Social Science v. Theology

Through the mid-19th century, American culture was dominated by a moral establishment that used the coercive authority of the state to enforce certain patterns of Christian morality. According to David Sehat (The Myth of American Religious Freedom), that establishment began to be challenged from within the universities, and “in the forefront of the new dissent were the social theorists who created a new form of knowledge built on social research and housed in universities” (185).

There was pushback from moral establishmentarians, and there were efforts to formulate a social science with liberalized Christian aspects to it. But the dissenters ultimately won:

“The new threat became most apparent as university reformers successfully pushed for an end to the teaching of moral philosophy as a capstone course in the 1870s. Their rejection of the moral philosophy capstone went hand-in-hand with the reorientation of the curriculum around the new disciplines as the German PhD became fashionable in the United States. American scholars who trained in Germany adapted their own graduate programs to the German model they observed firsthand” (187).

As a result, “by the end of the nineteenth century, many social scientists had agreed upon the future role of experts in guiding society in directions more rational, scientific, and secular. By claiming that Christianity had exhausted itself as a source of authority and that America needed a new body of knowledge to carry it into the future, sociologists built their discipline on a theory of secularization that they would effect” (197-8).

Social science replaced moral theology, and eventually worked its way into law. Sehat summarizes a Brandeis article on “The Right to Privacy” (published in 1890!), which argued that “political, social, and economic changes entail a recognition of new rights.” In advocating for a right to privacy that emerged from new social circumstances, “Brandeis gestured toward an emergent sociological jurisprudence” (203-4).

Popularly, the new moral regime was promoted by the Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and other contributors to the early New Republic magazine. Croly recognized the need for a moral liberalism to replace the Christian moralism that he was trying to unseat: “He agreed that diversity and individual autonomy rendered untenable the moral establishment’s belief that the state ought to enforce a Christian moral code. A majority would never accept it. But he also saw that society required some principle of solidarity that would legitimate cultural and political authority.” For the universities, social science provided that alternative authority. For Croly, the progressive moral regime would involve the creation of a just distribution of wealth. Lippmann argued that culture and politics must become “experimental towards life,” reject any creed that claimed absolute truth, and acknowledge that “creeds are instruments of the will.” According to Sehat, Lippmann saw that his proposal would “revolutionize modern politics by rejecting the moral establishment and reorienting the state toward the emergent social-scientific research model of free inquiry and secular argumentation” (205-8).