going to church even though the churches, by and large, were turning against “Darwinism.” Like them, Douglas was inspired by the fact of evolution and saw it as part of an upward-driving “impulse.” He himself was an optimist by nature, and as he scanned the history of the earth and its various forms of life, he believed the trend was destined to keep heading upwards.

He thought the world was getting better, but he didn’t think it was inevitable. He believed that it was individuals working together (rather than political or social systems) that improved society in each successive generation. Therefore, much of his preaching focused on this very thing: finding the way or ways in which you yourself can make the world a better place.

And that leads directly to his unorthodox views about immortality, which I’ll tell you about in the next post.

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Lloyd Douglas’s Views on Science and the Modern World

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

Lloyd Douglas was an unusual minister. He told his congregation in Akron:

I have never asked your faith to attend to any business that your intellect could handle more easily.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955)

This was an extremely important point for him. He believed that his progenitors had fought very hard to liberate the human mind from the powers that would shackle it: from political constraints, certainly, but especially from ignorance. And because of this belief, he preached that people should develop their intelligence. “You can bear it in mind,” he said,

…that I have never asked you to think exactly as I think about these matters of religious belief, but only to think. WHAT you thought was not of so great importance, in my opinion, as that you should have access to all the facts that I had access to; and after that, I was entirely willing that you should come to your own conclusions without too much gratuitous assistance from my quarter.

He did, however, urge his congregation to give serious consideration to the things being taught in the (fairly new) state universities, and especially in the natural sciences:

I have taught you that religion and science must be at one—if God is God.

Although many ministers were distrustful of modern science, Douglas was a huge fan of both its history and its latest findings. And although there was much confusion in religious circles about “Darwinism,” Douglas understood that evolution was a fact and that biologists were engaged in research to help explain the known facts. The fossil record showed vast differences in the types of flora and fauna in previous epochs, as well as changes in the structures of animals that still exist, such as horses. Darwin had proposed a theory to explain these facts (natural selection through scarcity of resources), but so had Lamarck (structural changes through use and disuse), and more recently so had Hugo De Vries (change by mutation). By the 1920s, biologists weren’t fighting over whether living things evolved; they were busy trying to explain how and why it happened.

Douglas warned his congregation…

…that the elemental principles of the new biology either must fit in with the elemental principles of Christian faith—or we lose the coming generation from the ranks of the church.

At first that may sound like he was over-accommodating to secular culture, but he believed what I quoted earlier: that “religion and science must be at one – if God is God.” He trusted scientists. He viewed them as honest seekers of the truth. And therefore he believed that any facts they uncovered, as well as any theories that could account for those facts, must be in harmony with what God was doing – and had done – in this world. Any religion that posed as either a judge or an adversary of the scientific enterprise was doomed to obsolescence, because it would fail to attract anyone interested in the truth. It wasn’t that Douglas was worried about the church going out of business; he was concerned that the church would fail to perform its mission: to provide support to truth-seekers in all walks of life.

Douglas not only accepted the “new biology” but actually found it inspiring. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C Douglas, fill out the form below:

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