{Two interlopers are chilling out at Cerulean Sanctum…}

I’m bored. Let’s play a game.

How about “Guess the Era!”

Dunno. How’s it played?

I’m thinking of an era in American History. I’ll throw out a fact and you try to tell me when that fact would’ve been true.

Sounds dull, but I’ll go along because I am like soooooo bored.

Dad works.

Yawn.

Mom homeschools the kids.

Official Focus on the Family Nuclear Family of the 2000s, right?

Wrong.

Mom also works.

Ooh, James Dobson’s ticker starts palpitating

Mom works from home.

Collective sigh of partial relief at Focus. Hmm, this is a toughie, though.

Dad homeschools the kids, too.

Really?

Dad also works from home.

Is this the family of the future, circa 2020, all gussied up with Terabit Internet access via which their home import/export biz of rare Chinese herbs for medicinal purposes competes in the global marketplace?

Aah, that would be “no.”

Even close?

Not on your life. Actually it’s the United States circa 1776. Revolutionary War days.

Wow, I would have never guessed. You’d think with all those smarmy Deists running around the country then that dogs and cats would’ve been living together in sin and the whole economy would’ve collapsed faster than the wooden tea stirrer market after the Boston Tea Party.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

Say, that kind of lifestyle sounds kind of appealing. Work from home. Do the log cabin thing. Grow your own…. You know, I’ve been to Colonial Williamsburg. Lots of real colonial cuties if you know what I—

Okay, you two, take a hike. This is my blog and I want control back.

You always want control, Dan. You’ve got issues. I know a great Christian therapist I can recommend. He’s a bit Jungian, but all the same, he’s—

HIT THE ROAD!

Okay, we get the picture.

Man, he’s goin’ all Cotton Mather on us!

OUT!

{Sounds of stumbling and mumbling, then a door slam.}

Sorry about that folks. Serious topics sometimes need levity. And this one is serious. It’s about the Industrial Church Revolution. You may never have heard of it, but like many things that go awry, it begins with a lot of hot air. Steam actually.

A couple decades before the idyllic days of mom and dad working together in a home-based economy in America at the dawn of independence, two English Thomases, Savery and Newcomen, invented a mechanical engine that ran on steam. And though it worked, it wasn’t until James Watt radically improved the design in 1769 that the first rumblings of pressure surfaced that would seal the fate of that storybook lifestyle of Mom and Pop Free America.

The English were the first to fall to what would later be called the Industrial Revolution. Steam power made possible a new strength in work. Some discovered that stationary steam engines could have wheels attached and be made to run on tracks. They weren’t fast, but they could haul heavy loads. Those tracks were made with massive presses, molds, and machines that cut and bent—all powered by steam.

But steam engines were expensive regardless of whether they became trains or not. And even though they allowed for the very power to build and create even more powerful machines, the labor to do the work simply could not be done from home any longer since few had the cash to have their own home steam engine built for private use. So Britain built centralized factories where people could come to work via the new modes of transportation that were developing, mechanizing much of the labor that had been done in homes by hand (particularly textiles— one of Britain’s major exports.)

Americans, still wanting to show the former homeland a thing or two, decided they could do it, too. Mass production of guns in factories started in the United States around the same time as the British burned down the White House. Mass production meant good money, but also mass workers. And masses of workers responded by venturing out of the home and into distant factories.

Meanwhile, factories chugged away in Britain even as “malcontents” like the Luddites protested, busting up mechanized knitting machines and other signs of the young Industrial Revolution until they themselves were busted up by the British army. Some were exiled to America. But the real problem of factory life did not emerge until a young scientist named Charles Darwin came along in 1843 with a challenging new biological theory he called “transmutation.”

By this time, economies in both Britain and America were beginning to undergo a steady change as more people left the hard life of farming the cursed ground for the hard life of factory work. Over in England, intellectuals started listening to Darwin’s ideas and saw natural correlations between it and the growing class distinctions in that country. Of course, it made sense to them that an underclass of workers existed in the factories to make products that the intelligentsia could use. Those miners mining coal to power the engines of the Industrial Revolution were a form of unevolved man. This was natural selection at work. Some were meant to prosper due to their superior breeding and intellect, while some were relegated to mines and factories filled with sweat. Only later was a name attached to this idea: Social Darwinism.

So far, this story hasn’t had much Church in it. The fact was that the Church was ignorant of the gathering storm or, in the case of many churches in England, were actually championing Darwin’s ideas and the work ethic of the factories. Certainly some clerics protested the grim realities of how men, women, and children were treated in the mills and mines, (favorite author Charles Dickens chronicled this in Hard Times, exposing the harsh realities of poor factory workers to the middle and upper classes of Britain), but despite some reforms in 1833, the factories chugged on, grinding up the poor with them.

It is here that we see the first effects not of the Church on the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution on the Church. Postmillennialism came to full bloom in both Britain and America after the Civil War, and this was largely due to the idea that science and technology were advancing so quickly that a new day was upon the Church that enabled Her to reach the world using the latest tech advances of the day. It was “Onward Christian Soldiers”—a hymn that reflects that thinking better than any other—and The Salvation Army ushering in the Age of Christ and His Church Triumphant.

Cities boomed as agricultural workers bought into the propaganda that life was better in the cities. Immigration in America further added workers to the expanding factories. The traditionally respected home economy languished in the face of the new: steel, oil, and the railroads. And a little book called “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” hit the shores of America.

Now as fin de siecle America flowed into the glories of the dawning 20th century, the Church finally realized that something had changed in the country—and not for the better. As youth left the farm for the city and immigrant children were left with little to do (once factories were deemed off limits to children due to various reforms), juvenile delinquency erupted in the crowded cities. Not only this, but wholesome young farm women learned of greater opportunities in the city serving as a secretary. So en masse they signed up to learn how to use the newly invented typewriter and headed to Metropolis.

But the evils of the city preyed hard on the virtue of these naifs and churches finally understood that something had to be done about them and the growing ranks of juvenile delinquents.

In the next installment of this series, The Christian & the Business World: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 2, we’ll take a look at the radical new ideas the Church developed to finally address the massive social upheavals it had ignored for far too long, and how those ideas have drastically altered the look and mission of the Church in America.

Previous post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #3: Subduing the Earth

Next post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #5: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 2

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